From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Feiffer, the Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. Everyone knows Taco Bell, of course, but not everyone knows this guy. My name is Sean Trezvant. And as of January 1st, 2024, Sean is the CEO of Taco Bell.
And if you haven't heard of him, that's fine. Sean kind of likes it that way. I always tell people, it's not about me, it's about the team. I don't need to get my bars up. Instead, Sean has spent his career raising the bar for great brands. He spent time at Sports Illustrated and PepsiCo. He rose to CMO for Nike's Jordan brand and then joined Taco Bell in 2022 as its global chief brand officer.
Now he is succeeding former Taco Bell CEO Mark King, who retired at the end of 2023, which means that Sean is stepping into the hottest seat in the hottest brand in franchising. Where attention is going to be hard to escape, but he knows his number one mission. My job and our job as a Taco Bell team is to keep this brand hot. How hot is Taco Bell?
Well, to start, so hot that it reached number one on the entrepreneur, branchized 500 ranking for the fourth year in a row, which is only the second brand to accomplish that in the rankings 45 year history. The other was subway. And by the way, I am reading from that issue right now. Just listen to this thing. I mean, yeah, that thing is that is 300 pages of magazine. It's the franchise 500 issue. You can find it on stands now. Let's keep going with Taco Bell Taco Bell.
So hot that unit growth was 12.4% over the past three years worldwide system sales grew to 11% in 2023. Its profit margins are 24% a number that David Gibbs CEO of Taco Bell's parent company, young brands called industry leading during a recent analyst call and Sean has already turned up the heat since joining the brand by steering some of its recent attention, getting moves.
You may have seen some of them like rallying doja cat and Dolly Parton to bring back Mexican pizza, which was a beloved menu item that was discontinued during COVID and partnering with LeBron James to quote unquote liberate the trademark on Taco Tuesday. Because as it turns out, Taco Tuesday as a phrase was owned by rival Taco Johns and Gregory's restaurant and bar, which prohibited anyone else from using the phrase until now as it worked.
Now Sean must keep this momentum going while also coordinating with franchisees and acclimating to the new challenges of leadership. Sean and I to mark the occasion sat down to talk to talk about Taco Bell, but also to talk about what he has learned by driving and growing incredibly culturally resident brands. How do you make a brand culturally resident? How do you keep it that way and how can great leaders empower their teams to be even greater?
That's the conversation that's coming up today on problem solvers, a edited version of this conversation is printed in the January issue that I just mentioned, along with so much more. If you are at all interested in franchising and getting into franchising franchisee or a franchise or this is the issue for you. We of course have the ranking of the top 500 brands. We dig into growth secrets from so many of them understand what's driving success.
We also learn about what it takes to be a great franchisee and so much more. But today after break, it's my conversation with the new CEO of Taco Bell. There's an article that I bring up pretty regularly when I talk with entrepreneurs about the dangers of not adapting to change. It's called Why Big Companies Can't Innovate? And it argues that as companies shift all their focus and incentives towards being efficient, they stop focusing on new ways to create value.
I love that piece and it was published in Harvard Business Review, the leading destination for smart management thinking and articles like that. Through its flagship magazine and digital content and tools published on hbr.org, Harvard Business Review provides professionals around the world with rigorous insight and best practices to help lead themselves and their organizations more effectively and to make a positive impact.
While much of Harvard Business Review's content is available for free after signing up their site, subscriptions to unlimited content start at only $10 a month. Go to hbr.org slash subscriptions and enter promo code solvers right now to take advantage of this great offer. Again, go to hbr.org slash subscriptions and enter the promo code solvers to learn more about this great opportunity to help manage your career and business. All right, we're back.
I'm talking with Sean Trezvant, new CEO of Taco Bell and just an absolute genius in brand marketing. And well, let's just get into it. Sean, I wanted to start our conversation with a kind of philosophical question for a new CEO, which is, you are stepping into lead a brand that is hot. It is undeniably hot. It is successful by pretty much every measure you measure a brand.
Is it easier do you think to walk into a brand where the expectations are so high as the new leader or to walk into a brand where maybe there was some more low hanging fruit around and a turnaround story that could be told? Obviously, you have the role that you have, but I'm curious how you think of it as you step into this new role as CEO. Yeah, I don't think it's easier to walk into a high brand because my job and our job as as the Taco Bell team is to keep this brand hot.
You can go back not only for the four years, but that's an incredible accomplishment, you know, being a back to back to back to back, the winner of the award, but take it back 62 years, this has been an incredible brand for four years without Naur Magasine, but for 62 years, it's been a high brand that zigged when others were zagging. It was courageous. It was different. It led from the front and in my mental coming in as CEO will be to continue that.
When we talked to Mark King, your predecessor, for the story that ran the, for the first of these four years, these first for consecutive number one wins, he told us this story, which was that when he first joined Taco Bell in 2019, he, as he told us, did not yet have a full grasp on just how culturally powerful Taco Bell had become. And then a week into his job, he drove out for a four day takeover that Taco Bell had done at this fancy Palm Springs hotel. And he was floored by what he saw.
And the people who showed up because they love Taco Bell and he ended up at the end of that day with a Taco Bell logo shaved into his head. I assume that's a story you probably know. Yeah. You are known as a guy who really understands culture. I'm sure you were very aware of the cultural power that Taco Bell had, but I'm curious what you maybe didn't know or fully understand about Taco Bell until you walked into start working for this company.
Yeah, my, my story is, is different from Mark, but very similar and maybe underestimating the power of the brand. So when I started, obviously I came from a brand that this, this pretty well known and two things happened. Whenever I would go, once I was officially named the, the global chief brand officer Taco Bell and people knew I had that role, email, the amount of conversations.
If I was at an event or a gathering or a conference, everybody wanted to talk about their favorite Taco Bell meal of today or of the past. One even to bring about a bad case, Alupa, what about the interredo? Hey, bring the column alone, but not a bad case. I just order from Taco Bell at my store and we need you guys need to make sure that you keep selling so on the menu. It was pretty incredible. The love and the passion people have for this brand and what we have on the menu for this brand.
That was probably the first one that was really interesting. And then of course, I like to represent the brand so I had to talk about more merch places I went on a plane and people would stop. Talk about, where did you get that jacket? One guy tried to buy my Taco Bell jacket off me and it just had a belt. And it was one of those interesting things like, hey, it's not for sale. No, no, no, like I'll give you a X amount of money. No, no, it's not for sale. No, no, no, I'll give you more.
And that's pretty powerful. I don't know many brands in the world who have that kind of cool passionate following about the brand. You know what's funny? I was thinking about Taco Bell and the cultural resonance that it has. And I was thinking it doesn't see. There's nothing inherently, culturally strong about Taco Bell, right? It's a, if you strip everything away, it's a quick service restaurant brand. It's a serves food.
There's no reason that one brand like it should be culturally resonant in the way that it another one isn't. And then I started to think about where you would come from Nike, which also at the very beginning, I mean, you know, the famous story with Nike is, is, is still night hustling to make this a relevant brand. It was not for a long time. In the same way that Taco Bell wasn't for a long time and Taco Bell didn't come out of the gate incredibly strong.
It came out as a, you know, which is another player and it took a long time. What is it? Do you think that turns a brand into just any old brand into the kind of meaningful player that it can become? And do you think that there's anything inherent about a brand that allows it to do that or can the right leadership accomplish that with any brand? Great, great question, Jason. I do believe from the start that Taco Bell wasn't any other brand and let me tell you why. Unbell 1962 started Taco Bell.
It has an incredible origin story like some of the best brands do. And in 1962, when when Bell brought Taco Bell to the US, think about it. It was Mexican food in 1962 in the US. It wasn't burgers. It wasn't fries. It wasn't pizza. So inherently, it was different. And inherently, it was for people who worked to were curious. And apparently it was for people who were bold and courageous to try something that fast forward to 2023 soon to be 24. And I believe that DNA still exists in the brand.
We are people who are zigged when others are zagging. We are courageous. We are bold. We are not afraid to do something different. And so that's what I think a little bit of the magic sauce in Taco Bell is is you origin of Glen Bell in 1962, the DNA of being different and being courageous and trying something new still is what we do today that has contributed to the success of the brand. Built into that answer there is something every great brand storyteller does.
And so I want to call it out to you to hear you unpack it a little bit more, which is to build upon the origin story of a brand. There's a lot of really interesting research out there about how the differentiation point for a brand for a consumer. It is is often the story of the founder, which is a really useful insight for founders because it tells them, hey, look, you are an asset. When you tell your story, that matters to and connects to consumers.
But of course, even if the founder is not there anymore or there's not the leader, that story can still be told as someone who tells brand stories. And I again, as I'm saying this, I'm thinking about Jordan. I mean, the name, the identity of Michael Jordan was right there and everything that you did with Jordan brand. I think that probably a lot of people, more people than not, that didn't know that the word bell in Taco Bell actually references a human being. I probably just think it's a bell.
But tell me about that instinct that you have developed to go to the brand origin story and make that a meaningful part of how people understand a brand. Yeah, we, it's another great question. We as early as probably 10 months ago, as we're thinking about the brand and the vision and how we take it forward, all great brands as you mentioned have a really interesting or origin story that is not origin story for origin, but it defines who they are.
You mentioned, Phil Knight, Zones, sneakers out of the back of the VW bus. You look at Jordan, there was a logo that was in flight, that brand is about flight. Glenn Bell in 1962 embraced the idea of difference, not the, not difference for a different sake, but different to try something new and, and be a little left of center. And we wear that with a pride. If you look at kind of the decades of Taco Bell, we haven't been afraid to lean into being different.
We haven't been afraid to be courageous. And today we still do that. And it's really kind of, we'll call it the filter of what we put our brand through. Not only marketing through, but our total brand through is let's breed courageous, let's not be afraid to be different, but it does stem from 1962, Glenn Bell, having this vision to be different in a world that was maybe Mexican food in 1962 versus who we are today, very much in a related and linked.
But if I were to ask you to give that same answer, but take your Taco Bell CEO hat off and just put on your marketing professor hat, right? And you know, if we're talking to a room full of entrepreneurs who are trying to understand how to meaningfully tell the story of their brand, there's something that you have learned over the years about how to tell that origin story and how to connect that origin story to now. Right?
I think it's, it's not an accident that the way you tell the origin story of Taco Bell, in the way that you weave it into conversation here is about this independence, this standing out from a crowd, which is exactly the customer that you target at Taco Bell, right? You came up with that psychographic of the cultural rebel.
So there's a very intentional connection that you're drawing here, and I would just love to hear you not necessarily as leader of Taco Bell, but just as someone who really understands brand marketing, talk about how to how to how to smartly use that origin story. So there's four marketing philosophies that are kind of our go to. Two of them apply if I'm sitting in a room with marketing people or people like how do you dimensionalize the story?
The two all use to help to visualize the story of why the origin story is so powerful is one, this idea of math and magic is one marketing philosophy. So how do you take all the math that is available today and turn it into magic? And that's one thing I think we're doing very well today. We are a data heavy businesses as you know, but how do you take that data and turn it into something special for the brand?
The other one is we have the saying here, which I think Taco Bell does better than any other brand is hit people in the head and hit them in the heart. Hit people in the head is like what's your pricing, what's your operations? When you think about how you go to market, all very important things, but none of that matters if you can't hit people in your heart. You make people feel the brand, make people love the brand.
And what is different than most brands out there that what Taco Bell has is people have an incredible love for the brand is because when we talk about the brand, you have to be smart and operational and all the right pricing, the right menu, but we also have to do is make people feel the brand, make people love the brand.
And those are probably the two things I'd say that we, if you had to break it down that we think about every day, that what make what differences this brand and other brands out there. And that's to magic is an important framing because I think the importance of data is not lost on anybody today, but it's how you use that data that matters and you certainly can see brands out there who just start tilting towards whatever they started to see in their data.
And it might not quite connect with the emotional driver that their customer actually has. Can you give me a real world example of what it means to take a piece of data and turn it into magic? Yeah, you're right. It's a, it's a pendulum. It's a scales and you got to have both in your business and you mentioned it more than ever today, the data that's available, the analytics that are available are as massive.
If you can't turn that insight, that analytical insight into action or magic, that's where I think brands lose the plot. One example that I'll give is we have a lot of data from our restaurants and from our social channels is that people talk a lot about whenever we post something about the brand people talk a lot about menu items of the past. Inturedo or case of loop up comes up and people, you know, the threads just go crazy. I remember when my mom took me, I remember how it tasted.
I used to get it with tomatoes. There'd be a lot of data. So we took all that data that how people love to talk about items of the past and we turned that into voting. So last year we started, vote on two items and the consumer decides. And that's I think a really good example of turning some data that we didn't maybe quite know what to do with it. We knew that people love to talk about their favorite talkable item of today, but also with the past.
How do we turn that into something next experience for the consumers where they can vote on two things from the past will actually bring something back on the menu. You know, it's interesting about that. It is the same insight that you personally got when you started talking to people when you first showed up at Taco Bell, right? Like that was your answer to me.
It was like one of the first things that you noticed was that as soon as you tell people that you're a Taco Bell, they just start telling you whatever random menu item from could be decades ago that they remember. They have some emotional attachment to some sentimental attachment to. And I'd love to hear your insights on what a leader should do with that. I mean, that's that's anecdote, right? That's not data at that point. That's an individual just noticing something.
But what's cool about that is that you noticed it. And then I don't know if there was a direct connection between then turning into something that you could draw data from and then draw action out of, but they are one and the same, which means that the observation that you had anecdotally, just as a individual out in the world, interacting with people when they hear about Taco Bell turned out to be the starting point for a really powerful action in the company.
What should leaders do with or think about these little personal experiences that they might have out in the world? Yeah, I think leaders, great leaders and great leadership need to listen more, listen to the data, for say and listen to the team.
Because I would tell you when I would come back and from the weekend or tell stories about that I was in an airport and somebody wanted to buy my jacket off me or, hey, I was at this event and all people could talk about was the crunch wrap or something that was in the past to your points very powerful and it wasn't my experience exclusively. Now it was mine because I was new to Taco Bell.
Sure. And I would talk about, oh, yeah, I have the same experience whenever I go to back home, people always ask me about the brand or they want merger. And I think as leaders being great listeners to the team on a, on a common experience is really, really important. And the other part is we could have explained it away. It could have been like to your point and an adult phenomenon.
But then when you, when you marry the anecdotal phenomenon with, well, hey, we just posted something in a chat about a menu item of the current and the threads blew up. Now you have the right people in the organization to really understand the function and say, how do we take this, how do we take these two things and anecdotal and a real data phenomenon and turn it into some magic about something that consumers can actually do in an experience brand?
As you're talking, I'm trying to puzzle together. I'm just going to think out loud and hope something connects with you. What I'm hearing is this, is this process of taking something that is just in the air. It hasn't been put down anywhere. It's not some test that had already been run. It's not data based on just whether X product cells or Y product cells. It was just a thing that a lot of people were hearing.
And if it was just you, then whatever it was one anecdote, what you found, first of all, was that it wasn't just you. It was a trend that everyone at Taco Bell was hearing this kind of stuff. And then you could expand it out further and you could say, oh, you know, actually, when we prompt these kinds of conversations on the internet, people really engage with it, which means that there's something there. There's something to engage with.
And then of course, the question is, well, how do you, how do you start to figure out what that thing is? How do you, how do you systematize it? How do you productize it? How do you create something that delivers for people the thing that they're clearly carrying around and maybe not, maybe not articulating that they want, but obviously they do.
Yeah, I think, I think if you take those pieces, I think one thing that helps the organization get to the magic quickly is in Mark's time here, he had a platform or a filter of this idea of restless, restlessly creative. So it doesn't matter what function you're in, it's not only reserved for the marketers, but whether you're an ops, finance, HR, sales, this idea of being restlessly creative was a filter that permeates the organization.
And so when you, when you have some anecdotes and to your point, you have the data, the, the quantity of data that says, when we do this on social networks, it pops. The mindset or the culture of being restless creative is what if we put those two things together in a, and let the consumer decide what we bring back. Now think about that. That sounds easy from me saying, and for the marketers saying it, but now you got to go splichain. Oh, available is a gradian. You got to go to operations.
How do we make it on the line? What else is happening during that experience where does it make it really hard on a team member? How do you price it? All those things have to come together. So it's, it's not as easy as let's bring these two things back. But now you got to bring the organization along too is like, this is why this is a good thing for the consumer, for the business, for the franchisee.
But what strings it all together is this idea of we wouldn't be able to do it if it was just a marketing idea. But since people have the DNA or the filter of being restless creative, it all comes together. That's such an important point that you make because I have certainly, at places that I've worked run into exactly what you described and then hit a dead end, which is to say that there was in some creative meeting, someone always, right?
Like the best idea is always start with like, what if we, you know, like, what if we did this? And you get it, you get a little buy in enough so that there's some momentum. And then it hits the next department that would have to be involved in this. Or like, no way. They're like, absolutely not. Right? Like that would just be that would be so much time to do that. And it would draw our energy away from something else and then it dies.
And I've often wondered what, what was it about that death that I could learn from? And sometimes I think, well, maybe the idea just wasn't good. And maybe the idea wasn't good. And that's why when Dev saw it or when somebody else saw it, they were like, no, but maybe, maybe what it is really is organizational leadership and making sure that every department feels like their job is to in some way, at least engage with or have a high tolerance for the crazy, what if we dot, dot, dot ideas?
How do you, how do you instill that? It's one thing to say, restlessly creative. It's a great line. It's another thing to get people to actually live it. I think for us, we have, we'll call it leadership philosophies, which I can walk you through. But walking into your point, I'm two years in, but, but I'm still, we'll call it new. And sometimes there's an outside looking in. I believe this organization has a very high trust bar.
So when you use the example, when you go to operations, you go to legal, say, we're going to put two things together, the trust from not only internal to talk about corporate or what we call the RSE, think about the franchise eats case in point to four years and a row, the idea of the trust through the, the total brand, big B brand, whether it's internal, whether it's functional, whether it's franchise ease to do the right thing. And again, tie it back to the origin story.
We're not going to be the brand or we wouldn't be the brand we are if we didn't take some big strings. If we didn't have it all figured out, if we didn't say, just go with us on this one. And sometimes we get it right more times and not, but sometimes we take a swing in it, you know, instead of a home run, it might be a double, but we learn a lot from it.
And the, I want to talk more about franchise ease in a bit, but just because you bring them up in this context, I'll tell you, I have this really interesting insight. It's not a unique insight just for me, but it's been interesting for me into the world of franchising because I get hired to speak in a lot of franchisee conventions. So franchises will reach out to me and they'll have become and talk to their franchisee convention. And the problem is always the same.
And the problem is that the franchise wants to introduce a bunch of new changes and the franchisee's are uncomfortable with it, not all of them, but a lot of them. They're uncomfortable with it because it wasn't exactly what they signed up for because it's different than what they expected because they've been in the system for a long time. And now you're asking them to do something different. And so they are constantly trying to open up that conversation about the power of new ideas and change.
And in some ways, if they're being totally honest and blunt with me, they'll tell me that it sometimes feels like they're just dragging the franchisee's along. You're describing something different. And I know that Taco Bell has a long history of empowering franchisees to think bold and then to take ideas from franchisees and build them into this whole system.
That's like an amazing thing about the Taco Bell franchisee community, but talk to me a little bit more about how to take that restlessly creative leadership idea, that idea of being open to embracing of new ideas and having it filter out into franchisees, which, you know, just to put a point on it, look at one thing for you to try to get your operations team or your legal team or other teams that work at corporate to say, yeah, we're the rest just restlessly creative.
Is it another thing to do with franchisees who are independent business owners who maybe don't want to move in the same exact way as the franchise award does? Yeah, it's a great one, Jason. If you think about franchisees, as you know, we call ourselves a system. So it is a system and it's a collective, but that collective is made up of individual business owners.
So while it's a system and people want to do what's best for the brand, as you can imagine, there's a lot of individual owners who are thinking about their business as well as well as the system. So it gets tricky.
The one thing I've noticed and again, two years in is that the talkable system, what makes it unique is there's incredible dialogue in that in my first couple of weeks on the job, the amount of franchisees who've called me personally and we talk about the business, we talk about my vision, we talk about their vision, we talk about what they think is working, what they think is not working, while at the time, I didn't think that was not new, unique. That was like, hey, new to the job in brand.
Of course, franchisees are reaching out to welcome me, but also talk about the business. As now I'm two years in, I find that's very unique. And I think whenever there's a big decision to make, whenever there's something to discuss, there is what I will call radical candor with respect.
Meaning everybody, because we're a system, everybody wants to do the right thing, but at the same time, we're not afraid to have tough conversations, have great debates, all in the service of getting to the right answer or the aligned around an answer. And I think that's very unique with the system. I was on the call day of the franchisee and it's not like, hey, I'm not going to call Sean, I'm going to talk about it within franchisee and then he'll get an email.
It was like, hey, I got something on mine, I'm going to give you a call, which again, I find very unique within our system that franchisees reach out and we have great discussions and we don't, what we agree upon is this. They're not going to win all the time and talk about, well, it's not going to win all the time. But as long as the consumer wins all the time and the team member wins all the time, then we're doing the right thing.
And that's an, an ethos that I think it's, it's, it's not about me or talk about corporate being right. It's not about the franchisee is a system or the individual right.
What's most important as we go through our relationship is that the consumer wins and the team there was that alerting process for you because you, I don't, I don't know, I've never seen any data on this, but my, my anecdotal assessment is that executives in franchising tend to spend their career in franchising because it's a pretty unique system. You came from outside franchising.
You had never had to deal with and coordinate with a whole ton of independent business owners who also happen to operate your brand and how you do. I love what you just described there. I love the idea of radical candor with respect. But what was the learning process for you? And did you share maybe some, some adjustments that you made as you started to have those calls? Yeah, it was, it's, it's still a journey. It's still learning.
I still got a long way to go, but I, but I feel confident and, and where the journey is headed. If you think about it in my former job, you come up with an idea around a product in my former life. Maybe you, you talk to a couple of people on marketing and you launch it into the world. You know, I think the learning curve for me is we can come up with an idea and there is a lot of trust.
But sometimes we, we have, you need to take that idea through a marketing committee or an ops committee or, or an all access to tech committee, a digital committee. And that's new. And it's less a jury and more just explained to me the rationale why this is great for the talk of ballroom and. And so that's where the learning comes. That's like, hey, this is why it's good. This is why it's good for us as a system. You as an individual.
And before I would say early in, you know, you kind of dread going into the ops committee and proposing something, hey, we're going to bring back voting and you know, you're kind of, oh my god, are they going to go for it? And now I love when we get together because it's great conversation and collectively, we all want to win. And they love big ideas going back to the DNA of the brand. And so when we come in with big ideas, there's going to be some questions.
But mostly is like, they like to think big. They like big ideas and if we can figure it out from an operational standpoint, if we can figure out from marketing standpoint, protect standpoint, let's do it because we do have a, we feel responsibility to keep this brand going and live up to the DNA. Limbel started. You're describing what you said the word you used was unique.
That, you know, this is a unique relationship that you've entered into here where the franchisees feel very empowered to reach out that they're received and heard. There's this dialogue. You're very new in this role. You obviously didn't build that culture yourself. You're inheriting it. Have you gotten a sense of where it came from of how it was shaped in that way? No, I'm not quite sure of why the success happened.
I can tell you, this is unique brand when you go back and what it stands for where it is. What we serve is very unique. And I think that uniqueness continues on to the relationship with the franchisees. As a collective, they're all very, very sharp business people as you imagine and know. But they're good human beings as well. And to the point of, it's not about them being right. It's not about talk about being right. It's about doing what's right.
I think is maybe the difference of other brands out there. They don't want to be right just to say I was right. They want to have the discussion. We don't want to be right. Just say we're right. We want to be right and service of the people who work on our restaurants and the people who we serve, the consumer, the cultural rebel who you mentioned. That's why we want to be right. And that, you know, and again, I don't want to speak on other brands or franchisees relationships.
But I think that's what makes us different. I was listening to you on Matt Britton's podcast. And I said, well, no, no, no, no, no, you're great. You're great. This is related to what we're talking about right now, which is that you described yourself. He'd ask about leadership and you described yourself in three words. You said approachable, curious and empowering. That's the kind of leader that you want to be an approachable leader, a curious leader, an empowering leader.
Can you unpack that a little bit more where that comes from and how you put that into practice? Yeah. Let's take approachable. I'm probably not the dictionary definition of a CEO for many reasons. Maybe it's the way I look. It's the way I act. If you were here today, I got sneakers on. We're in Crocs right now. It's okay. We're in Crocs right now.
And I'm always my authentic self and my authentic self is doesn't matter what level you are, whether it's top of the organization or whether it's the people are just starting out on their career or in a function, whether it's the people in the cafeteria, I like to have conversations. I like to meet people where they are. When I ask you how your weekend was, I'm looking you in your eye. It's not a formality. And I've always grown up that just be kind of people.
And I want to make sure that from a leadership standpoint, yes, I have a new title come January first, but I also have a career journey that started where most of the people are starting out. And I want to always be approachable to those people, which is a hard thing to maintain as you get hired. Not for an ego reason, right? I, you know, there are a lot of people and you strike me as one who can remain incredibly grounded regardless of where you end up, but people see you different.
They start to treat you different. And maybe they're not going to be as blunt with you as they would have if you were in a lower role. How do you maintain that engagement as, as just the simple hierarchy of the job starts to distance you from people? Well, I drive my eA crazy because people say I want to have a coffee chat or a little bit of mentorship or shana, I usually don't say no to your point as, as, as just who I am.
And I, I feel like I'm in my position because I had great mentors, leaders. I'm going to give me 10 minutes in a coffee chat. So I try to pay it forward like that as well. But to your point as this role approaches, I can't be as available. I'm on the road talking to French eyes, I'm at the headquarters in yum. And so I'm trying to figure out how, you know, the team has been great of it. And maybe it's less one on ones, but it's still the ability for shana to be seen.
Never I don't want to be a CEO who's just in it in the back corner office. Not sure what he's doing versus he is driving the business forward, but he's also, hey, there he was in the cafeteria and he stopped and we talked about either the weekend or the business. That duality of, of driving the business from the corner office, but also being approachable a scene to the people that are a sea is really, really important to me.
I bet to bring it back to the franchise conversation that we're having a second ago, that attitude and that approachability makes a huge, huge difference when you're engaging with franchisees. It doesn't.
And you know, the approachable part is whenever I go to a Taco Bell, you know, David gig, David Gibbs, he of yum said, said something that they really stuck with me is when you enter the brand or the business is when I first started come through the front door on the back door, meaning come through the front door, but I don't have restaurant experience. So make sure you come through the back door and that is to the kitchen.
And so whenever going to restaurants, you know, you go back and you thank the team members and you understand how the line works. You understand putting the headset on and understanding how difficult it is when you're leading the drive through or making a crunch wrap. And it's important to the approachable part is like when you want to restaurant, don't stand on the other side of the counter. Be approachable and get on their side of the counter and understand it a little better.
You said you don't have a restaurant experience with, you know, which you don't know. A lot of CEOs walk into lead companies where they may not be the industry that they came from and they have to now speak with authority in an arena that they haven't developed, maybe a granular authority on. You know, you know, you know, I run a brand, but not necessarily restaurants. That's what you're going to learn.
I'd love to hear your advice to leaders who are in that place of transition, of maybe catching up to the space that they walked into. But something that I had to do, frankly, just to make it personal when I walked in to be the editor in chief of entrepreneur magazine, my background is in media. I worked at other magazines.
But then suddenly people started to treat me like I was an authority in business, which honestly, it took a long time to feel comfortable having authoritative conversations about business because it wasn't my arena. I had to learn and understand what my audience cared about.
And I'll tell you the breakthrough for me was to realize what we had in common that my background was about risk taking, their background is about risk taking, my background was about reinventing myself, their background is about reinventing myself. That really helped. I'm curious what you have done or gone through to feel comfortable in this space and what you would advise other leaders who are going through that kind of transition. Yeah, I'll give you two.
One is be humble enough to know what you don't know. For example, you gave us great when I came in, if you think about the QSR business, it's real estate is development. There are things that I didn't know to your point of granular detail. So be humble enough to go to the experts in those field or the functional leaders and learn. A lot of times leaders, because they're in a certain position, certain title, they feel like they can't learn or shouldn't ask.
And I've always been humble enough to, if I don't know about development, I go talk to our lead development person and say, help me understand before the business what I need to know. The second thing is probably some of the best advice I got early on as I was transitioning. And the advice was this, don't try to be a black belt in everything. Be a black belt in marketing. That's what you are. And be a brown belt or a red belt in development, finance, operations, HR.
If you're going to try to be a black belt in everything, it's on a complex, you can't uncomplest it. But be a black belt in marketing and be a red or brown belt and everything else and then higher black belts or you have the black belt in those other functions. And looking at it that way, Jason really was a great mindset for me as like, as I come in a CEO, I don't need to be an expert in every function. That's why I have an incredible team.
I may be an expert in marketing, have the people around you that are experts and learn from them, but don't try to be an expert in every function. And there's an incredible power in just giving yourself that permission. I bet that there was a real change because you're absolutely right. And I've learned that myself and applied it myself. And once you give yourself the permission to just not be the expert in something because somebody else can be and your job actually wasn't to be the expert.
It was just to make sure that that person who is an expert is empowered to be an expert. It changes everything. Right. Power is the organization. It's trust it goes in the air as soon as they realize there's a boss that I'm counting on them to lead development. And yes, I'm going to have points of view and understand and have questions, but they lead it. And I'm in more of an expert or black belt in asking the questions and they lead the function.
So as the black belt marketing, let's spend our final few minutes unpacking this. We all know because it's been well documented, the return of the Mexican pizza and the way that that happened. Because people were tweeting about it, but then doja cat tweeted about it and you guys brought doja cat into reintroduce this. And I would love to hear from you more granularly about how to build a team where that can happen. Because as I think about that story, I just think a lot of things had to happen.
Somebody had to notice the tweet. Somebody had to feel empowered to say, you know, there's more that we can do here than just like reply in a funny way from Taco Bell's handle. And then it had to move steps up the chain. It had to do that thing that we were describing earlier where there was the restless creativity and so many different parts of an organization had to say, yeah, we can do this. Yeah, we can make this bigger. Yeah, we can get.
So can you can you talk to me about what it means to build a team and I mean, maybe even like just on the real granular level, like what is the first thing that someone on your team can or should do when they see a doja cat tweet like that? Who do they talk to? Do you have some process by which it gets escalated so that it can become a bigger idea? Like what actually happens to make that thing happen?
Well, you mentioned a lot of things that go up the chain, the process is but but it all one thing probably the most important thing for that to happen is the idea or the process of what's the filter. And so our filter for no matter what it is is authenticity. So how that happened. Now let me let me give you just a little bit go backwards, go forward.
Sure. We took Mexican pizza off the menu because it wasn't selling highly, it was a little complex to make and as everybody did in COVID, we had to make some tough decisions. So we made the decision to take Mexican pizza off the menu as COVID's going on and things are happening and as it started in, doja cat tweets bring the Mexican pizza back. Now that's authentic.
It wasn't us reaching out to doja because as we were thinking about things to do, we could have partnered with many and many other people. But there was something authentic because doja cat loves the Mexican pizza. It's authentic, it's real, she tweeted, we didn't pay her to tweet, it was a real thing. And then to your point, that's where this restless creatively kicks in. That's where the Glenbell 1962 DNA kicks in. What should we do with this? Well, she wants a Mexican pizza.
What if we brought it back? And then there's a whole bunch of ideas on how to bring it back. The long and short of it is no matter if it's the thing behind me, which was a cloud with pointed rays, no matter if it was LeBron James, helping deliberate trademark of Taco Tuesday, whether it was doja cat bringing the Mexican pizza back, it all stems from us trying to be an authentic brand, an authentic to who we are and what we're trying to do.
And could we go get somebody else to do a club besides one of rays? There's a story behind it and why we chose them. Is there, could we have got anybody to help us liberate Taco Tuesday? We could have, but there's a story of why LeBron was a person. And then again, on bringing back the Mexican pizza, we could have went and got a musician and artists and athletes, but because doja tweeted it, it was really authentic on how we wanted to do it.
One thing, as you're describing that, I'm thinking you have to make room for if you want to be responsive to authentic moments, is you have to make room to scramble things up and to do it on the fly. I would imagine that before doja cat tweeted, bring back the Mexican pizza, you all were not sitting around saying, we have no ideas on what to do next. We have no roadmap. We're just going to hope somebody tweets something, right?
You had some plan and that plan had to be put on hold or that plan had to share some space with this new plan. He talked to me about how you create that space for that kind of reactivity. Yeah, I talked about the marketing philosophy. One of them is being nimble and as the world changes, as a consumer changes, as macros change, technology changes, our philosophy is we got to be nimble. Tear point. Right now today, we have drawn up 2024. As you know, stuff will change. Things will change.
Something will happen in culture that paid out. Be cool if we did that. So this idea of, of course, we've got to have a 2024 plan, but the idea of being nimble I think is more important ever today because the world moves at a fast pace and we need to keep pace with that fast pace. And so you have like a plan, but then you also have a plan to abandon the plan.
Yeah, we have plan and when something cool in culture happens, if you're going to be a brand of culture, you got to be nimble and be ready to capitalize on the moment. Sean, this has been so enlightening. Another important thing and I'm just fishing in the dark here, but I can't help but ask to prepare for an interview like this. What I tend to do is go back and read a whole lot of things that somebody else wrote about or find a bunch of interviews.
And I didn't find that much on you, which I was really surprised by. Yeah. We haven't been, haven't been big profiles. You haven't been on that many podcasts. I assumed that was some sort of conscious decision. Tell me about that. It's a great question. Probably the most introverted extrovert you know. Or when you meet me and the most introvert extrovert, you know, you know, I am listening to you. I'm just a little bit nervous and I always tell people, it's not about me, it's about the team.
I don't need to get my bars up. If there's an interview to be had, I really enjoy talking to you, but it's a marketing thing. I'll have our CMO do it. If it's a brand thing and I know there's times when I need to be out front, but I'm also, I've never been the one who does it for the line light. I do it for the business and brand. And when Chad or Matt Prince, I don't know if you met him say it's more on V2D. I'm out front doing it.
And I'm also want to make sure that the team is out front as well. Right. That's your PR team that you're referencing there. Yeah. Well, Sean, I'm glad you said yes to this. It was super enlightening and informative and I really appreciate your time. And congratulations again on number one for the fourth year in a row. Thank you, Jason. Love talking to you. Appreciate the conversation. And that's our episode. I would love to hear what you think and maybe even about a problem that you solved.
You can find me at my website, Jason Fyfer.com. J-A-S-O-N-F-E-I-F-E-R dot com. Also I have some more useful stuff for you. I write a newsletter about how to future proof yourself and become more adaptable and optimistic. I would love for you to sign up. It is at jasonfifer.bulletin.com. Also check out my other podcast. It's called Build for Tomorrow. In each episode I take on some belief that we have that holds us back from progress and show you why it is not as bad as you think.
This solvers is a production of entrepreneur media and comes out every Monday morning. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode. Thanks to Deepa Shaw for production. My name is Jason Fyfer. See you next week.