#110 with Kat Cole - Ideas From the Head of a $4B+ Business

**Shaan Puri** (0:19)
Okay, so Kat Cole is here.
She's the president of many brands, including my favorite brand of all time, Cinnabon. Did I get that correct? Is that true, or am I just getting excited about it?

**Kat Cole** (0:32)
That's right.

**Shaan Puri** (0:34)
Okay, and yeah, so give people kind of like, I don't know, like the two minute summary, like who are you, why should people be excited to listen to this? I like to let people sell themselves because, A, you'll do it better than me, and B, most people are really afraid of bragging, and I'm like, no, no, no, this is the time to brag. For two minutes, just brag, and then we'll be humble the rest of the time. But for two minutes, tell people why they should care.

**Kat Cole** (0:55)
Flex, flex it up.

**Shaan Puri** (0:55)
Yeah, flex, exactly.

**Kat Cole** (0:57)
So I run a company as president and COO called Focus Brands, four to five billion in global consumer product sales, just under 7,000 units, 60 countries, seven food brands that people know and love, Cinnabon, Auntie Anne's, Carvel, Jamba Juice, Moe's Southwest Grill, Macalester's, and Schlatzky's. The business grows by acquisition, so we're constantly looking for new brands that are big enough to make sense in our portfolio but have enough upside potential in multi-channel, retail, franchise, CPG growth to bring them in and apply all of our strengths to those brands to build them over time.

**Shaan Puri** (1:38)
So two questions. Okay. Three. What's your favorite Cinnabon? Let's start with that.

**Kat Cole** (1:43)
I love the Cinnabon mini-bon. It's not mini because the classic is giant, so it's just like, it's more normal sized.

**Shaan Puri** (1:52)
Normal bon. You won't hate yourself later, bon. That's right. Second, do you guys have, so I see all the food brands. Do you guys do non-food brands or are you specifically focused on the food category?

**Kat Cole** (2:04)
All food and franchising as the core legacy business, and then even better if it's extendable into other licensed formats and grocery products, and even better if it can port around the world.

**Shaan Puri** (2:18)
Gotcha. And are you guys public or is this a private company?

**Kat Cole** (2:21)
Private equity.

**Shaan Puri** (2:22)
Private equity. Okay, gotcha. Okay, so you're a baller. That's amazing. How did you get here? Are you kind of like, I worked my way up from mail clerk for 20 years and now I'm the president and COO, or did you have some other career and you kind of sidestepped into this? How did you get where you are?

**Kat Cole** (2:38)
No, it was kind of like the great poet Drake started at the bottom. Now I'm here. I am one of those stories. So I started out as a hostess and a waitress when I was 17, 18 years old. At Hooters restaurants, putting myself through college, first person in my family to get into college, grew up the child of a single parent, alcoholic father, helped raise my sisters. And so I just had to work to pay for school. And I was the first person to get into school. And so everybody was really excited. And then something really crazy happened. Hooters happened to be growing around the world at the time that I was a waitress. And I was asked to be a part of the training team that would go launch the franchise on different continents around the world. And so I said, yes, I started doing that. Australia, then Central America, South America, Asia. I did that so much. I was traveling. I had to be in these countries for 20 to 40 days to launch the franchise. I very quickly moved from being on the team to leading the teams. And by the time I was 20, I had opened up the franchise on most continents and was failing college because I was never there. So I dropped out of school before I got my two-year degree. Luckily, since the company was growing, there were many corporate job opportunities for people with my experience in the company. And so I moved to Atlanta from Jacksonville and took my first corporate gig with a paycheck instead of cash and tips, and found my way into the professional world. And again, as the company grew, I grew. I was vice president of that company when I was 26, while they were doing 7 to 800 million in revenue. Stayed with that executive team. All kinds of really interesting things during that executive tenure that we could double click on later. Started my humanitarian work in Eastern Africa. Did a lot of nonprofit leadership that gave me some really cool parallel leadership experiences that allowed me to be just a better leader at a younger age than many people because I was leading my day gig, my nonprofit on the side, humanitarian work.