Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Chili's CEO Kevin Hochman

I recently interviewed Chili's CEO Kevin Hochman on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today is the leader of one of America's best-known restaurant chains and the parent company of more than 1600 restaurants. Kevin Hockman is the CEO of Brinker International, the parent company of Chili's and Maggiano's on track to generate more than $5 billion in revenue this year. Kevin, thank you for joining us.

Kevin: Hey, thanks for having me on the podcast. I'm looking forward to sharing some ideas.

Adam: Looking forward too. You grew up in Miami. You were the youngest of three. You wound up moving to Pennsylvania, Philadelphia to go to Wharton as an undergrad. You've lived all over America, lived in lots of different cities, spent the majority of your career working for Procter & Gamble before working your way up to become the CEO of this huge restaurant conglomerate. Can you take listeners back to your early days, what early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

Kevin: The biggest thing that kind of shaped me as a kid was like my mom was a real servant leader. So she loved taking care of us and throwing parties and cooking for folks and just doing whatever she could do to make people feel special. That was her thing. I think I picked that up. I love servant leadership now as an adult and I don't really want to let anybody down. And that's kind of what drives me. And it's probably maybe pretty effective in this role just because we have so many employees and they have so many ideas and the more of a servant leader you can be, the more effective you can be. But that was very formative for me. I get a lot of enjoyment out of serving others and it's just a way of how I go about business now.

Adam: How do you define servant leadership and how can anyone become an effective and successful servant leader?

Kevin: The first thing I would tell you is you can't really have an ego because if you're going to ask people what do you need and what's the opportunity and to try to help and you don't like the answer you can't not like the answer. You got to respect the answer. So first thing I tell you is you got to check your ego at the door. and be okay with the idea that you don't have all the ideas. And then I think you have to really find joy in it. I don't know if everybody finds joy in serving others. I do, and that's an advantage for me in the business world. I look forward to doing it. It's not like it's a muscle I don't want to exercise. In fact, it makes me feel more comfortable when I'm serving others for a lot of different reasons. So that'd be the first thing. The second thing I'd say is you have to assume that the answers are in the room when you want to be a servant leader. So I conduct a lot of listening sessions all across our company. When I started here and it's been several years later, I still do this listening sessions and we'll bring 15, 20 area managers in a room and we'll ask them, what's one reason why you stay at this company? Brinker makes you excited to be at Chili's and Give me one or two things that if you were the CEO right now that you would change. And they really open up. And you hear all kinds of things. I'm a geek, so I take out my laptop. I don't want anybody else taking the notes. I want to take the notes because I want to really make sure I understand what's happening. And then I collate them when I'm done. It's usually a two, three hour session. And the ideas that I think are really good or should be assessed, I send to my leadership team or the different teams that manage things in our business. But what you end up finding is there's all this friction and all these things that we can help with that nobody really knows about because you're not in the restaurants every day. And this is not rocket science stuff. If you want me to do this task better, I don't know why you asked me to do these three things. Or I could get this thing done faster and better for the guest if I had this type of equipment. There's a million different things that come out. And then when you go work it with your teams, you'll find some folks are really open to that stuff and they want to get after it. And others, their muscle is to say, why do they say that? There's not a, they're right. And let me go assess it. And then I'll find out, maybe I'll find out something later that maybe doesn't make it right. The muscle is rejection. And I think that's a really difficult way to run a retail business or any business, because at the end of the day, if our leadership is not serving the people that are doing the work, it's gonna be very difficult to get amazing things accomplished and since that time we recently read a book about the navy seals and leadership i have a CEO book club that I do and I do it once a month to connect with all levels of the organization so anybody is going to read a book with me can sit down with me for two hours and we talk about the book and lessons. And you learn about the Navy SEALs. And I think it's probably for all the military is that the best ones are servant leaders. They are understanding what's happening in the field and then interpreting that. And then they're leading, they're providing command, but it's through the lens of what others need and need to be supported. So that's kind of my philosophy on it. There's other pieces to it. Like, do you have the resource that you need and do you have the bandwidth and the time and are you getting the coaching and we can spend all podcast talking about it. But that's probably the thing I got from my mom so much was at the end of the day, you exist on this earth to serve others. And if you do that well, really well, and not with lip service, but really listening, understanding, and then acting, you will win. And that's really served me really well in my career.

Adam: Kevin, I love it. You shared so much there. Very simple, but powerful and actionable framework. Listening, serving, acting. Assume the answers are in the room. You as the leader probably don't have the answers. It's not your job as a leader to have the answers. It's your job as a leader to find the answers. It's your job as a leader to empower the people you're leading to get to a place where they're going to surface the answers that they have. The answers are already in the room. I love that.

Kevin: I learned that the hard way as a young leader. I was working in the P&G cosmetics business and it's probably maybe four years into working there. It's my first job out of college. And I had a manager, Rick Shepard, he's awesome. And he sat me down and he's like, hey, based on what you told me about the things that you want to accomplish, here are the opportunities I see with you. He started with all my strengths. And then he was like, here are the things you need to work on. And one of them was about leadership. And basically he didn't say it in these terms, but what I interpreted was, okay, if you have an idea, you want to launch a new lipstick, let's say in the market, you see some opportunity and you want to launch this lipstick. The reality is I don't know anything on how to do that. I don't know how to formulate a lipstick. I don't know how to manufacture it and fill it in the tube. I don't know how to cut it up so it's nice and smooth, so it contours the lip. I don't know how to design colors. I don't know how to design packaging. I don't know how to buy equipment. I don't know how to buy chemicals. I don't know how to sell it to Walmart and Target. I don't know how to make an ad for it. I really don't know anything. And if you're not leading others who know how to do those things, we had a whole factory and offices full of people that knew how to do all that stuff. If you can't envision where you want to go and why, why is this lipstick so important and what is it going to do for our business? Are we gonna make margin on it? And how are we gonna make it? And how are we gonna sell it to the retailers? And what color should we design for what targets? And get all these different people that have all this expertise, understanding the whys behind why this is so important so they can actually design something together with you that's gonna win in the market, you're dead. At the end of the day, I don't know anything. In this job, I don't know how to install equipment in a restaurant. I mean, look at my hands. I've never really worked in a restaurant. I like to cook. Throw me in a restaurant at Chili's on a busy Friday night. That's not going to end well for anybody. And the point is, if I'm not asking the questions to understand what we need to do for our ultimate goal, which is to make guests and team members feel special, I know how to do that by asking questions about how we can do that. And then being the champion of great ideas and making sure they're properly resourced and breaking any barriers down when sometimes our own measures get in the way. I'm getting bonused on this, but you're asking me to do this and they're in conflict and I can fix that. That's my job. I know how to do that. So it's just so critically important to have the humility to understand if you want to do anything great, you've got to envision where you want to go and you've got to bring a lot of people along. And sometimes younger leaders think bringing people along just means making sure they have their buy-in. But really what that means is making sure you're listening to their feedback and not just trying to sell through them. And if you need to change your project or you need to change your strategy, you have to have the humility to do that. Recognizing if you're talking to the right people, they're going to give you feedback to make your ideas way better. And that's what we're seeing in our business is that the ideas that these teams have, lo and behold, they're amazing. You need to talk to managers in one of these rooms and There might be collectively 500 years of experience in that room. I mean, even managers, 20, 30, 40 years, sometimes they have a lot of the answers. If you ask the right questions and you're really open to hearing the answers, even when they're inconvenient for how you want to run the business. The other thing I would tell you is I had a manager, Mickey pant. He ended up being the CEO of Yum China, but this is when he was at global KSC. Tell me a great lesson. He's like, if you do the right thing, all the other stuff, take care of itself. That's simple. Why it's so poignant is because a lot of times doing the right thing is hard on the short term. It actually is a headwind in the short term. But if you can get through the short term, the long term gets a whole lot better. And then over time, doing the right thing gets easier and easier because you've got a win in your back. We saw it in our business here. It was very hard to make short term decisions on either streamlining the menu or getting rid of a bunch of coupons that created wrong behaviors with consumers because you're going to lose in the short term. And I got a lot of pressure from Wall Street about, well, when is it going to turn around? And I was like, well, as long as every quarter we get stronger, it will turn around eventually. Go with me on this thing. But that was an example of now things are in a much different place and it is a lot easier to do the hard thing. But that's the big challenge for leaders is oftentimes the easy decision is the shortcut and it mutes some short term pain. but it's just kicking a can and making your challenges worse. So I would always tell that to young leaders. You all know what the right thing to do is. You just have to ask yourself that question, but you know what the right thing to do is in every situation. It's how do you make sure you do that and you see that through and don't take the easy route. It might provide some short-term relief, but it's not really doing the things that you need to do long-term.

Adam: It's great advice and it's a great example, a very clear example for anyone listening to this conversation to understand. If you're someone who has a restaurant that you enjoy eating at and all of a sudden they cut something from the menu, you're not going to be very happy. You're going to be upset. But if you're running a restaurant, there's a pretty good reason why you're doing that and no pain, no gain.

Kevin: And that's a challenge for us because I get all kinds of nasty comments on social media and stuff. And it's like, oh, you deleted whatever it was. And it's like, am I solving for the few people that eat that item? Or am I solving for making the food better for everybody? And if you have a tighter menu, the food's going to be better for everybody because you can spend more time working on fewer things. You can do a whole lot better. And that's my job as an enterprise leader. I'm not trying to solve for these five people or this 10% of people. I'm trying to solve for the best thing for the enterprise. And that means sometimes you've got to make decisions that it's going to upset a small group of people so that we can help the larger group of people. And it's hard to get out of that doula, especially when you have challenges in front of you and, you know, short term, that's going to set you further back from your goals. But you're trusting that if you do the right things long term, the good things will happen. And it's a big challenge of business. I think it's one of the main reasons why you see a lot of companies fail over time is because it's just hard to do the right thing in the short term sometimes. And you have to.

Adam: Kevin, a lot of what we've talked about so far has really revolved around getting to a place as a leader where your employees feel comfortable around you, respect you enough so that they're going to show up as their authentic selves and be willing to share their most valuable ideas with you. How, as a leader, can you create an employee-centric culture?

Kevin: The first thing I would say is I think you've got to role model that from the top. So I've been part of a few turnarounds now. In every turnaround, that connection between the leadership and who's setting the strategy and the people that are enacting the strategy, that was broken. There wasn't information flowing up and down. And part of it is you have to do it yourself. You have to show this is important to me so that your leaders around you see that it's important and they want to replicate that. So, for example, I can't tell you how many times I've had managers come up to me after these listening sessions and go, number one, that's the first time I met my CEO. Number two, I just can't believe that you sat there and took notes and asked questions and you were curious about what's going on. And we see the changes happen every month. There's new changes that are happening. It has our fingerprints as managers written all over them. And that makes us want to give you more feedback because we see that you're acting on it. And I make my market visits every year. I make them for a year and then I'll invite our key leaders to join me. So pick one of these 12 or 14 or whatever it is that's convenient for you. And I want to travel with you and I want you to do a listening session with me. And I do that partly so I can help develop them, get to know them better. Obviously, when you travel, you get to know someone even more than just an hour meeting or a two hour meeting. So that helps me develop them and helps me get to know them in a more personal basis. But it also gets them to see me in action and see this is the things I value and this is why. And then when we travel back, we debrief on some of the things that we heard that were surprising. It could be in their area of discipline or not. But a lot of times there'll be areas in their discipline and they'll say, I never knew that. I wish someone had told me that because all of our people want to do the right thing. Sometimes it's inconvenient. Sometimes they just don't know. But I think we all have the best of intentions and every so busy. So sometimes you forget. Well, maybe I need to ask the end user how things are going. I think one is just really role modeling what behaviors that you want your organization to adapt to. And then two, you got to make time to do it. You literally got to say, am I spending enough time role modeling this and doing this so that the organization will see change? And something I do probably every six months, I have a corporate coach that coaches me. He was CEO of a large restaurant chain for many years, a long time ago. but there's nothing I can stump him with. So every time I ask him a question, he's already got, oh, that happened to me in 2005 and here's how I handled it, right? It's always helpful. And he had me sit down and he was like, look at the last four weeks of your calendar and codify all the things that you did, put them in percentages, like how are you spending your time? Then put a second column in and then write, based on what the business is, where do you think you should be spending your time? And they're likely not going to match up. And then that's going to give you some insight where you need to spend less time and where you need to spend more time. Because it's always got to add up to 100% unless you want to just drive yourself crazy working, which I don't. And most people don't. So I remember I did that for exercise the first time and I wasn't spending enough time in the field as I think I needed to based on where the business was. I wasn't spending enough time on innovation. I thought we needed to build an innovation culture and ramp up that. And I thought I wasn't spending enough time with operations. And so I stopped doing some things so I could invest more time in those things. And so every six months I'll do the same exercise and say, based on where we are, am I spending the right amount of time in things or not? I think that's just about being honest with yourself. We all want things and we all have a vision about where we want to go, but are actually behaving in a way and spending your time in a way and allocating resources in a way that is consistent with those priorities. I'll tell you a funny story. I had a call from a new CEO in the industry. person had run a function prior and now he's at a new company, he's a CEO. And he wanted to get some time with me about just sharing what my observations are when I became a CEO. And his first question was this time thing. He was like, it's interesting. Everybody opens my door and I got to sign this thing and I got to do this. And then I got to run and do this and I got to meet with a supplier. I don't think it's the right use of my time. And I'm like, well, that's what they're going to do because you're the new leader and they want to see how you think and they want your time and I want to get to know you. And I think some of that's okay early on, but at some point you got to take control of Where you spend your time and I said, what do you think's important? He could write it off in 2 seconds. He's like, I think I got to do this, this and this. And I said, well, then you got to structure your time so that you spend the majority of time on those things. And you got to set boundaries so that if your door is closed, they don't open it. Either you have office hours or you get one on one time. If you're a day late with your idea for your one-on-one, you're two weeks early for the next one-on-one. So you got to train them so that you can spend the time the way you need to spend the time. And that's not being a servant leader because you want to help them, but you've got to get some organization around the prioritization of where you're going to spend your time. So I think that's critically important. Just overall, the idea of being objective about anything you're doing If you can't be objective about your performance or where you spend your time or whatever it is, it's very hard to grow as a leader. I see that a lot. People that always want to defend whatever they put in market and they'll just spin data or whatever. Everything's rosy, nothing's bad. It's very hard for those people to grow because I will tell you as a leader, I've learned way more things when I've made mistakes than when I've done it right. That's when I'm like, ah, didn't do this, this and this. That can all be course corrected the next time we do this. So it's okay to fail. You should welcome failure. But if you don't learn from it, that's not okay. That's the kiss of death because that's what you get out of failing or making mistakes is that you build knowledge. So you become a much, much stronger leader. And I really encourage the people around me. I call it intellectual honesty. Just be really honest with how are we performing and how can we be better? And if you can instill that in your organization is that are always hungry, regardless of how much success they have. they're always going to find ways to get better. There's no way you can lose because you're always going to be pushing yourselves to get better and better. So I think that's a really important part of role modeling the right behaviors in an organization. And in telling the organization when you make mistakes and when you're going to course correct. I've had so many managers say, you know, it's been so refreshing is when you've made mistakes, you just come out on all organization and call and go, that was a boner. You shouldn't have done that. Here's what I learned. Here's what we're not going to do again. And they're like, most of the time when that would happen in the old world, they would just run it in the ground and we'd have to deal with it. But you take personal responsibility for it. And nobody ever thinks I'm dumb when I do that. They don't think I'm weak. They don't think I'm not good at what I do. In fact, they think just the opposite. So that's a really important lesson, especially for young leaders, is that people like when you're honest about what happened and you share what you learn and you share what you're going to do next time. And guess what? They give you a pass too, which is really nice. So. That's another big one, both in servant leadership and bringing people along. It's just being vulnerable enough to be able to say, hey, I made a mistake. Here's what I learned. Here's what we're going to do differently.

Adam: I love it. When you make a mistake, acknowledge it, own it. Don't pretend like it didn't happen. Use it as a learning experience. Use it as an experience that allows you and everyone who you're leading to get better. Is there a mistake, a failure that you think of that really transformed you as a leader?

Kevin: There's been quite a few. So in this current role, I think one time I had made a mistake on, it's really not important what the product was, but I thought we could make a big deal about this product. And we were going to invest some time and money and really blowing it out inside the restaurant. It didn't work. And when I went on the earnings call in front of the world, everybody listened to our earnings calls and was like, this is what we did. Didn't work according to what we thought it was going to do. The team is quickly course corrected, and this is what I learned. I thought this was going to lead to X, but what ended up happening was consumers did Y. I think people were like, wow, this is a different kind of person that's willing to do that. I'm sure it made some of our own stakeholders uncomfortable that I would do that on an earnings call, but at the end of the day, If I was an investor, I'd want to know that the CEO was OK with sharing his mistakes and what he learned from it. It's not just about saying it was my bad. It's really important to say why it was a mistake and what you learned and what you're going to do differently next time. And to me, maybe that was a turning point for me because it's like, oh, I'm just comfortable enough with myself. And it is a tangential lesson to this question, which is one of the most important things a leader can do is just be yourself. And maybe you've got to make some little changes to style. For example, for me, I'm really okay with talking about what opportunities that we have in the business are, but it's clear. I can't talk about what was bad about the business three years ago. I just need to talk about where we're going in the future. You're saying the same thing you're doing in a positive way. It's going to lift the organization up instead of being a jerk about what was bad. So I'm still being true to me, which is these are the things I want to work on, but I'm doing it in a way that's way more digestible for an organization versus saying everything we did was terrible. That doesn't work for people. They don't want to follow a leader like that. I know I don't want to. That's the other thing I would tell you. And to answer your question is, I think it's really important for you to understand your own style and then how do you use that to your advantage? We didn't really talk about my career and I didn't expect to, but when I worked on the Procter & Gamble Walmart team, so this is a 250 person office. And P&G sells every business they have to Walmart. It's a gigantic billions of dollars of sales. So it's a big team. And every single one of the P&G North American leaders, they would come to Walmart to help work on their business with Walmart. So you got to meet all these amazing leaders. I always remember, I thought it was like the Super Friends. Here's Batman, here's Aquaman, and there's Wonder Woman, and there are all these leaders of these different businesses, like laundry, or cosmetics, or skincare, whatever it is. They're all incredibly successful. I mean, to become a general manager at Procter & Gamble, you have to be a really, really good leader. And they're all so different. They had different superpowers. This leader's superpower was really lifting up the team and making them feel like they could accomplish anything. And this leader's superpower was they really could communicate very clearly about what the opportunities are and what we were going to do together with the customer to move the business forward. And you sat there going, wow, you don't have to fit a certain mold. You've got all these diverse leaders that are coming to their businesses. They're all equally incredibly successful, and they do it in a completely different way. And then you can pick and choose things like, oh, A.C. Eggleston Bracey, I really like the way she envisions the future. I'm going to pull that from her. That feels like me. Or I see Joe Arcuri and the way he's so pragmatic about the strategies that he puts in place. And I feel like I'm that. I'm like the common sense guy, right? I'm going to pull that from him. These are all things that were kind of in me, but I see them being expressed by a big leader. And I'm like, wow, I can do that. I don't have to look at the part of the CEO who's very, very polished and acts and talks in a certain way, because that's not me. And when I do that, people know it. People are like, huh, that seems a little stiff, Kevin, because that's not who I am. So that's another big one for leaders is just understanding about what makes you tick and what you're excited about, how you want to interact. And then lean into the strengths. You don't have to cover a strength if you don't think it's appropriate. Figure out how to use it to make you more effective.

Adam: I love it. Every leader, every person has lots of weaknesses. You've made reference to your coach, highly successful former CEO who you admire. He has plenty of weaknesses. Every great leader who I have interviewed, I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of the most successful leaders. Every single one of them has lots of weaknesses, but what makes the greatest leaders great understanding themselves, knowing themselves, self-awareness, self-confidence, authenticity, humility, everything we've been talking about over the course of this conversation. If you understand who you are and are able to tap into what makes you uniquely great, That's how to get there. It's not about trying to pretend to be the person who you admire. It's not about trying to be the second best version of anyone else. It's about understanding what makes you unique and getting to a place where you are your best authentic self.

Kevin: Couldn't agree more.

Adam: We didn't get a chance to talk too much about your career trajectory, but I would love to ask you about it. What were the keys to rising within your career? How did you get to a place where you become the leader of a multi-billion dollar restaurant company? And how can anyone rise within their career?

Kevin: So I talked that story about Rick Shepherd and he sat me down and was like, these are the things that you need to start doing better. And that was like a light switch for me because I grew up in a pretty loving family. But the one thing that wasn't great about the loving family was there was not a lot of constructive criticism. It was like, you're the greatest. I had two older brothers. My mom was very, very effusive with like, you guys are the best. And that's great because she loves us. But there was never, but here are some things that you could work on better. Or, hey, you got two A-minuses. Maybe if you had started studying a little bit earlier, you could have gotten two A's. That was not my family. Family is always just super positive about your performance. So it wasn't until I got this manager who really set me straight about this is going to be a learning process forever. Doesn't mean you're bad. It just means based on what you told me that you want to do, these are your opportunities. And that was like a light switch for me. I got real hungry to be like, I want to get better in all these areas. So every time I got a new promotion at P&G, I'd be like, well, what are the things I need to work on? And what are the things I need to do to get there? For example, if it was like, hey, in this new role, I want to be presenting to larger groups because it's a bigger responsibility job. I better learn how to communicate to large groups. That's not just something you could turn a switch on and be, well, some people can, I'm not one of them. So how am I going to build skills to do that? Well, I'm going to watch people in similar roles. There's tons of video now online. What are the best books on Amazon about how to talk to big groups? I can get someone to help train me. There's a lot of things that we can do and I'll map out a plan on what are those skills are and I want to go get it done. Even in this role, when I got the CEO job at Brinker, one of the things I showed the board was, here are the things I think that make me really qualified to do this job and where I'm going to have a lot of strengths. And here are the things I'm going to have to quickly learn because I've never been a public company CEO. And then these are the things I'm going to do to build those skills. So for example, I'd met with the investor community a little bit in my prior company, but I had never managed earnings calls. I had never had regular investor conferences. So I said, here are the things I'm going to do to cover that. I'm going to find someone that's done this job before that's going to teach me about earnings calls. This CFO I'm going to work with to help me have more exposure. I'm actually going to go to the after calls that the CEO doesn't normally go to so that I can learn more about how investors think so I get more exposure faster. And then went through each of the things that I had not had experience for, but I had a very finite action plan on how I was going to build skills in those areas. That idea of you're constantly learning. And there's a million different ways to learn. You just have to be more deliberate about sitting down and going, how would I do this in order to get this skill or get me from point A to point B? I think it's just critically important for anybody, whether you are a CEO of a publicly traded company, or you're just starting out in a giant company at the entry level, the idea of continuous self-improvement, being honest about the things that you need, and then setting a course on how you're gonna go address those things is just so important. And then the last thing I'd leave with you in this area is, so David Novak, he was basically the founder of Yum Brands. Wonderful leader, written many books about the subject. He has this really simple exercise that I use for myself. I use it for some of my directs. It's called a three by five card. It's really just think about it as two columns. One column is what do I appreciate about myself today? And the other column is how am I going to take that strength and make it even more effective in the future? So what I appreciate about being today, I think my organization would say, hey, Kevin's a really good listener and he is really open to spending time with us to get our ideas on how to move the business forward. So that's a huge strength of mine. People really appreciate it. They would put that in that box. How could I take that strength and make it even more effective would be, that's an example where sometimes I do too much of that and I kind of know what I want to do. I just need to make the decision and I need to do a better job of explaining the decision to the organization because I don't want to make people feel bad that I didn't listen to them. I did listen to them. I listened to you. Here's why we didn't do what you asked me to do. And this is why we're going to take this path so that we can make quicker decisions. I think my team would say, It doesn't happen often, but sometimes Kevin could be due too much listening and he really just needs to act because he's pretty clear based on what he's heard. So those are the types of things that I think are really important for a leader over time. It doesn't mean you got to be like, what are the things I'm bad at? And I'm just going to go address this. That's not the point. Start with the things that you're strong at and then say, how could I build on that skill to be even more effective and then have a very deliberate plan to go change your behavior? I think that's a big idea.

Adam: Kevin, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

Kevin: The big thing I would tell people is just be hungry about building their own skills and be honest about what they need to get where they want. So I think if you ask one of your listeners, what's your ultimate goal five years from now, 10 years from now, they might say, I want to be a vice president in this function. Okay, where am I today? What are the things I need to do to get to this ultimate goal? You're not gonna be able to do it in a quarter or a year. It's a big goal. It's going to take years to build those things and then start building a plan on how to get there. So let's say it's, I want to start my own business. I work in CPG candy and I want to start my own candy business. Well, the things I know, I know a lot about the candy industry. I know the manufacturers of candy. I know the trends of candy. I know what consumer thinks about candy. I know the retailers that sell the most candy. That's great. What do I need to do to become my own candy? Well, I've never run a business before. I've been a part of a business, but I've never run a business. So I better get some entrepreneurial skills. Well, I probably need to just start with finding some entrepreneurs in my life that I could go spend time with. And maybe there's some books I need to read. Maybe there's a podcast on entrepreneurs that they always talk about all the things that you need to be a successful entrepreneur, like the legal parts of it and enterprise. And then you map out, it's going to take me five years to get all the things that I want, but here I know my stair steps. Because then every year it goes by, you're getting closer to your ultimate goal, which is I want my own company. And that's the end of the day. I think you see a lot of people be like, I want this. When you're like, well, what are the things that you need to be ready to do that? Well, you don't get much of an answer because they never really asked themselves that you said, well, no, I don't know. I just want that. And I think if you were listening to this podcast and you left with, wow, I really can put myself in a position to try to be anything I want to be. But I got to be deliberate about the things that I need to learn in order to set myself up to be successful in X. And then they go do it, that'd be really valuable. But anything I've seen, whether it's in business or in people's personal careers, that is a real lofty goal that you think about and go, oh, I don't know how you could do this. When they break it down into little things that are manageable, I mean, it's the same thing that we're doing in our business. We have a very big lofty vision about where we want to take Chili's. It was so far away from when I started where we were, but every quarter we keep chunking away at it. And we have a very deliberate stairstep on how we're going to get there. And we know it's not going to be done in one year. We just know anything that's worth doing, you got to have big teams working together to do it. It's going to take some time, but if you're honest about the progress and you continue to make progress, you're going to be well on your way. So that's what I encourage your viewers is set some lofty goals, create some chunks of work that you know you can do, and then just get after it.

Adam: Kevin, thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Kevin: Hey, thanks so much. It was really fun.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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