The professionals who rise fastest are those who behave like stewards of the entire business and step beyond their job descriptions
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Kat Cole was a 17-year-old hostess at a Jacksonville, Fla. Hooters restaurant back in high school. When she turned 18, she worked as a waitress and a Hooters girl, where she spent so much time learning the ins and outs of the restaurant and its various jobs that she could eventually train new employees to do any gig in the building.
By age 20, she dropped out of college to open international Hooters franchises in places including Australia, Mexico, and Argentina. Cole was promoted to vice president at Hooters when she was 26.
At age 32, Cole interviewed for and was hired as the president of Cinnabon. Now 47, she’s the CEO of nutrition brand AG1.
Cole has casually referred to her rapid, youthful rise as simply being “curious and helpful.” But we can also call it what it’s been from the very beginning: thinking like an owner.
The professionals who rise fastest are those who behave like stewards of the entire business and step beyond their job descriptions.
So what does it mean to “think like an owner”?
Leaders can cultivate these traits in their teams.
Anna Szczurek started Arlington Heights, Ill.-based SkyLine Commercial Cleaning in 2007. She said that after 17 years of business, she’s learned that transparency about client relationships is what transforms employees into workers who think like owners.
“Instead of keeping client feedback private, I share every review — both praise and complaints — with our entire team during weekly meetings,” Szczurek said in an interview.
She also invited her cleaning crews to learn how much it costs to lose a client.
“The game-changer was when I started showing our cleaning crews exactly how client retention works,” Szczurek said. “When they understood that losing just one medical facility client costs us $3,200 monthly, our team began proactively reporting maintenance issues before clients even noticed them.”
She taught her warehouse cleaning division that service time is reduced by 15 minutes per location when cleaning supplies are well organized.
“They started suggesting storage improvements that now save us two hours daily across all routes,” Szczurek said.
The biggest shift happened, she said, when she gave the company’s night crew access to client satisfaction scores in real-time.
“Knowing that our 98% satisfaction rate directly correlates to contract renewals worth $180,000 annually made them start double-checking their work without any supervision from management,” she said.
Bilt CEO Ankur Jain recently appeared on the Change Order podcast and didn’t mince any words about the ownership culture at the financial tech company running the United States’ largest residential loyalty program, allowing users to earn points and build credit history from rent payments.
“As part of this culture, you have to keep showing people how to create,” Jain said. “Everything is doable. It’s just a matter of cost, rewards, and alignment of incentives. Is it worth it to somebody or is it not worth it to somebody, and that’s it. It’s not that it’s ’not possible.’”
“Number one is that you have to be ruthless about instilling that culture,” he added. “We are not the company for everybody, and not everybody is the right person for Bilt. One of the things we do as part of our pod model is every single person across the business should be able to clearly articulate what part of our business platform succeeds or dies with them. That creates some risk — but I also think it attracts the best talent, because the best talent wants to know what they’re responsible for every single day.”
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