Understanding the Whole Business: Kevin King on How Curiosity Makes Better Business Leaders

Hey everybody. Welcome to today's webinar. Super excited to have Kevin King on. For those who don't know, Kevin is the CEO and president of Donato's Pizza. And honestly, just one of those rare franchise leaders who spent time in development operations, real estate. I now in the CEO seat. And he is helped some major brands grow.

I think Donato's Smoothie King, Papa Murphy's Domino's. I think there might have been one more that I'm missing, but I'll let him talk about it. Well, honestly, I'll just turn it over to him in a second just to frame the conversation. Really wanted to bring, Kevin on to talk about. What happens when leaders understand the whole business and the importance of that, not just sticking within lanes.

And it's based off of some conversations he and I had and some other content I saw him speaking on and I asked him to come on and share with you all. So big. Thank you Kevin. Thanks for being here.

Very welcome, Gary. Thanks for having me. It's a great topic. I look forward to sharing it with you.

Amazing. So before we dive in, I'd love, you know, I gave the two sentence overview. I would love to hear just a little bit about your background, how you made it through franchising, and now where you are.

Yeah, what's interesting my entire life, short of two years I've worked in the restaurant industry, most of it in the pizza industry. If you ask me. As I was a 20 some year old in college, if I thought I'd work in pizza restaurants for the rest of my life, I, would've told you no.

There's no way. But there's something about it that is magnetic and there's something about the energy in the restaurant business and, certainly the pizza business that keeps kept drawing me back. And, so I started in a, restaurants, in a neighborhood, pizzeria owned by a local family and. I worked there through college. I went away to college, but every time I came home I could work. And, it was a great experience. I understood what a small business was, at a very young age in which I think it had major implications for me outta college. I went. Went to work for Domino's. That was in the eighties, so Domino's was on a growth tear then. But I was in operations and I was young and single and mobile and moved around a lot and spent, a lot of time in different places. I, worked in four different US states in three different countries, that was a great experience to learn and grow.

That was really where I got exposed to franchising and started to understand what the franchise business and the model was all about, which was great education. I came to Donato's the first time, in the early nineties to start a franchising program. Had 24 restaurants all in Columbus.

I had known the family. Growing up and they wanted to franchise and, I knew a little bit about it. And back then I probably thought I knew a lot, but I didn't. But I knew a little bit about it. And, put together a franchising program and grew, we built, a couple hundred. Restaurants over that period of time in 1999, Grote family sold the company to McDonald's, which was a fantastic time to be here. It was super exciting and, exposure to things that, a small company never had exposure to before. So that wa that was great. I left in 2003, head. Decided they were, not really interested in growing Donato's at the time. It was before the family bought it back, but I went on, I spent, a couple years in banking and that's what I said.

The magnetism to the restaurant industry just drew me back. I. Loved it. I loved what I was doing and I learned a lot, but I was missing the energy and the excitement of restaurant and franchising both, and got an opportunity to go to Papa Murphy's. My wife and I and our three kids moved from Columbus to Portland, Oregon, and, spent over 10 years there. And that was also a great experience. It had been purchased by a private equity firm, the year before. We, put together a team. I was a part of that team and grew it. We sold it to another private equity firm in, 2010 and, the company went public in 2014. I left, 2015. It was a great experience.

We built over a thousand, and a lot, most of those were franchise restaurants around the country. So it was a super exciting time. Then went to Smoothie King, my first venture outside the pizza world. Great brand. The company had been purchased by its largest franchisee, a gentleman named Juan Kim, a couple years prior.

And he was, the largest franchisee, but he was based in Korea. He had some US restaurants, but most of his, smoothie kings were in Korea. He relocated to the United States, was building a team and wanted to grow and that was a part of Smoothie King for almost seven years. That was also a great experience and. I was able to pull together a lot of experiences I'd had in my life. Important, what's valuable, what you learn from great leaders, what you learn from not so great leaders, to try to influence the kind of person that you are, the kind of leader that you are, and the kind of company that you want to be associated with.

That was a great experience and in the fall of 2021, Donato's reached out and, their CEO was gonna retire and they asked me if I'd come back as the president and, the CEO role when he retired. That was at the very beginning of 2022. And about, a year and a half ago, we became the CEO, and that's where we are today.

What an incredible story. I mean, I love that. I think the fact that you kinda, you started in pizza and then kind of made your way up and then got pulled to the side just to be pulled back and I, I think, you know, you said differently, just have different philosophies and yours clearly is this idea that.

No matter where you're running your organization, you need to know the business of pizza or if you are smoothie's, the business of smoothie end to end. And you know, it reminds me of, you know, I was a product manager. I jumped between industries and you see it all the time. People jump between industries in the VP of Ops or in the marketing role or whatever it might be.

I, I guess walk me through why that happens. Why do we think that somebody can do marketing in any industry versus being a specialist in pizza or kind of how do you fill in. The pizza industry, if you don't, or the pizza knowledge, if you don't know, if you know the marketing right. How do you think about that?

I think of it this way. I think you can learn a lot of things and a lot of things are applicable, and I wouldn't say. That I've spent most of my life in the pizza category because I'm just an expert on pizza. I think that it's probably happened by as much by accident as anything else. But I do think as a team member in any organization, you have to have curiosity. Have to be curious about the business and, that curiosity is what's gonna enable you to grow. One of my. Life philosophies is to be a lifelong learner. We're never done learning and whether you get it through reading books or watching programs or documentary, maybe you're just a great observer of people when you learn that way. Whatever it is. You have to be a lifelong learner. And, some of that comes to play in working in a business. And so what do I need to learn in order to be successful in my role? But it is way beyond that if you really want to be successful. That's where my philosophy on this comes is needs to understand how the business makes money. And once you understand how the business makes money, you can then contribute in multiples of ways. But if you don't understand the fundamentals of how the business makes money, your suggestions are really not that valuable. They're just ideas. They're not strategies, they're not tactics, they're just, you're throwing a dart against the wall.

That's where it becomes incredibly important to, to learn and to, grow with the business and be curious about what it is that moves the needle for that business. That is, I think the first thing you have to. Before the what the business makes money is, are the values and principles that the business stands for, then what does it, then how does the business make money?

Because both of those things are integral part of creating strategies and tactics to win for that business. And one thing I got exposed to a lot of different leaders in my life. And, a lot of them have made huge impressions on me. Jim Grote, who started Donato's was a guy who brought principles to work when nobody talked about it and values.

And, and he just said there's more to business than making money. That, is way more. To business. And so he set out and said, what are my principles and what are my values? And I'm gonna bring those to work. And then profitability is an outcome of executing your principles and values.

And so I was able to learn that really early on in my business life. And then, The, I was always curious about how the business made money, but I'll tell you when I really realized how critical it was, when I actually left the pizza business and I went to Chase and I was, on the retail real estate side. But I, so I worked for the retail bank on the development side and where do we put branches? And at the time they had a very different structure and, the. They had real estate people who were outside the retail group who picked the sites, and I'm talking to 'em and I'm looking at what they're. Doing and I realized they have no idea what a branch p and l looks like or what the people in the, retail side of the business are looking for. They were looking for all of the things that the retail branch side looked at as expense rather than what actually made the bank money. I guess before that I just assumed people knew how the business made money. And, so I, I. Kind of had this, epiphany. I'm like, they don't understand what's important to us. And not their fault. We've never shown them. So I helped put together a class on. What the branch p and l was all about. And the light bulbs started going off because they were actually looking in all of the wrong areas. And that was the very first time I was exposed to, wow, how important it is for everyone in the organization to understand how the company makes money. And so I took that and was able to then grow. And as I grew as a leader, saw lots of different people who. Were on leadership teams but didn't understand that and they didn't understand, and they curious enough to say what really matters at the store level of a restaurant order so I can create ideas, strategies, tactics for us to grow this business.

It really came out of leaving the restaurant industry and, because then it was so obvious to me, it's wow, they're not. Bringing these sites. They're bringing these sites. 'cause they don't know any better. They don't know. They don't know what's important. And it's so applicable, I think, to any business.

I love that it's such a clear, it's such a clear rubric, right? It's saying that every, every business has two things. They have the way that they make money and then they have their culture and each one will be unique. Right? Though at Chase and Donato's have a different way, they make money and they each have a different culture.

But the thing is that culture is the thing that is set by leadership and needs to be the drumbeat of the entire thing. And the p and l needs to be an underlying knowledge where every person needs to understand at the unit level how they make money. But well, actually as I'm talking, right, I'm realizing that oftentimes even if people know how they make money, they might.

They might feel like they can't step on toes. Right. Whereas maybe if your marketing leader knows their marketing, they're, they're, they're not gonna want to think about the rest because as somebody else's domain or the p and l belongs to the CFO, even if they understand, how do you, how do you turn that around to make everyone feel ownership over the p and l at a store level or at the broader brand level?

First of all, I think you gotta give permission and, the organization from the CEO Down, it does start with the leadership team. I think the difference between, Junior leaders in an organization and the senior leadership team is there is an expectation that you're gonna contribute beyond your role.

And even there, people like to stay in their lane. They don't want sometimes to stand out, but that leadership team is never gonna be cohesive. They're never gonna be what all they can be. If all those leaders stay in their lane and they don't contribute beyond their role. So I think that is an absolute requirement of being a senior leader in any organization, is that you contribute beyond your role.

So you gotta have the curiosity about the business. You gotta be thoughtful about your decisions and cultures are different. So if you feel like you're gonna step on toes and you need to go to that leader, the other department and say, Hey. Why haven't we ever done this or that? And I, Hey, I think this could be a great idea. But I do think it has to come from the leadership in the organization that it's okay to let people contribute beyond their toes. People do hold back because they're afraid, the organization has got to give them that power, and they've got to say that we are better than I al. We are always better than I.

And our organization at Donato's or any organization has. Been a part of the team as a whole is better than any individual person. There's not a sports team. There's not, I, there's no analogy. You cannot bring me an analogy other than a, so a true solo, but then they have a coach, or they have a choreographer, or they have other pieces, and that's their team. So there's no single person, better than a team ever. And you Get over those things. The organization gives permission to contribute beyond your role. Then you start to unlock the intellectual capital that you have in the organization and the creativity that you need in order to win. And man, is that true today than ever?

The speed of change, the speed of, how things, how fast things happen today. It's so important to let people contribute beyond their roles so that you can create strategies to win.

That's awesome. How have you seen that Play out? Play out? How have you seen as you've enabled your teams or in other organizations if you wanna speak to them as well? When you start to unblock people and you start to give them both the agency and the almost the expectation that they see the bigger picture and contribute to it, how do you see that changing, especially in the flywheel of, you know, today's quicker and quicker iteration?

The

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Is on any leadership team, you have to have trust and that team has to build trust. So you know, whether it's a flywheel or any of these models that are out there, the foundational level for trust is I trust my fellow teammates that we all have the organization's best interest in mind. And once you have that, the rest gets pretty easy. I've seen it play out really in every organization I've been in. I've. And I've been a part of stepping beyond my roles and being recognized for it. I've also seen the reactions to it, and initially when it happens, there is a lot of resistance.

Like, why did you say that? Or why, are you attacking me? And in this meeting and. You have to get past that. You have to build that trust so that team is actually a team and that we're here to win. I've seen so many examples. We had one recently in Donato's. We created a new dashboard, that measured, a bunch of key metrics in our restaurants and our, Our head of development, his name's Jeff Baldwin. He came up the stairs. He was flying up the stairs in our building because, he had something he had to share. And, and it was really around pickup times in restaurants that we quote to our guests. And, the first time we had visibility to something we hadn't had visibility before.

And he's Look at all these restaurants who haven't changed their pickup times for months, and the pickup times are supposed to be changed. Your pizza could be ready in 10 minutes, but they were setting their pickup times at 20 and 25. So by the time the guest comes and you hand them, their pizza could be 10 or 15 minutes old, a pizza is different, 10 or 15 minutes

Absolutely.

So here's a guy who's in development who's looking at a report and something jumps out to him he brought it up and he shared it. And we started an initiative based upon that. And it wasn't about, getting the operations team in trouble, it was pointing out A weakness in our organization is we're not focused on this.

And if we're not focused on it,

I.

We're not focused on it as leaders, our stores aren't focused on it. And so we're letting our guests down. That's one of my most recent examples. This is just a couple months old you have to create the space for that kind of contribution to come and then you have to reward it, and you have to celebrate it. And at the same time, you can't punish the people. So in order for it to work, it can't be. You guys are terrible. Why didn't you know this? And you just gotta accept the feedback and you gotta move on. And, so that's, those are the critical steps in it. But it does, it, it, happens all the time.

And your organization doesn't do it, then you're not accomplishing what you can.

How, how deep down does it go? Right. You talked a lot about the leadership and Absolutely right. The idea that the C-suite is this. Closely knit team operating at the top. But then that agency, that p and l, that ownership, that cross functionality, does that extend down into their VPs and their managers and whatever?

Like how? And if I mean yes or no, and if so, how does that look at that low, those lower levels?

Yeah. First of all, everyone in the organization needs to, how the organization makes money down to, down to no matter what you do in the restaurant, you can be a pizza maker in the restaurant. If you don't know food cost is important to us and you don't know why, then it's not important to you. So how a restaurant makes money has to be important to everybody, all the way down, up and down the ladder. And that takes time, right? And there, there have been times where it's command and control. We don't share that information with our people. They don't know whether this restaurant makes money or not. And you. To me, that's just so wrong in leading a restaurant organization or a franchise organization. And I do think it's one of the tricks in franchising is, everyone in the restaurants that are owned by franchise partners, they know who the owner is and they know what's important to the owner. So they do a better job sometimes than large companies at showing how that restaurant makes money or doesn't make money. And they make it personal. And it is personal. And it should be personal. So in our organization we've pushed down, as far as we can the importance of people understanding how their restaurant makes money. And the rest does take time. And I do think you have to start at the top and make it okay to contribute beyond your role. And people have to see that's okay. And they have to see that there's not a, Gotcha culture and that there's not tit for tat and there's no retaliation. And that is what's gonna open it up to bring it down for their organization.

So are we all the way down to where I want to be? No. We'll get there. But it is, you have to make it okay for people to contribute you're never gonna accomplish what's possible.

I love that. It sounds like there's this underlying tone of curiosity, right? It's you need to be, as a pizza maker, curious about how you make money or as a leader under curious about marketing or, you know, being cross-functional across all of them. How do you create a culture of. Curiosity that goes from the CEO to the pizza maker and everybody in between like that, that feels hard.

That feels like there's all these silos and everyone's geographically spread out. That feels like a hard thing to facilitate, especially as people are moving in and other people are advancing in their career and other places. It's, it's just such a big amorphous thing.

So first I think you gotta talk about curiosity. Are you curious and you gotta hire for curiosity. Look for people who are gonna be curious, look for people who want to learn, look for people who want to grow. So I think that's incredibly important. I think the second part is stop telling people what to do and telling people why you do it. And if you're great with the why. Then that enables the culture to be curious. It enables the culture to learn and do all those kinds of things. Donato's did a lot of what, sometimes they would call the why they would call the. The what, the why, and it wasn't the why. And or telling people and giving them the solid why and the true why incredibly important.

So we're back to the pizza maker because the pizza maker shouldn't always be thinking about profit or how we make money. He's first gotta think about the quality of the pizza that he's making. A reason we put a hundred pieces of pepperoni on every 14 inch large pizza. He needs to under, he or she needs to understand that first and then the importance of food waste and consistency and why we do what we do. And it's all about the why. If I don't know why we put a hundred pieces of pepperoni on then today. I am just gonna put 90 on and tomorrow I'm gonna put 120 on. And it doesn't matter because I've never given him or her The why. The why gives people, it builds commitment, it builds trust, and it builds understanding.

And so in every decision that we make and every strategy we implement, everything we do, we have to make sure we give them the why. Lots of organizations are great about the what just. Just do it. And the other beautiful thing about the we live in today is our Gen Z and millennials, they don't want to do anything unless they know the why, okay.

I think that's great. So they're pushing us on the why. The last thing a Gen Z or millennial wants to hear is the what. They want to hear the why. And I love that about the generation. I think they're challenging us to make sure that we're always communicating the why. And whether no matter what you do, smile for the guest, tell 'em why.

When's the last time you went to a restaurant and the person didn't speak to you? How'd you feel? That's the why. So it's. It's all these things to me, they're really a part of the same philosophy. They're really a part of how we are gonna build a great company is, make sure everybody knows the company's missions, vision and values. Make sure everybody knows how the business makes money, and hire people who are curious and then give them the whys. And if you're curious and you're not getting the whys, you're not gonna stay. They're

I like that.

Because. Why, would I work here? I, you want me to learn, you're not even telling me why we do this.

We're not telling me why it's important. That, that's what, pulls all this together. But fundamentally, everybody needs to understand why we do what we do. Of that is mission, vision, and values. Why we, make pizzas the way we make pizzas, and then how does that ladder up to profitability? I know those. I can contribute, then I can tell you, I really think we should have free pizza on Tuesdays. If you don't understand why the business makes money, you come to me and say, I think we should have free pizzas on Tuesdays. All anyone's gonna say is, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

But, if I think we should have free pizzas on Tuesdays, okay, tell me more. And I can't think of a reason why we should have free pizzas on Tuesdays, I'm at least gonna listen because I know they understand what our mission, vision, and values are and how the business makes money.

I love that as a millennial myself, I, I feel seen by you, Kevin, right? The idea of the why behind, so much of why I started my own company and, that journey. So absolutely. I think that's a great ending place. Kevin, always our final question, if people wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way to reach out if they have follow up questions from this chat?

Sure. KKing@donatos.com is a great way. That's my email. Please do that. I am on LinkedIn. You can find me, can send me a message there, but if you really want to get me, send me an email. And love, love to, talk about this more

Amazing.

Gary was a great

Oh my God, so much. My pleasure. Yeah, likewise. Thanks so much, Kevin. Till next time. I.