I recently went one-on-one with Kevin King, CEO of Donatos.
Adam: You’re the CEO of a pizza restaurant business, and your first job was working for a pizza restaurant. What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?
Kevin: I was 14 years old, and I’d had a paper route as a kid, so I always understood having a little bit of cash. You know, you’re a paperboy, you’re not making a lot of money, but I had given that up and wanted a job. I started in a little neighborhood pizza shop, like there certainly were 40 years ago. There were pizza shops all over the place. Now there are more chains, but there are still lots of local restaurants. I learned there’s something about the restaurant industry that’s magnetic for some people. For me, it was really about the pace of a restaurant. A restaurant has a heartbeat. It has a pace to it that’s exciting and gives you energy, as opposed to taking it away from you. I guess I got bit by that at a young age.
I worked in that same pizza place until I graduated from college. I did go away to college, but anytime I wanted to come home, they were always happy to have me. I spent three years of high school and four years of college working in a neighborhood pizza place, and you get to know the customers. You get to know the family that owned it. It was a great experience. It taught me tons of life lessons that have been with me forever. It started with just honest, hard work, being attentive, and putting in effort. Those were the beginning things. It taught me a lot about business and some lessons where you’re like, wow, I want to do exactly that, or wow, I don’t want to do that again. It teaches you some of the best things.
I have been drawn to the restaurant industry throughout my whole work career. I have worked in the restaurant industry except for two years when I worked for Chase in the retail branch side. It was still kind of retail, still kind of around people, but I missed the pace of the restaurant industry. After two years, I went back. Most of my career has been in the pizza business, but I did spend six and a half years at Smoothie King and really enjoyed that experience as well.
There’s something about the energy, the people, and the excitement of the restaurant business that has really latched on. At Donatos, we have always hired young people who are frequently in their first job. In Ohio, you can work limited hours at 14 and 15 years old in certain jobs, and we’ve made a point of hiring people at that age because we figure we can teach them life lessons and skills they’ll use forever. A lot of those kids stay with us for a really long time, and they have a great admiration for the brand because they started here, even if they go on to successful careers elsewhere.
I love the restaurant business, love the energy, the excitement, the people, really everything about it. A lot of that came to me at a very young age.
Adam: What were the keys to rising within your career? And what can anyone do to rise within their career?
Kevin: The first thing I would say is we learn every day. We are learners throughout our entire lives. We are learning. You do not go to training, and then you are ready to go. You are learning your whole life. So watch, pay attention, observe, learn every day, and apply what you learn. That is probably the number one thing I would say.
The second is just curiosity. You have to be curious. Curiosity is another way of learning. If you are curious, you might ask: why do we do that, how do we do it, and that is going to teach you things.
The thing I would tell anyone in any job is that you need to understand at the core what that business does and how it makes money. If you understand what the business does and how it makes money, then you can suggest ways to build it and grow it. But if you do not understand what it does, why it exists, or how it makes money, everything you suggest is kind of like throwing a dart at the wall.
To me, that is where curiosity and learning come into play. For me, those are two of the biggest takeaways. You are going to learn every single day of your life. Take what you learn and apply it. Be super curious. Ask questions. Understand the why. Be super curious about what that business does or what that person does. Curiosity goes beyond work. It is about people in your life. You and I just met a few minutes ago, but we started with some curiosity about each other, and we had great banter and great conversation because I was curious about your story.
So those two things, learning every day and curiosity, if you apply them to work, you have got a head start on a lot of people.
Adam: I really love it. You are going to learn every day. And I would add one caveat in there: if you allow yourself to. You have the opportunity to learn every day. To your point, Kevin, you have the opportunity to learn inside the workplace, outside the workplace. Every single person you come across is a learning opportunity if you allow yourself to learn, if you open yourself up to learning. And it comes down to the first point you shared: being curious. Curiosity is essential to success.
Kevin: Totally. I could not say it better.
Adam: I appreciate that, and I also love a piece of advice that you shared: understand what the business does and how it makes money, which fundamentally comes down to figuring out how you can add real value to the people around you. And the only way you are going to be able to add real value to those around you is by fundamentally understanding the business. Once you understand what the business does, how it makes money, then it is on you to have the mindset of going above and beyond the narrow focus of what you might be assigned to do, and figuring out what are the people around me doing, and how can I make their lives easier?
Kevin: For sure. Absolutely. It is the foundation for everything. I talk a lot now about how people want to criticize millennials or Gen Z, and I know there was already one called Gen Y, but I really think millennials and Gen Z are the why generation. But it is not the letter. It is the word why. They do not want to be told what to do. They want to be told why they need to do it.
My generation would say we were okay with being told what to do. The current generations want to know why. So as business leaders, we have to factor that into everything we do. Our customers want to know why, too. Why does Donatos exist? Why is it different? Why should I give you money? Why is it so important, and it is part of what I talked about earlier. The why is the curiosity piece.
If you have ever had little kids and they start asking why, why, why, as a parent, you might get frustrated, but you should be thinking, I have a curious kid here who wants to learn. So take a few more whys.
Adam: I was with my nieces and nephews yesterday. I do not have any kids, but I hang out with them quite a bit. They are always asking why, and it comes down to being curious. And that curiosity that we have as kids, we might lose that as we get older, but the most successful people never lose that. I did an interview recently with the former CEO of a Fortune 50 company, who told me that over the course of his life, he has been addicted to the learning curve, and I have heard that same sentiment from the most successful leaders over and over and over and over again. For some people, “what” might be enough, but for most people, as leaders, we fundamentally need to get to the “why.”
Kevin: Totally agree. It is the foundation. I think it is probably the single most important thing I do as a leader, to help motivate, encourage, and give people direction through why we want to do something, not just what. The more people can get the why, the better they are able to implement it because they know why it is so important. And if you cannot come up with the why, you are probably never going to get the commitment that you want out of a team member.
Adam: What do you believe are the key characteristics of the very best leaders, and what can anyone do to become a better leader?
Kevin: Curiosity, number one, for sure. I think that curiosity is about your own business. It is about the consumer. It is about the market. It is about everything. It is curiosity about your team and their lives and what is important because it shows commitment back to them. So curiosity is number one.
Number two, as a leader, you have to be a great communicator. That does not mean you have to be the best presenter in the world, but you have to spread the word of what you are trying to accomplish and why it is important for us to do it. You have to provide that inspiration to them. I think that is a key word for a leader. You have to inspire your team to run through that wall with you and understand why it is important.
So curiosity, communication, and inspiration would be the first three things I would say. All of those lead to that other part about learning. I am learning every day. So pay attention to what is going on around you. Read, look at the news, gather information from others. If you have those, I think you have a lot of what is important to be a great leader.
Adam: What are the keys to inspirational leadership?
Kevin: I use “why” a lot in inspiration because I feel like if I do not really tell people the why behind what we want to accomplish, then I am not going to have them committed. Part of inspiration is care, concern, empathy, and a lot of that comes into inspiration. The other part about being inspiring is being a good storyteller. Can you weave it all together and give people something that they can believe in? That is a key part of inspiration: being a good storyteller.
I think the one part about it that we always have to remind ourselves of is repetition. Repetition in storytelling and repetition in what we want to accomplish in an organization. If we are not tired of saying it, then we have not said it enough. It is going to take a long time to get it seeded into the organization as a whole. So do not be afraid to repeat stories and tell them over and over again because the audience is probably slightly different, and the message is going to take a few times to get through.
If you do that, I think a lot of inspiration can come that way. There are charismatic people, and they are easier to follow. You can just feel that magnetism. But I do not think you have to have that charisma or magnetism in order to be an inspirational leader. You just have to be a good storyteller, and you have to weave it all together.
Adam: I think the formula you shared is a winning formula: zeroing in on the “why,” honing your communication skills, and, something that you mentioned, albeit fleetingly, but I think is essential to effective leadership and essential to inspirational leadership: empathy. Leaders who genuinely care about people and about the people who they lead are going to be effective and are going to be a lot more likely to inspire the people who they lead in a real way and in an ongoing way than someone who is charismatic but doesn’t care. Caring is what ultimately matters here.
Kevin: It does. Empathy is a word I think maybe 20 years ago business leaders did not use, but it is so important to be empathetic in order to get people to follow you. If they do not feel the empathy, then it feels fake. It feels plastic.
I think that is one of the things that has come through in the United States over the decades about the role of business and how we drive it. We are not afraid to use empathy. Jim Grody, who founded Donatos, used the word love. No one used love in a business in the 1960s. He started Donatos in 1963, and a lot of his mentors told him it was a dog-eat-dog world and that you had to kill the competition before they killed you. They said the sole reason for business was to make a profit. Jim said, no, there has to be more to business than making a profit. There has to be a soul to the business.
Over the last several decades, that feeling and that belief have come through. Using a word like love in a business setting has become acceptable today, but it was not before. Jim coined a phrase called agape capitalism, and it has three main tenets. The first is to lead with love. The second is to follow the golden rule. The third is to do the right thing.
We use it in decision-making every day when we think about making a tough decision. Jim actually had a coin made that has those three pieces on it. You just go through the progression. If I lead with love, and to me, what that really means is that you start with pure intentions, and you are not going to take advantage of somebody in a situation. The golden rule is to treat others the way you want to be treated. If you do those first two things, doing the right thing is really easy.
We talk about that a lot. Principles and values in business are so important. When I think about what is important to the next generation and why they are going to work for Donatos, they are going to work here because we stand for something, and we live those values every day. That does not mean we never fail. Of course, we do. It is part of being human. But we are going to get up, and we are going to lead with love, we are going to follow the golden rule, and hopefully we are going to do the right thing.
Some people might say those are religious values. I think they are really just human values. We try to talk about them regularly with our team and communicate the importance of them. That is why Donatos is in business. Does that mean we do not care about profit? Absolutely not. Profit is essential for a business to thrive and grow. But I think profit is the outcome of doing things right, as opposed to the reason that we exist.
I packed a lot in there, but Jim was a fantastic leader and innovator in so many ways. One of his best innovations was simply this: I am going to bring my principles to work, and we are going to live them every day.
Adam: Out of everything you shared, the principle that I love most is “profit is the outcome of doing things right.” What a way to summarize it.
Kevin: Yes. If we treat our guests right, they are going to come back. If we treat our guests right and they come back, then they are going to tell others. We are going to continue to grow as a business, and profitability is the outcome of doing things right.
Adam: Leading with love is a topic that I talk a lot about in my interviews and in my keynotes. I did an interview with a well-known celebrity chef, and I was asking him about his experience working in different toxic environments, and he said that you can taste fear. The flip side of that is you can taste love. When you are building a business, particularly a business where you are serving food every day, that is important, because as a customer of that business, you can probably taste whether you are being served food from a business that cares about its people and cares about its customers and leads with fear or leads with love.
Kevin: Absolutely. I could not agree more. You cannot prove you can taste love, but you can on the service side. You can feel love really fast. We do believe food tastes better if it is made in an environment where people care.
Fifty or sixty years ago, people did not talk about love in business. But today we talk about it. Even McDonald’s says, I am loving it. Our current tagline is gotta love more. We love the double meanings of phrases like that. We have to show it to our people. We have to show it to our franchise partners, and they are going to show it to our guests. If all three are not feeling it, then we are going to drop the ball along the way.
Restaurants can be a stressful environment. But when a restaurant is running really well, it is like a symphony orchestra. You can do fantastic things when that happens.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topic of performance management?
Kevin: Number one, honesty and communication are the two most important things. I think where most performance breaks down is when people do not want to have conversations about performance. So you have to have them, and you have to have them regularly.
Is it all about performance reviews and goal setting? No. It is all about the daily communication. It is about clear expectations. When I think about a person and their performance, the first question I like to ask myself is, are the expectations for the role perfectly clear? That is the first question. The second is, did I give them the tools and the skills to accomplish those expectations?
That is the foundation of doing my share in supporting someone who works for me. So number one, it is about setting expectations, making sure we are on the same page about what is expected and how they are supposed to get there. We are not a company that says the result is all that matters. We care about how you get there, and that is part of setting the expectation.
The second part is, did you give them what they needed to be successful? Sometimes that is knowledge, sometimes it is space, sometimes it is capital or resources. If you have set really good expectations and given them the tools they need to be successful, then and only then can you get to accountability.
To me, that is a great place to start. Communication is the key in all three of those areas. If the associate does not feel they have the tools to win, they need to say, I need this or I need that. Maybe they do, maybe they do not, but you need that open dialogue.
If you have set good expectations and given them the tools they need, then you can have great accountability. Communication is always important to making sure that happens.
We do performance reviews twice a year at Donatos. I think that is great, but they are only good if you have had the weekly, daily, monthly conversations along the way. There should be no surprises in performance reviews or evaluations. Those things are, to me, the most critical parts.
What I have experienced throughout my career is that different people need different things. Some people need daily communication. Some are fine weekly. Some are biweekly. I would not go beyond that. You need to figure out what that person needs in order to accomplish their job and how it should be managed. If weekly is not enough, then increase the frequency. If it is too much, then maybe reduce it a bit. It really depends on the person and the role.
I did not always feel this way. I now believe structure and communication are really important. Otherwise, we think we are meeting regularly when maybe we are not. We think we are communicating, but maybe we are not. Most of my people, I start with once-a-week one-on-ones, and we vary it from there. Sometimes it becomes twice a week, sometimes every other week. It depends on what that person needs, the scope of their job, what I can add, or anything else.
The other part I always tell my team is, do not look at my schedule. If you need something, just tell me you need time, and I will make time. Our schedules fill up, and sometimes not with the most important things. If someone is waiting for availability on my calendar, they might be the most important thing I need to do that day, and they need to let me know.
The other thing I like to share is that there are many different work styles and ways people handle communication. Some people do email at different times. That does not mean it is my expectation that they do the same. Sometimes that schedule works for me, but I try to communicate that clearly and be sensitive about it. People want to please their leader. If I send an email, they may feel pressure to respond. So I need to be aware of that and consider the message I am sending.
All of that is important in the performance management process.
Adam: What are the keys to effectively tracking results and ultimately measuring success?
Kevin: It comes back to setting expectations. Different roles vary. Some roles make it easier to set clear goals because they are number-driven. Some are not. But it is essential as a leader to define what is expected, what the goals are, and what done looks like.
For some people, done is a project. For others, it is a number. For others, it is a satisfaction score. It really depends on their role. But everyone needs a clear idea of what done looks like and what finished means.
I have managed people who have said it feels like they are the only ones who have goals. I tell them, the person sitting across from you has goals too. Maybe he does not stress at the end of the month because he is a better planner. Maybe he hides it better. But I can assure you that person has a goal as well.
We all have expectations to meet. Sometimes it just feels like you are the only one with a target, but that could not be further from the truth. No matter what your role is, I guarantee there is some form of measurement for success.
Adam: What pitfalls pertaining to performance management should leaders be aware of and avoid?
Kevin: The most important one is do not be afraid to share the truth. I have probably made the mistake myself at times. You like the person, so you kind of skate around a challenge or a problem, and it always comes back to bite you.
If there is a performance issue, you need to be very clear about it. Go back to those two questions. Was the expectation clear? Did I give them the tools and skills to succeed? The only way I can answer yes to both of those is to have a conversation when things are not going the way they should.
That is the biggest pitfall. Not raising the issue when you see it, because it is uncomfortable. It is not the best part of the relationship, but you need to say it. They probably already know it, and saying it is the only way to get change.
Adam: What are the keys to building a customer-centric business?
Kevin: It starts with the why. Why is it important? Paint a really good picture of what a great customer experience looks like. Those are the critical things.
We also have accountability measures, and as leaders, we have to make sure those measures do not lead to behaviors that take away from the guest experience. That is where the rub can happen. The numbers are super important, but you are also supposed to be nice to the guest. If things are too tight and the focus is all on the numbers, then the guest will suffer. That is short-term thinking.
That is a manager mindset instead of a leader mindset. We need leaders to lead customer service. If you are just managing customer service, you are probably managing it downward. We need people who think about the guest experience.
Something I have struggled with is how do I support my team when they follow the procedure, but a guest is still unhappy? It is tough. You are not supposed to argue with guests. The guest is right most of the time, or the guest is right because otherwise, they will go somewhere else. But how do I support my team?
Sometimes you just need to take care of the guest and then go back to the procedure. Maybe the procedure needs to be questioned. Maybe there is something we are missing if the guest was unhappy. Sometimes you just cannot please a guest. You tell the team member, I know you did everything right, but we still need to make the guest happy. That is the hard part.
Adam: You bring up a really interesting topic, which is the potential friction between customer centricity and employee centricity, which are both essential to success. Nine times out of ten, there is alignment: when you’re building an employee-centric business, you’re also building a customer-centric business, and vice versa. But that one time out of ten, when there’s conflict, what do you do as a leader to resolve that?
Kevin: I am still working that out, to be honest. I have to make sure my team knows I appreciate everything they do. But as you said, it is one out of ten. It is not seven out of ten. So do not manage to the exception.
Lead based on the majority. If we are following our processes and doing the right things, and one guest is upset, then we deal with the guest. I hear it from other leaders, too. They want to stand up for their people because they followed the rules, and the guest was wrong. But in the end, we cannot argue with guests. We are in a guest-centric business. We have to take care of them.
Look at your metrics and make sure they are not so tight that you cannot allow for that one guest out of ten. Make them happy. Those are the stories that get told about your brand. That is what we have to stay focused on.
Sometimes you can go back to the guest and ask: What were you expecting? Then say, okay, we will do that for you, or I am sorry, we cannot. But treat them with dignity and respect. Communication matters.
De-escalation is a concept taught a lot in law enforcement. It applies here, too. Our people need to de-escalate. If a guest wants a refund, give it to them. It is okay. We will be fine. I know you followed the procedure. They want their money back. We will give it to them.
It is difficult, but manage to the majority. You do not know what kind of day that guest had. Something small might have pushed them over the edge. If I lead with love, then I have empathy. That guest may have had a terrible day, and something I said caused them to go from reasonable to unreasonable. What can I do to lead with love, follow the Golden Rule, and do the right thing?
Adam: When you have an unhappy customer, just be honest with them. Be open with them. Treat them with compassion and kindness, and focus on the big picture. Even when the customer is wrong, if your mantra is that the customer is always right, you may lose the battle but win the war.
Kevin: That is right. I do not know a lot of businesses that have been successful by winning all the battles. You might not have any customers left.
Adam: What can anyone do to become more successful personally and professionally?
Kevin: Remember you are learning every day. That to me is number one. Keep your curiosity. Take your principles to work with you. Live them every day. If you do those three things, you are going to get better every single day.
