I recently interviewed California Pizza Kitchen Co-Founder Rick Rosenfield on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:
Adam: Our guest today founded and led a global restaurant brand that generates nearly a billion dollars a year in revenue. Rick Rosenfield is the co-founder and former CEO of California Pizza Kitchen and is the author of the new book, The California Pizza Kitchen Story. Rick, thank you for joining us.
Rick: Thanks. Thank you for having me.
Adam: You grew up on the South Side of Chicago, a big Chicago White Sox fan as a kid before becoming a Dodger fan, and you stayed in state to go to college at the University of Illinois and law school at DePaul before moving to Los Angeles. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?
Rick: If we go all the way back to the South Side of Chicago, I’d say values. It was a great neighborhood to grow up in, great friendships, great families around. It was a great family neighborhood. But then, after law school, I left Chicago permanently, went to work at the Department of Justice in Washington, and I had this dream job. I had the honors program at the department and was in the Appellate Section, Criminal Division, writing briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court. So here I am, a 24-year-old kid writing briefs in the Supreme Court, going down to the court, listening to every oral argument, and it was really very heady stuff.
Adam: And you stayed in the field of law for quite a bit. You went from working in the Justice Department to working in private practice. How did the idea for California Pizza Kitchen come together? How did you actualize it?
Rick: Well, I went, as you said, to Los Angeles, became a federal prosecutor there, and met my future law partner, Larry Flax, who was also an assistant U.S. attorney. So then we were defense attorneys. That had been going on for about 12 years. We were tired of it. We always had one restaurant idea or another, but never quite got there because each time we were about to do it, a client would come along, give us a big retainer, and we’d be back in the law business or staying in the law business.
But one time, after a long trial in San Francisco, we decided we were going to do it, and I had seen a pasta cafeteria concept in Chicago and told Larry about it. And we went out and saw something similar in L.A. and noticed that they were doing this sort of god-awful-looking pizza, quite frankly. But everybody who was getting pasta seemed to get a slice of pizza. So we were driving back to our office on the way to Beverly Hills, and we kicked around, saying, “Yeah, well, let’s put some pizza in our pasta concept.” And somewhere along the line, we said, “You know, why don’t we do something current here? This is the start of California pizza. This individual pizza, getting away from tomato sauce.” It had been introduced by Chez Panisse in Berkeley, by Alice Waters, and Puck had brought it down to L.A. with Spago, with duck sausage pizza.
We said, “You know, let’s do that, and then let’s put that wood-burning oven right in the center and put a counter on it.” And at that point, Chin Chin on Sunset had opened and been successful for a year. And the owner, Bob Mandler, was our longtime friend, and actually we used to share a law office. So he said, “Well, let’s make it look like Chin Chin, but do it in an Italian version.” And that’s literally how it popped up. So in that afternoon, driving back, we changed it. We didn’t have a name, didn’t have a menu. It just became a concept.
Adam: Was the concept to start a restaurant while continuing to primarily practice law, or was the concept to start a huge business at scale, a national, international business?
Rick: Well, from the get-go, we actually intended to build an international chain. We had no background, no right to believe it. I often say, if I knew then what I know now, would I have done it? I’m not sure. We had no idea, but we pulled the trigger. We borrowed. The first big move was to sign the lease with personal guarantees. We found the spot on South Doheny Drive, about five blocks from my home. I lived south of Wilshire in Beverly Hills, my wife and I and my daughter and son, and signed the lease with personal guarantees. Went to the bank to borrow a quarter of a million dollars on our law practice, and he wanted us to write a business plan.
So I sat down and I wrote a business plan that said that we were going to create the third style of pizza in America. We considered the two important ones. The most important were New York and Chicago, probably in that order. So we said we were going to create a new and a third style of pizza, California-style pizza, and ultimately this style of pizza was going to be defined by whatever California Pizza Kitchen said it is. Now, that was really chutzpah because that is before the creation of the barbecue chicken pizza.
Adam: It really speaks to this sense of, you used the word chutzpah. You could also use the word conviction, belief, and oftentimes we have conviction and belief that is misguided conviction. In your case, it may have been somewhat misguided, but it worked out. How did it work out?
Rick: Well, it’s interesting, and that’s the thing that I’ve come to reflect on in my memoir too. When I say that if I knew then what I know now, would I have done it, what I’m referring to is, we thought we had this great concept. We were clever lawyers, and then we got into it, and we learned that the concept would only carry us so far, and it really was going to be about our ability to run a business. In fact, if we couldn’t run a business, we weren’t going to make it out of the gate with the first concept. So that was the revelation. We had all the types of tensions you would exactly expect if you opened up a brand-new restaurant concept, and it was complicated by a chef that we got along with like oil and water, who thought that these two lawyers should not even be in the restaurant and leave it to him.
Adam: I want to dive into that in a minute, but before we do, going back to the transition from working as a lawyer, a successful lawyer, to making the decision to essentially abandon a successful law practice to enter an extremely risky business that you had no experience in. What advice would you share to anyone listening on how to understand whether your idea is a good idea, whether a risk you’re considering taking is a risk worth taking?
Rick: There is no simple answer to that. First of all, nobody would have believed we could have done it. These crazy lawyers who have no experience. However, we went to 22 friends in one afternoon, 22 phone calls, 23 actually, and got 22 yeses in investment. And we were lawyers. We had no experience, so why did people do that? Well, they believed in us, and so we believed in ourselves, and we had people that believed in us.
Usually, businesses, depending on size, it’s very common for businesses to start with friends and family investment. But I believe you have to keep your eyes wide open. Everybody says failure is not an option, and we said that. But the truth is, failure is an option. COVID taught that to a lot of people. Circumstances do happen beyond our control, but ultimately, you have to believe in yourself, and you don’t have to have a plan B other than your belief in yourself, and say, “You know what? Under the worst case, if I have my health, I have my family, I have my friends, I can pick myself up and do it again, or find something else to do.”
And if you don’t have that conviction or belief, I don’t think you can pull it off. But having the support of friends, family, and I guess confidence in yourself. Larry and I were unique. We had a unique partnership. We often referred to it as a synergy, that one plus one equals three. So we had the confidence of each other, and I’m not sure either one of us would have done it alone. In fact, I think neither one of us would have done it alone. So that added the degree that gave us the ability to push it over the edge and actually pull the trigger.
Adam: Rick, you shared a lot there that I would love to unpack. If you don’t believe in yourself, who’s going to believe in you? The importance of doing the work before the work. You mentioned that even though you had no experience in the restaurant business, you had no problem raising money. Why? Because you had developed a reputation that allowed you to pick up the phone, call the list of people who you knew would, number one, take your phone call, number two, hear you out, and number three, invest not in your business but in you. And why are they investing in you? Because you established yourself as a person worth investing in.
Rick: I guess that goes to a core issue, which is morality. And I’m not talking about it in the most wild sense of the word. I’m just talking about it. People knowing somebody that they trust, that is honest, that they believe is smart. But in the end, it was interesting. We were criminal lawyers. Now, none of these people we called were any of our former criminal clients, I might add. These were all friends, but they believed in Larry and me, and I think it’s because we were good guys and we were honest, and they knew that we were committed.
And I reflect often, and I do that in the book. When we finally created CPK, California Pizza Kitchen, our mantra was do the right thing. So we, I think, as lawyers, you could argue both sides. To us, everything wasn’t black and white. It was often gray. But when it comes to important decisions about how you conduct yourself in business, how you conduct yourself with people, there is a right and a wrong. There’s usually a pretty bright line as to what the right thing is.
Not everybody has the courage or the morals to do the right thing all the time. We really did try to do the right thing. Our first culture was, let’s treat people great and let’s get people to like us. There’s a line in Annie by Daddy Warbucks that said, “You don’t have to be nice to the people on the way up if you’re not coming back down again.” We didn’t believe that. We wanted people to like us, and I think that’s why people trusted us.
Adam: I love that you didn’t have a track record in the restaurant industry, and when investors are looking to invest, they’re looking at track record. And you didn’t have a track record in the business that you were going into, but what you did have was a long track record of honesty, integrity, doing the right thing, working hard, being committed, and the last thing you shared, being kind, being nice. Everyone has a choice every day. Am I going to be kind to others? It’s not really that hard. It’s within our control, and what a difference it makes.
Rick: Adam, that’s what ultimately, when we use the word kindness, evolved. That idea evolved over the years into what we called ROCK, R-O-C-K. That was this California Pizza Kitchen culture: R for respect, O for opportunity, C for communication, and K for kindness. And we did that. Larry and I were sitting in the office, and at that time, PepsiCo owned two-thirds of us, and they were asking for a mission statement, like, “What’s your mission statement? To sell more pizzas than anybody in the world?” Well, that wasn’t our mission statement. They owned Pizza Hut at the time. That could be Pizza Hut’s mission statement. It wasn’t ours.
So Larry and I said, “What really does define us? Let’s talk about the culture that we’ve been building over the last seven or eight years.” And we came up with respect, and then we came up with communication, and we came up with kindness, and we had RCK. We said, “Well, we have an O for opportunity. Now we have ROCK and we have rock stars.” But we used that as the clear bar and barrier to promotion. We only promoted rock stars.
And what was the glue that held that all together? It was the K of kindness. So we would always judge people: Are they kind people? And the reason that’s so important is, obviously, I shouldn’t say it’s obvious, but when you go into the workplace or anything in life, you want to be surrounded by kind people. If you’re surrounded by kind people, it’s fun to come to work. If there is one unkind person in your life or organization, you don’t want to come to work. You don’t want to go to that lunch. You don’t want to go to that dinner. We want to avoid instinctually unkind people, and we felt that.
And that’s what I think the key to CPK’s success was: truly ROCK. It was organic. We didn’t do it as a slogan that we didn’t walk the talk. It’s something that evolved and we believed in. And everybody did work for us, and we did it from within. We promoted from within. So by the time we had sold the company 25 years later, with 4,000 employees and people who had been with us at that point 20 years and 15 years and 18 years, that was our success. Our success was our people.
Adam: I love it, and we can talk all day and all night about mission, about vision, about values. But how do mission, vision, and values actually translate into culture? By living and breathing your mission, vision, and values. By not just talking the talk, but by walking the walk. By promoting people based on their ability to live up to your mission, vision, and values. When you say our core belief, our core mission, our core value is kindness, and you promote jerks, then those are just words on a wall. But when you are indexing kindness in determining who you’re promoting, that’s how you build a winning culture.
Rick: Adam, you said something really important. You can talk it, but you have to walk it. And what you have to do is actually enforce it. You can’t just say it and then hire jerks or promote jerks, as you said, right? You have to enforce it.
So we would run into sometimes, when people would be terminated, they’d go, “Well, that’s not very kind.” Well, you’re right. It isn’t very kind. You’re right. It isn’t very kind. On the other hand, we are doing you a favor because you are not going to succeed here, and we’re giving you the opportunity to go somewhere else and find something that you will succeed in, because you will not be successful here. And kindness also reflects on the organization. We are being kind to the organization, and that was something else that we lived with. You have to enforce it.
That is so hard for people, and for me too. I mean, it is hard to fire people. But, you know, it’s interesting. Larry and I had no experience, and when we started, or maybe even before we opened that first restaurant, we read Ray Kroc’s book, his autobiography, and he said, “When you have somebody in the organization that you know is bringing you down, do yourself and them a favor, and basically part ways. Because if you don’t, it’s going to come back to you in a way worse than you ever expected.”
And so, you know, another way I used to do it. This is very granular, I must say, but you’re causing me to reflect on it, is I used to tell people, if there is somebody in your restaurant, your organization, that works for you, and you just wish you could push a button and make them go away, push the button. Push the button.
Adam: Was there a situation when you had a member of your team who was highly productive, a star player, but who was an unkind person, and you had to face that down and make that call?
Rick: And that was our first lesson. We had hired this former chef from Spago, who was a pizza guru that created Spago’s pizzas, and we hired him as our first chef. And we got along like oil and water. He thought these two lawyers should not be in the restaurant and leave it to him. And we never gave him the impression we were going anywhere or not going to be in the restaurant, and so every day was a fight. Every day was a challenge with him, and yet we were dependent on him in those earliest days.
But it was only a month or two that he blew up. He blew up at a server, wrongfully accused her in the restaurant, and a server came over to our office next door crying. We validated immediately what he did. Called him into our office and said, “We can’t have this.” And he said, “You have to support me.” And we said, “No, we don’t. Okay, we are always going to do the right thing. You’re terminated.”
And here it was. We were in business one year. We were wildly successful from the start. Everybody coming in for barbecue chicken pizza and coming back again for barbecue chicken pizza. And here we fired our chef. And Larry and I and my wife, Esther, sat on the floor of my law office and we cried. We were terrorized, but we knew we had done the right thing.
Adam: How did you overcome that obstacle? How did you move forward without your star player?
Rick: Well, he had brought, like, a cook. Actually, Gary Beauregard was a waiter at Spago. He was a cook, meaning a line cook, not a restaurant manager, not a kitchen manager, not a chef. He was as calm as can be. He was a Berkeley graduate. He calmed everybody down. We trusted Gary. We said, “Can you run this kitchen?”
And Gary not only ran the kitchen, he became what we ultimately called a culinary vice president. We worked with him for 12 or 13 years as he grew and we grew, and Larry and I would work with him on creating the new menu, mostly Larry and I. And then he would tweak it, and we’d tweak it back. But Gary rose to the occasion.
And then way before we had developed ROCK, and we had all this tension in the restaurant between the front of the house and the back of the house, and we just broke it up. We said, “We can’t have that,” and we said, “You know, California Pizza Kitchen is color blind, education blind, religion blind, gender blind. We don’t care what your background is or what you did, but if you’re committed to our quality and our ethics, and committed as we are to build this vision, then you’re going to be promoted.”
But something else that started very early, the first hire we had, we got so blessed and lucky. Larry and I were having lunch in Santa Monica, and this server, Julie Carruthers, waited on us. We said, “You know, you are exactly what we envision for service in our new restaurant, and we’re starting a restaurant chain.” That was right when we signed the lease. “And would you consider coming to work with us?”
So she came to our law office the next day, and Larry and I didn’t do interviews. We did sales pitches. I have to say, the whole time we practiced, we were not good interviewers. If somebody got to us, if they got to the point they were talking to us, we already knew we wanted to hire them. So Larry and I pitched, and we pitched Julie on our vision, and she quit her job and came to work for us way before – months before we had the first restaurant. Wrote the first training manuals. Was a server as well, and then grew to be very big in the restaurant industry as she grew into our human resource vice president, and she became a leader in training.
And so that’s the other thing that we did from the beginning, was training, and so that was unusual in casual dining restaurants at that point in life. CPK became a pioneer in that, in having family-approachable casual dining with well-trained servers.
Adam: I love that, and that anecdote is emblematic of what the best leaders do. The best leaders are personally invested in finding the best talent, recruiting the best talent, hiring the best talent. Always keep your eyes open. You never know who your star employee is going to be. You never know where your star employee is going to be. In this case, you were at a restaurant. You had a waitress who you really liked, and you had the intuition to say, “I want you on my team.” And then you said, “Well, just because you’re a great waitress doesn’t mean that you’re going to be a great waitress for the rest of your career. You can do all kinds of things.” Great leaders build great leaders. Great leaders develop great leaders. And your focus as an organization around developing great talent starts with you as a leader being personally invested in developing great talent.
Rick: You know, Adam, it occurred to me too. I saw a program about a year ago. I think it was on the Food Channel or wherever, and they were interviewing this owner of a single pizza parlor in New Jersey, and he said, “You know, I can’t expand.” He was very successful in that pizza restaurant. Said, “Well, I can’t expand because I’ll never get anybody to care like I do.”
And I wanted to scream into the screen, that’s right. You never will. You’re the owner. You will never get anybody to care as much as you will. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get people to care. And that’s the difference. You have to be able to trust the right people, empower the right people, and have them share your vision. And that is easy to say. It’s not so easy to do because we all know sometimes you can end up trusting the wrong person. And I don’t have a playbook for that. I don’t have any way to do that other than Jack Carr, who I knew as a Navy SEAL and now is a number one, multi-number-one New York Times bestselling author.
As a SEAL, when I first met him, became friends with him, I asked him something, and he said, “Rick, trust your instincts.” Trust your instincts.
Adam: And your instincts are an accumulation of your experience, an accumulation of all the things you did well, all the things you did poorly, all of your wins, all of your losses, and there’s a reason why you are usually successful when you trust your gut. There’s a reason why you often regret not trusting your gut.
Rick: That’s what people have to do to move forward. And, you know, as I said, you’re not always right. You take some falls. There is no straight line to the top. We were sort of a rocket ship, but it went down, up, down, up, leveled, and we stayed vigilant to our vision. And Larry and I, as partners and trusting each other, we worked through a lot of difficult periods over 25 years. But each time, we emerged stronger for it.
Adam: What was the biggest challenge that you ultimately had to navigate? How did you navigate it? What did you learn?
Rick: Well, for us, it turned out during the period that we had sold to PepsiCo, and basically they wrote us a blank check. When we started with PepsiCo, and we were about to go public, we had 25 restaurants. They came along and said, “We don’t want you to go public. We want to buy in,” and they ended up buying out most of our investors, not us, as they intended.
And we had 25 restaurants, and they said, “You should build 50 or 100 a year.” Well, we built 15 the first year as planned, and we built 28 the second year as planned. But a lot of those didn’t work out because we didn’t have the infrastructure and the team to choose the right locations, to get them built. And Pepsi pulled the plug, and now for the first time we had to lay off teams of people. It was brutal and very difficult.
But most importantly, we broke our vow, so to speak, to our employees. At one point, they had actually, in order to lower costs, brought in an inferior cheese, and Larry and I were powerless at the moment. I was in Miami. I had called together a bunch of managers to take them to dinners, as I did when I traveled, and I said, “Larry and I, we’re still committed to quality.” And I saw one woman manager sort of roll her eyes, looking at the other, like, “Does he really believe that?”
And I went back to the hotel, and I called Larry back in Los Angeles, and I said, “We are really screwed,” and I used an expletive far stronger than screwed. So I think that was the lowest point. But we got lucky. We had a great lawyer, Bob Kahn, and we had a contract with Pepsi. And then Pepsi got out of the restaurant business, and they spun Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut into what later became Yum, but they couldn’t, because of our contract. They couldn’t spin us. So we got new life and got new private equity guys to come in. So fate and fortune sort of worked in our favor at that time.
Adam: What did you learn from that experience?
Rick: Once again, just pure perseverance, keeping your head above water, keep grinding it out, stay committed, stay focused, don’t give up, stay true to your vision, even if it’s beyond your control. But Larry and I never compromised. It wasn’t okay with us, so we were shouting from the rooftops, and I know that’s why people believed in us, even at a time when maybe they didn’t believe in the organization. They knew Larry and I were always trying to do the right thing.
Adam: Rick, what do you believe are the key characteristics among the very best leaders, and what can anyone do to become a better leader?
Rick: The best leaders bring out the best of people, like sports. The best managers, the best leaders, bring out the best of others, and restaurants are a team sport. That’s what made CPK successful. It was that we surrounded ourselves with great people, but we empowered people.
So another thing that I’d say is a great line that I attribute to President Reagan. It may have not been his originally. He used it in relation to the Russians. It’s trust but verify, and so you have to always cross-check. When I flew airplanes, you always cross-check your instruments. Don’t blindly trust. Trust but verify.
But going back to leadership, what is leadership? In order to build an organization, it’s other people. And how do you motivate? How do you motivate other people? And that is by setting the standard yourself, by setting standards and living up to those standards. And I believe that’s what made Larry and me successful over the 25 years we built California Pizza Kitchen. We held ourselves to the highest standards, and we held everybody else to the highest standards, and I believe that motivated people because we trusted them; we trusted others, but they knew we were all committed to do the right thing.
Adam: You’ve talked a lot about your partnership with Larry, which started before you became a restaurateur. You were law partners together. You had different restaurant ideas. You had compatible working styles, different personalities, but realized that there was something here that could work really well. What are the keys to a great partnership? How can anyone find a great partner and maintain a great partnership?
Rick: Well, I liken it to a great marriage. In this case, Larry and I, we have very different personalities, and we debated endlessly. Some people would say we fought. I’d call them debates, but we always ended on a good note. We never spent a night mad at each other. We would talk to each other morning, noon, and night, and we never, ever left each other mad.
But the other characteristic of our partnership was that while we both had strong egos, neither one of us had invested in being right. And once we would debate endlessly, we would come to a conclusion, and then it would be our decision. So we never, ever once did “I told you so.” If it didn’t work out, it was our decision. So no “I told you so”s, no looking back, and no going to sleep angry.
Adam: That’s such good advice. And when you are committed to whatever it is you’re building, when you’re committed to success, as opposed to caring at all about ego, caring at all about credit, all these issues that can potentially be sources of conflict are not going to be sources of conflict. They’re going to be irrelevant because you’re so focused and so invested on achieving the shared goal.
Rick: We were so trusting of each other that newscasters and interviewers, reporters, always commented. We stepped on each other’s lines, and we finished each other’s sentences, and we did it organically. There was no jealousy. We did the Today Show three times. There’s just no jealousy between us. We would each take clues from each other, and then we did Mutt and Jeff in business, right? The bad guy, good guy. But we never preordained who was going to be the bad guy and who was going to be the good guy. We did it organically. We said, “Okay, he’s taking that position, then I’m going this way.” Right? It was just a unique relationship and partnership over 40 years. And you combine our law practice and CPK; we were business partners over 40 years.
Adam: Do you have any advice for anyone listening on how to find a great partner? How to assess whether someone is or is not a suitable partner?
Rick: Well, first of all, you have to ask yourself, “Who am I? What am I? Am I a great partner?” So if you, in your own mind, are not willing to accept somebody else as a partner, then the thing is, it’s great when you find a partner, and as I did, we do different things, and we do them differently. But we trust each other. But it came from knowing I’m a good person, and I know I’m going to find a good person.
But if you are not that person, then you cannot expect to have a great partnership. If you are that person, then look for a person, whether they’re exactly like you or not exactly like you, but they have to share your values. The critical thing is they have to share your values.
Adam: I love that. It ultimately starts with you. Before you can look outward, you have to look inward. Rick, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?
Rick: Read, study, think, learn from other leaders, and again, trust your instincts, but learn. Be willing to learn. Be willing to assess yourself. Be willing to assess: Am I right? Am I moving in the right direction? You have to be willing to look at yourself first before you look at others and hold yourself to a standard.
Jerry Magnin, who was a restaurateur. I read something early in my career. You just brought it out. Haven’t thought about it in a long time. He said, and I’ve seen it from others as well, and it’s always stuck with me, “Every day I get up, I ask myself, how can I be excellent? What can I do today that will make me more excellent?” And that means every moment of your day that you can try to do something useful, try to learn something today. There’s so much available that wasn’t available when I grew up, so much knowledge from so many sources. Look at that and check yourself and attempt to make yourself better.
Adam: Rick, thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.
Rick: Thank you. You brought out some good things that I hadn’t articulated, so I appreciate it.
