Cava CEO on how the Chipotle competitor grew to $33 million per restaurant

Fortune

The 52-year-old CEO and co-founder has watched Cava, the cult-classic Mediterranean fast-casual spot, skyrocket. Since its IPO last summer, the chain’s stock has grown over 300%; it hit a new peak—$128 per share—in late September.

Transcript

00:00I never specifically thought I wanted to be a CEO, but when I worked in finance I felt very

00:08unfulfilled. I wanted to make a greater impact than what I was making in that career, build

00:14something that helped others and lifted others up. I'm Brett Schulman, I'm 52 years old and I'm the

00:20co-founder and CEO of Kava and here are my secrets to success. We are Mediterranean through and

00:25through and we think we're creating the next large-scale cultural cuisine category. It's just

00:30really simple, flavorful, satisfying food that you can feel good about eating. So I was born and

00:36raised in Philadelphia and my father had worked in the car industry, the car business and had an

00:41opportunity to buy into a car dealership in Maryland. So we packed up our bags and moved

00:46to Maryland, graduated high school and went to college my freshman year out in Arizona,

00:53but that was a little bit far for me and wound up coming back and eventually graduated from

00:56University of Maryland. I was able to get an internship at a finance firm, an investment bank

01:02and was able to use that internship to get a full-time job after I graduated. That really

01:08was the beginning of thinking about, well maybe I want to do something different and at the time I

01:13met my wife Mary. She talked about doing something more entrepreneurial, I had been thinking about

01:18doing something more entrepreneurial. So around 2004 we started to think about leaving our careers

01:25to do something more entrepreneurial and that really came to life in a natural snack food

01:29company. A couple years later as we were growing that business, I hadn't necessarily planned to do

01:33that full-time and around that same time a friend of mine from college from University of Maryland

01:39called me and said, hey will you talk to my cousin? They have a restaurant called Cava Meze, do you

01:43know it? So at the time my partners Ted Eich and Chef Dimitri had opened a full-service restaurant

01:50in 2006 called Cava Meze which still exists today in Rockville, Maryland but that business

01:55was struggling and they said, do you have any advice? So I gave them some advice, we agreed to

01:58stay in touch and then about two months later I called Ted back up and I said, how's everything

02:03going? He said, well not well, what are you doing? I said, well I'm thinking about what I'm doing next

02:08and he said, well why don't you come on board, would you want to consult for us and help us

02:13fix this business? And so I was able to go in and get the business profitable and get it turned

02:18around and me and the guys hit it off and they said, Brett, why don't you become our fourth

02:22partner? So I went back to the guys the next day and I said, I'm in, let's be partners but have you

02:28ever thought about taking what we do in full service and in the grocery stores to a larger

02:34audience in a fast help-based format? We spent about a year figuring out how that food would

02:39translate from a full-service made-to-order format into a fast format and ultimately settled on the

02:46walk-the-line format and so this allows us very efficient labor productivity which then allows us

02:52to take that efficiency and invest in our food quality and we always felt that we were going to

02:59succeed with our high quality food that we were already serving in the full-service restaurants

03:03and we opened our first fast casual location in January of 2011 and fast forward to today and

03:11we have over 340 restaurants operating in 25 states and the District of Columbia. I say being

03:17an entrepreneur is very much the cliche of riding a roller coaster and you know even at Cava we've

03:22stared into the abyss a few times and lived to tell about it and I think just the success we've

03:27had is really a byproduct of everything we put into it, how we invest in our team, how we invest

03:34in our guests and the guest experience. You know we tell this to our team every day, we don't want

03:39you hitting the snooze button on Monday morning, we want you jumping out of bed excited to make the

03:43impact or do the work that you're going to do. I'm an optimist by nature, I'm a glass half full kind

03:48of kind of guy but I use a couple terms that I talk about with the team a lot and it's being a

03:55victor not the victim and it's being better not bitter when a challenging situation comes up.

04:02Even when I'm getting frustrated and I'm recognizing I'm getting frustrated or feeling down in a

04:06situation to remind myself that hey if it was that easy everybody would be doing it but be the

04:13victor of this situation, don't sit and feel sorry for myself and be the victim so I'm always trying

04:18to use those terms to calibrate my mindset. Mediterranean diet is the number one ranked

04:22diet now seven years running and you know I think it's the idea of it's not so much a diet as a way

04:28of life and this idea of eating whole foods in moderation and foods that are very high in

04:35nutritional value but also very satiating so that you're not snacking between a meal the only thing

04:40we like to say after kava you don't need a snack or a nap you're eating really flavorful food

04:45you're eating very satisfying food and oh by the way it's better for me right you don't have to

04:50make compromises you don't have to make sacrifices and you can walk down our line and pick out what

04:54you want to your tastes and preferences. Being a CEO and being responsible for now 10,000 people

05:01over time has absolutely changed my perspective in my daily life.

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