Taco Bell
Irvine, CA USA
“You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room—what you have to be really good at is recognizing when to call on someone else for their thoughts. If you can be an avid learner, it takes your doubt and turns it into confidence.”
Chief Operating Officer (COO)
I lead the experience, performance, and growth of Taco Bell’s 7,000+ restaurants across the U.S.
Once the vision and strategy are set, it’s all about making people excited about the journey and helping them get there in meaningful ways. I spend a lot of my day walking around and catching up with the team. Everyone knows each other on a personal level. If I’m not in the office, I’m out in our restaurants doing the exact same thing. Of course, there is a lot of food involved too. I love taking new food ideas and figuring out how to execute them in our restaurants.
Here's the first step for high school students
Take that entry-level job and decide you’re going to be the best at it. Deciding that I was going to get as good as I could at my first job—sweeping floors and making tacos at 2 a.m.—ended up adding volumes to my long-term path. Everything centered around that early experience: I had to understand the ground-floor fundamentals of the business so I could understand how to bring people together and give them a feeling of purpose.
"Earlier in my career, there were a few times I thought I was ready for the bigger job when I wasn’t. It was deflating to stand back and watch other people get opportunities ahead of me. "
