Dive into the exciting world of CAVA, the fast-casual restaurant taking the Mediterranean by storm. Join Jack McCullough as he sits down with CAVA CFO Tricia Tolivar.
In this Rockstar CFOs episode, she shares her incredible journey from a childhood fascination with numbers to leading the financial charge at CAVA. Tricia reveals the secrets behind CAVA’s innovative approach to menu creation and customer experience that keeps their guests coming back. She opens up about how she has navigated the challenges of motherhood, handled a demanding career and dealt with an IPO while staying true to her values.
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We have a true Rockstar CFO in this episode. My guest is Tricia Tolivar, who’s the CFO of CAVA. CAVA is a fast, casual Mediterranean restaurant chain offering customizable bowls, salads, and pitas. I just want to welcome Tricia. Welcome to the show.
Jack, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
I gave a really brief description of your company, but maybe you could fill in the blanks and share a little more details with our audience.
I’d be happy to. CAVA is a Mediterranean category-defining brand. We’ve brought our brand to over 25 states in the country, and we’re able to bring amazing Mediterranean cuisine, where taste and health unite, and deliver that with incredible hospitality through one of our over 300 restaurants across the country.
That’s a fantastic story. So many people are looking for that. They want good, quick service, which you have, and they want to eat healthy. They want it fast, and they want it healthy. That’s been elusive for a while, but you guys seem to have cracked that nut.
We’re fortunate. We are able to take the blend of convenience, relevance and experience to our guests each and every day. We find that the experience and creating a value proposition for them are differentiating. What we’re finding and seeing is that as fast casual has, it really brought itself to the brand and to the country, brought itself as a format and CAVA has been able to bring its unique cuisine and really differentiate it there.
It’s also creating this sort of an influx between those that were experienced with fast food and how those prices have increased in fast food, creating a more expensive alternative and closing that gap between our value and theirs from a price perspective. It’s creating more of an opportunity for trade-up from fast food to fast casual that’s really affordable and really highlights the difference in the opportunities that we have.
At the same time, casual dining is experiencing a little bit of a challenge in that it’s not as differentiated with tipping and everything that’s going on as becoming more expensive and, therefore, creating the opportunity for guests to trade down from casual dining into fast casual. It’s creating a unique opportunity for us to provide exceptional value and brings guests back to us more and more often.
I’m just grateful you’ve opened up some locations in Eastern Massachusetts.
We’re happy to have you as a guest and excited about the warm welcome we’re getting in all the markets we open.
Career Start
I want to chat a little about your early years. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in New York. I lived on Long Island until I was ten, and then my family moved to Florida on the West Coast of Florida in the Tampa area.
Where do you live now, if I may ask?
I live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My husband is from Louisiana, and his family is here. Two of our grandchildren are here, one of our children is here and our youngest daughter is also living with us. We just moved. I’m able to benefit from a hybrid work arrangement. Our company office is located in D.C., so we relocated from Maryland to Baton Rouge to be closer to family so that we can take care of our aging parents and enjoy our grandchildren.
It’s interesting. You look substantially younger to me. If I gave a little bit of one of those when you mentioned grandchildren, I apologize. Anyway, you grew up there and went to college at Emory to study accounting, which seems to be a pretty good decision for you. You’ve had a wonderful career. What was it that attracted the seventeen-year-old Tricia to a career in accounting?
In 1986, I went to Atlanta to go to Emory, and I really loved numbers and math. I thought accounting would make sense. Selfishly, it was the quickest way out to get a job. Emory was a bit expensive, and I was putting myself through school and taking on loans. At the time, in Georgia, you could get your CPA in four years, and accounting seemed like the right path for me, and I was comfortable with it.
In many cases, it just made sense. I didn’t have accounting classes in high school. I experienced business school. Once I got to Atlanta, initially, I had thought about maybe I’ll do the engineering route, but that program would have been a combination of Emory and Georgia Tech. It would have added another year to my education, and I said, “What’s the fastest way for me to get out and start producing?” That’s the path I took.
I had a similar type of thing. I don’t think that, at seventeen, I had a passion for accounting or business or anything else that I had reasonable skills in, but it seemed like a good career path. Here it is, in my case, almost 40 years after I graduated, and if I’ve worked 39 years, I’ve been employed 38 years and 9 months of them. I encourage people to pursue accounting. I know it’s not the hot field these days for up-and-comers, but it’s a great way to make a living.
I agree. Indeed, the accounting profession is looking for more and more talented candidates. Although I haven’t convinced any of my children to go that route, it certainly has been something that I have enjoyed throughout my career.
That’s great. I looked at your LinkedIn, and I recognize the name of every company you have worked at. You worked at EY, AutoZone, then EY again and then GNC and now CAVA. You went the public accounting route and then AutoZone, a company with probably about 100% name recognition, I would guess at this point, perhaps not when you worked there. Tell me how those roles prepared you for the current CFO role at CAVA.
I would love to do that. EY was a great experience. I went to EY and thought I would be a partner there. There weren’t many women in the partnership at the time. I thought, “This is going to be great.” Honestly, I worked at EY when women couldn’t wear pants to work. I was part of that generation that introduced a pantsuit and did that in a meaningful way. What I had the opportunity to do was get to experience AutoZone as a client. I was at EY when you could still work for your clients. I left EY to start their internal audit department.
We called it process improvement at the time because we didn’t want that internal audit kind of halo around it. It was a fabulous experience for me. I also got to participate in a number of their acquisitions. We did three acquisitions in eighteen months and became part of that team that evolved that. It was a very transformational time at AutoZone.
There was a bit of an opportunity for us as a business to break out of silos. We had a new CEO come in, Steve Odland, and he got all of the VPs together. There were many of us who didn’t even know each other. He’s like, “Here’s an opportunity for us to see how we can work together to really transform and drive the business.” I was able to be part of that transformation. Through that experience, I evolved into different roles.
I finished working in the internal audit department. I had the opportunity to work in FP&A and strategy and then, ultimately, in the corporate controller [position], a great opportunity for a public company, but then [there] was an opportunity to run a business at AutoZone. That was something I’ll never forget. Steve came to me and said, “I’ve got this idea. I want to see if you want to run the commercial division. It’s our second-largest division.” I said, “No, I want to be CFO. I want to go down the CFO path. Why do I need to do that?” He said, “It’ll make you a better CFO, I promise.” He was absolutely right.
I led that division. It was interesting. I did not know how to lead a sales force or an operations team. There were so many things I had to learn, and I had the opportunity to learn many things there that helped drive me to be a better business partner and trusted business advisor. I strongly encourage that opportunity to experience operations.
I did that for a while and was traveling a bit because part of it was managing relationships with the commercial division. They were installing [parts], doing, fixing cars for people. It wasn’t the DIY side of the business. It was do it for me. I was traveling, meeting different customers across the country, and working on different deals. It was a lot of time away. I had two young children at the time, and then I was a single mom for part of the time. It was a bit of a challenge. I went back and I said, “I need to have some more stability and some more time at home. Can I go back into finance and be back in my comfort zone?” Steve again said, “No, that’s easy. You don’t want to do that. Let me see what else we can do.”
I had the opportunity to pivot and learn about supply chain and replenishment. He said, “That’ll keep you at home. You won’t have to travel as much, but you’ll get to explore another part of the business.” It was, again, very beneficial for me to see another side of the business and understand we had over $1 billion in inventory. I wanted to see how we could optimize that better. I was able to do that successfully.
There were lots of great learnings that I could leverage as I moved into other parts of my career. As I continued to do that, I mentioned I was a single mom going through a challenging divorce process and took some time off. Everyone said, “You’re going to hate it.” I played golf and tennis and spent more time with my kids. There wasn’t much I hated about it, but I missed the professional side of it and decided not to go back [to AutoZone].
Moving On
I learned a tremendous amount at AutoZone, and it was super exciting, but I didn’t know how to be someone different from how I was when I was there. I wanted to be a better mom than I had been and be more balanced in my approach. I had the opportunity to be CFO of a nonprofit in the Memphis area.
It was a great experience. It taught me how to work in a smaller organization, be scrappy, close the books myself, write the checks and do everything I had teams to do before and manage the executives on the board. We were investing in a significant endowment and making sure we were distributing it to different arts organizations across the city.
I was entrusted to do the best thing I could with the dollars. That was another benefit in learning. Ultimately, I started dating my husband. He had an opportunity to take a job in Atlanta. As we got married and I moved, I went back to EY and had the opportunity to be very flexible as I was starting my new family, relocating my kids and then being a great internal financial partner on the EY side.
I led their North and South America financial practice for the consulting arm of the business. I had many opportunities, but I had taken myself out of that CFO route. I mentioned I wanted to be a CFO, but I wanted to focus on my family, but keeping up that professional side at the same time. EY, again, came in as an opportunity to help me hone in on those skills, but also give back to what I needed from a personal standpoint and a family standpoint at that time.
Ironically, while I was there, an individual who I had worked for at AutoZone had the opportunity to become the CEO, and that’s Mike Archbold at GNC. He reached out and said, “I know I’ve called you a number of times with different opportunities. You’ve always turned me down, but I’ve taken on this role at GNC and the CFO role is open. Do you have any interest?”
I said, “It’s funny, Mike, my oldest children, Ellie and Will, I had never wanted to move because I didn’t want to risk losing them to go back to move back to their dad in Memphis. Ironically, they decided on their own to move to Memphis. My husband, Dennis, and I are here and our youngest, Lily, is four. She hasn’t started kindergarten. If there’s a time where we want to do something, now would be the time to explore that.”
I had the opportunity to take a public company CFO role. I never had that opportunity. He gave me that because of the experience and the relationship we had. My husband and I took our four-year-old at the time. She turned five, and we started kindergarten and my career there as a public company CFO back in 2015. That was an interesting experience as well. I know I’ve been going on. I’ll go a little bit longer, but during that time, I worked with four different CEOs from 2015 to 2020. I saw a lot of ups and downs there and learned a tremendous amount.
I navigated through the end, through a bankruptcy experience that also taught me a lot about resilience and other things I took with me as I moved forward. It was one of the quickest bankruptcy exits. We entered in June and exited in September, but I wanted to make sure I could do as much as possible for the impacted people and businesses. While I was going through that, towards the end, a friend who had worked with me heard about the opportunity at CAVA, and he said, “Tricia might be interested.”
Fortunately, Kelly Costanza, our head of people and culture, reached out to me and said, “I’ve got this opportunity.” Keep in mind, this was in 2020. The pandemic’s going on, and I’m Googling what CAVA is. I’m reading it’s a restaurant. I said, “Do you think I’m crazy?” It didn’t seem like the right time to try a new opportunity in the middle of [a time] when people weren’t even going into restaurants. Luckily, Kelly was persistent, and I listened, and she said, “This is something special. I want you to hear me out.” Thank goodness I did.
I got to meet Kelly and Brett Schulman, our CEO, as well as many other board members, and I got to learn how special CAVA was. Fortunately, I took the step in November of 2020. It’s been an incredible experience ever since.
We could end the show right there, and we’ve already delivered tremendous value to the audience. That’s just a great story. One of my questions when I talk about the career path is, are there any mentors you’ve had along the way? Very few people get to your level without some help. It sounds like you had more than your fair share of people genuinely interested in your career path. Are there any that maybe one or two tha stitck out as being particularly impactful?
It’s interesting that when I reflect on that, I go back to my mom, which is not a traditional answer. My mom cared for me at home until middle or high school. She worked in retail, and she always instilled in me the confidence to think that I could do anything I wanted as long as I put my mind to it. She also always taught me from her retail experience that the customer is always right and how you continue to deliver on that experience. She’s just been an amazing sounding board for me. Whenever I questioned a path or wondered what was the best thing, she always gave great advice and kept me grounded and whole. That was helpful.
It’s a rare answer, but you’re not the first person who’s mentioned a parent as a mentor along the way. My parents had an outside influence on me, even though they didn’t have a professional life. My mom was a mom, and my dad was a mason, but I learned more from them than from anybody I ever worked with, just about treating people and commitment to quality. My dad would have put an expletive here and there, but the customer is always right, even when the customer is a blank.
It’s interesting. I probably discounted the value that my mom provided earlier because I didn’t think she had the professional experience, but there were so many times when her intuition and her wisdom opened my eyes to how I was seeing a situation. My dad was a general contractor. I was the first one in our family to finish college. That’s something they were very proud of. I’m just happy to realize how much I learned from her.
CAVA’s IPO
Let’s talk a little about CAVA. You’re doing a good job of anticipating my questions because I was going to ask how you came to get the role. It sounds like I know, but given everything you’d done at that point, the role, your experiences, perhaps had your pick of multiple CFO-type roles, I’m going to guess, even if you weren’t actively looking. What was there about CAVA that said, “I’m going to make the leap?”
There were so many. I’d start with my interaction with Brett. I loved his passion for the business, as well as his understanding of the guests. It was one of the things that I think we missed during my time at GNC. We were so focused on brick and mortar that we ignored this thing called the internet, e-commerce and Amazon. We just said, “Let’s keep driving and do what we’ve always done.” Brett is such a visionary in how he understands guest behavior and trends, how to stay in front of those and how to leverage technology to do it.
In many ways, it reminded me of my early days at AutoZone. High growth, lots of opportunity, understanding the business need and how you can address it and wanting to be part of that type of experience. Couple that with a founder-led business. The founders are still very engaged, which is phenomenal. You’ve got amazing food and an incredible team of over 10,000 who deliver amazing hospitality. It was hard not to say, “This is something I want to be part of.”
Now that you work there, what is the culture at your company like, if I may ask?
I get asked this quite often, and I often say it’s really special. It’s hard to put words to it. I’ve been fortunate to have recruited several individuals who have worked for me before. I’ve said, “It’s unlike anything I’ve experienced.” It’s a very special place. We talk about our mission, our values and our competencies, and our mission is to bring heart, health, and humanity to food.
That’s something that we’re all passionate about. Our values are things that we believe in and deliver on. Whether that’s generosity first always, our passion for positivity, or constant curiosity, we all do that. At the end of the day, I’m just part of a team of very thoughtful, passionate people who care about what they do and care about each other. It just makes it a really exciting, fun place to be.
I’ve been to the one in Woburn, Mass., a couple of times, and as I mentioned before, we started recording. I have a unique ability to determine a company culture at restaurants and stores because I’m an autism parent. Both of my sons are young adults who are autistic, and my oldest is nonverbal. I think I know exactly what the company is about and how they treat my kids, and I know you can get a particularly good or bad one. They treat my kids like they’re rock stars when they go. It’s not like they can remember the name or anything like that, but they definitely remember my kids.
They make them feel good. They can be a little bit of a handful. My youngest will not stop talking. He’ll ask 300 questions, and he’s the most curious human being on the planet. I’m not unrealistic. I know not everybody’s good with that, but they’re just great to them. They’re so patient with them, and they’re very nice to them. As best I can tell, it reflects the corporate culture stemming down to the customer experience.
That’s our goal. I’m so glad to hear it. As I said, I’m very proud to be part of such an amazing team of people. We like to get it right, not always, but I’m glad to hear that that was how it occurred for you.
I’m going to say you’re either the bravest guest I’ve had so far or the craziest. We’re going to figure out which of the two that is. You took your company public in 2023. I’m guessing everybody told you not to, probably, right?
Absolutely, they did. We were in such a fortunate position because we didn’t need to go public. We had a great balance sheet and a lot of opportunities, but we wanted to make sure that we had the opportunity to leverage the exposure that we would get from being a public company. I’ll be honest. Frankly, I thought, “We’ll get some exposure, and we’ll see what happens,” but that exposure was very significant and helped create a step function for us as an organization and our visibility across the country and where we were.
The thing, though, that was differentiating, and I don’t know, I still am not sure if it was bravest or craziest, maybe we can decide at the end of this episode, but we wanted to make sure we were ready. Whenever we went, it was because we were ready. I thank Brett and our board for ensuring we were in that spot. I think that’s what’s enabled us to be successful as a public company. For eighteen months, we prepared. We did five mock earnings calls for before we even went public.
We acted like a public company, went through, prepared the earnings, released the script, conducted Q&A and said, “We don’t want this to be the first time to be the first time. Let’s make sure that we’ve got this down.” We practiced things like creating guidance before we were a public company, working with our leadership team and saying, “Here’s what our commitments are. Are we going to stand up against those commitments?” I think that preparation paid off for us, and it’s been a good experience so far.
I remember I wasn’t familiar with your company until you went public. I guess mission accomplished, if I’m any indication. I remember people were like, “Why is this sort of niche-y, fast, casual restaurant going public?” Afterwards, other companies were like, “They’re the ones that restored the IPO market for the rest of us.” Thank God that you made that decision. It was a hugely successful event, correct?
It was. It was a very special time for us as an organization. As we say over and over again, it was definitely not the destination. It was a step on our journey. It’s really created the opportunity for excellent next chapters for us to be able to fulfill and deliver on our mission.
A lot of people say an IPO is an exit. I suppose for investors that are going to sell at the time, it kind of is, but not for you. You’re still going to work there for a few more years. It may be the biggest event in the company’s history, other than when it started.
It is. I’ve heard people compare it to a wedding, and what really matters is the marriage and how you deliver on that and how you approach it. A lot of celebration was part of the event. Certainly, that was super important, but the focus, and what I’m very proud of our team around, is how quickly it was, “Back to our strategy and how are we going to deliver, and how are we going to execute against our plans.” That’s what makes us a great team.
An IPO is a wonderful thing for everybody, but it does change the culture and create some challenges. Not having worked there, I am guessing CAVA had a very entrepreneurial feel to the company before going public. All of a sudden, now you’re public, and there are certain things that you need to do. You need to behave like a public company that the world is watching. How did the event change your culture within your team and maybe across the company?
It’s interesting. We practiced being a public company for a while before we went public, so I didn’t notice a significant change. Fortunately, the bigger you get, the harder it is to have that entrepreneurial piece, whether you’re public or not. We want to continue to embrace that in our culture, and having our founders still involved in the business helps keep that for us. What it allows us to do, though, is entirely focus on the business. As I said, it creates this opportunity from a brand visibility perspective, giving us even more strength.
We remain grounded in wanting to do what’s right for our guests and team members. If we do that, it ultimately pays out for our investors. We take a very long-term focus and say, “What is it that we’re doing for our guests in terms of price and the experience they have that keeps them coming back? What is it that we’re doing for the team members, that team members are excited about what they’re doing and deliver on that experience that you and your family have had?” All of that fuels an incredible business model that makes investors happy.
As long as we ensure we’re focused on those long-term things, the short-term things work out well. That’s some of what the market worries about. We try to stay focused on what we’re thinking about two years out, five years out. What do we need to have to make this business successful so that we can deliver as time goes on and ensure that it all works out? We’re often looking at it and saying, “A happy team member equals a happy guest, which equals a happy P&L.” That’s what’s going to drive more value for our team members and our shareholders overall.
Quality and Innovation
One of the challenges when companies grow as quickly as CAVA has is maintaining quality. How do you do that, maintaining the high-quality delivery that you want to bring to your customers, but also, you’ve got a great opportunity in front of you? You want to grow as quickly as you can. How do you juggle those two things?
It’s thinking about two and five years out. We often invest ahead of the growth to ensure that we maintain that quality, which is so important to us. The quality of our food and the quality of our guest experience. Making those investments in people, processes and technology ahead of time allows us to support the growth that we envision for the future and maintain, if not improve, the quality of that experience as we go forward.
That’s a great philosophy because I know people who own one restaurant, open up a second, and just couldn’t do it. They had such a successful individual restaurant, but they lost the quality control, and both suffered. It’s incredible what any restaurant chain has done.
We often say scaling restaurants is not like scaling SaaS software. It’s hard. You have to pay close attention to it and give it a lot of love to do it in the right way.
You mentioned scaling. From a financial background. What are the financial strategies you implement to support that?
First, start with the right team in place to be able to deliver on our experience and make sure that we can deliver our commitments. We definitely don’t want any surprises. We’re very thoughtful in how we approach the business. We have great technology and tools in place to do that, and then, going back to what I talked about earlier, how we incorporated the practices into being a public company before we were a public company. We weren’t figuring it out along the way.
One thing I learned, I think you know, I interviewed another CFO for a well-known fast-casual place, and I was surprised to learn what a big role innovation played in the company. I wasn’t surprised. You’re in one of the most competitive markets out there, but I guess it makes sense that the companies that succeed would be innovative. How does Cava approach innovation? You can’t keep the same menu and the same experience forever. People are going to get really bored.
How do you balance that innovation and not create so much change that it’s difficult for the restaurants to execute on as well? I talked about our mission, values, and competencies, or MBC. Innovation and growth are some of our key competencies, and they’re certainly significant components of how we think about the business. We lay out roadmaps for culinary innovation and pipeline innovation two to three years out. We’re always working through that process and going through different stage gates, starting with an ops test and understanding is this innovation going to break the kitchen or is it going to be something that we can deliver on that works?
We move to a market test and say, “How will the consumer receive this? Is this going to work?” We then take it and bring it out into a full rollout. That whole cycle is 12 to 18 months. We ensure that we’re thoughtful in bringing new items to the market while creating excitement for the guests at the same time. Innovation is key, whether that’s innovation from a culinary perspective or we’re relaunching our loyalty program and creating innovation around that, shifting from a “spend X [to] get Y” to more of a surprise and delight rewards program where you can choose how you want to use your points to experience CAVA
Maybe you even have other opportunities from a merchandise standpoint or other things to create more innovation and excitement, or you have different innovation around other contests. Could it be that, Jack, your bowl is the most favored bowl in the Boston market? Now you will be rewarded because you’ve attracted others to the brand and taught them new things about what to combine into their CAVA experience. Innovation is a key component, something we’re passionate about.
Along with innovation, technology is everywhere. It’s constantly changing. It makes it fun. How is CAVA using technology, both within finance and accounting and in the broader business as well?
From a technology standpoint, I mentioned earlier that CAVA has been very thoughtful around technology. We created our own digital platforms because we knew how important it was to create a differentiated experience. If you have the opportunity to order online, it’s much like going down the line in our restaurants, a little bit differentiated from what others experience.
When you think about technology in the finance and accounting world, it’s about trying to use tools to get better at forecasting, whether you can use weather patterns or prior trends to do predictive modeling on sales. We’re in the early stages of that. We think there’s an opportunity for AI and other tools to bring into the business, but we’re likely going to find others that will realize those and understand them a little bit better before we sink significant dollars into them. Let others test it out first.
When you’re thinking about technology, we find value in our restaurants. How can we use technology and tools to make our team members’ jobs easier? Is that leveraging video technology, understanding when it’s time to put more harissa honey chicken on the line? You inform the grill cook electronically to put more chicken on the grill instead of relying on team members’ intuition to call back and place orders for additional items. Creating tools that can make their lives easier and providing tools for scheduling or ordering that are more automated are where we see the opportunities for technology.
We also firmly believe that we see technology as an opportunity to enhance the human experience, not replace the human experience. I discussed our vision, bringing heart, health and humanity to food. We think that’s something guests really want, and that exchange from a human connection standpoint is super important. While we think technology can help the experience in the restaurant, we don’t see it replacing it in the front. Perhaps, maybe in the back of our restaurants, for additional orders, there could be an opportunity for automation. We still want to be able to see you engage with your kids and your family and deliver on that CAVA hospitality that we believe in.
I think people, and even younger people who grew up with technology, they still want that human interaction when they can have it. We’re not a planet of robots. I have a question. I know that perhaps you’re not a CPA anymore, but certainly, your formative professional years were in public accounting. Just a little different than that. Beyond traditional GAAP, what are some of the ways that you measure success at CAVA?
Ways to measure success? Indeed, how our guests feel about the business is one of our most important things. We’re always working to refine our tools. We’re rolling out a new system that will allow guests to give us real-time feedback that we can then share with our operators so they can get better and better and go back and deliver on that incredible hospitality. A financial metric that we often look at is traffic. What does that say? If you’ve got positive traffic, which we’ve been fortunate to experience, it’s a testament to whether your guests want to keep coming back. I would say front and center is the guest experience and how we’re delivering on that.
The Future CFO
I want to step back a little bit to the profession of being a CFO. I was a first-time CFO a quarter of a century ago, which I never consciously thought about until now. Anyway, how do you see the role of financial leadership changing? I got my first CFO job probably because I was the best accountant, I was reasonably strategic, I got along well with the boss, and people liked me. However, it was largely my finance and accounting skills. I don’t think that’s it anymore.
It’s not. I think the strategy piece of it is super important, as well as the general business understanding and how you can be a great partner and advisor for the rest of the organization. I also think it’s about looking ahead and understanding what will matter in five years. From a resource perspective, what can you provide for the business to ensure you can deliver on that in the best way possible? Leveraging those capabilities, a strong accounting background is nice, but I don’t think it’s as necessary or as prevalent as it was when you and I started decades ago.
I sometimes remind people, “CFO, the F is for financial,” and that’s good enough for me to see if they have kids or watch Sesame Street. That’s from Cookie Monster, if that’s not obvious. Sometimes people are like, “What?” Finance and accounting skills will always be a big part of it. Many CFOs I talk to say, “I have a great chief accounting officer, a great controller. I couldn’t do my job if I didn’t.” It’s such a great skillset to have.
I completely agree.
I want to ask now, one of the things I wanted to do with this show is change the perception the world has of CFOs. I like to ask people, do you have a hidden talent, an interesting hobby, or is there a fun fact about you that you can share with our readers?
I think as a CFO, I want to make sure that we have fun. We spend a lot of time at work and together, so we want to make sure we have fun. If you asked if there’s an interesting fact that people don’t know, that would be when I was younger and living in New York, I had the opportunity to do several commercials as a kid. I was the little girl in pigtails with the Stove Top Stuffing, stuffing over potatoes. That was something I experienced when I was about 5 or 6.
I’m going to go on YouTube and look up Stove Top classic commercials and see if I can pick you out.
You might be able to find it.
That’s definitely one of the most fun facts I’ve heard. I also like to ask about work-life balance, and your situation’s interesting because you’re the mother of five children. I also want to tie it back to an IPO because, while I’ve never done one, I’ve been a controller, and I saw the toll it takes on the leadership team. How’d you manage those worlds? You can’t say that it doesn’t impact your family because it does.
It certainly does. You mentioned I have five kids, and I’m very blessed to have them. Four are almost completely grown and out of the house, one is starting high school. During the IPO process, I guess you get so into it, you don’t realize how much it’s pulling on you and the time it’s requiring. My experience was very positive, so I enjoyed every bit of it.
You can’t talk about it because it’s confidential. Your family doesn’t necessarily know what’s going on. When you talk about work-life balance, one of the things I try to do is always be present wherever I am. When I’m at work, I want to be present and fully engaged with work. When I’m home, I want to be present and fully engaged at home. Sometimes, I’m more successful at that than others.
When you tie it back to the IPO, I guess I reflect on this. I didn’t realize how impactful it was to my youngest daughter and the whole experience itself. She was interviewing for high schools, and my husband and I had the benefit of sitting in on one of the interviews. It’s interesting to watch your kids in an interview setting. You always want to be there for them but then you get so proud of how they’re able to support themselves on their own. They don’t really need you anymore.
The interviewer asked my daughter what her most memorable experience with her family was. I thought she’d talk about one of our ski trips or something like that. I was completely floored by her response. She responded and said, “The most memorable experience for me was standing on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and watching my mom ring the bell when her company, CAVA, went public. I was so proud I got to experience that with my family and really see what my mom was able to do with all the time she’s been spending.” I still get a little sensitive about it when I talk about it, but I had no idea how impactful it was for her to comprehend or understand and how proud I felt that she got that out of that experience.
We started off with me asking about mentors, and you mentioned your mom. It suddenly strikes me that you’re probably a really good mentor for your children as well. Good for you. That’s so cool. Anyway, that’s a wonderful story. I want to ask you for advice for the next generation of CFOs. You’ve learned a lot. You’ve worked with some great executives. What should the next generation of leaders be focusing on for their careers?
My quick response is, go with your gut. Many times in my career, things have come up and I was like, “I wish I had pushed on that a little bit more,” because something about it just wasn’t going the way I thought or should be going differently, and so go with your gut. More broadly, as I think about the next generation, and you and I both talked about this, having worked for 30 years or more, what I get the most sensitive and thoughtful about is wanting our younger generation to know you are enough. You are enough. Who you are, what you are, and what you want to do, all this pressure, whether it’s from social media or whatever else that’s out there, just remember that you are enough. You’re amazing just as you are. Remember that and you’ll succeed in whatever it is you want.
Tricia, I appreciate you making the time to be on this. I know our readers are absolutely going to love this. Your personal and work experiences are fantastic. After the thank you, and I’m very grateful, I just like to give you the final word.
If you haven’t had a chance to have CAVA, please go and enjoy it. It’s amazing. I would love for you to be part of our incredible experience.
