Driven 4word
Driven 4word
'I'm proudest of the opportunity to live out servant leadership.' - Cheryl Bachelder: Part 1
The influential leader we will learn from this month is Cheryl Bachelder. Cheryl built a highly successful career with companies like LifeSavers, Domino’s, and Popeyes, but a career in business was not what she originally envisioned for herself when she started college. In this episode, Cheryl and I talk through successes that she considers are defining to who she became as a professional Christian woman and who she is today.
This episode is sponsored by Ronald Blue Trust. Ronald Blue Trust is honored to serve women from all walks of life, professionals, mothers, daughters, retirees, widows, and students across the nation providing biblically based wisdom for their finances. Their advisors are experts in many areas of financial planning and investments, and offer useful resources to guide you in gaining clarity and confidence, helping you leave a lasting legacy. Learn more@ronblue.com. This is Driven Forward Influential Leaders powered by God's will, hosted by me. Jordan Johnstone. The influential leader we will learn from this month is Cheryl Batchelder. Cheryl built a highly successful career with companies like Lifesavers Dominoes and Popeyes, but a career in business was not what she originally envisioned for herself when she started college. In this episode, Cheryl and I talked through successes that she considers our defining to who she became as a professional Christian woman and who she is today. Well, thank you again for being here today. Um, and I would love to start off with my favorite question,<laugh>, to start off with, who is Cheryl Batchelder?
Speaker 2:Wow. Who is Cheryl Batchelder? Um, you know, the conventional hour, uh, answer to that question is always like name, title, serial number kind of thing. Um, yeah,<laugh>. But I guess the way I would answer that question is, uh, I am a Christ follower, um, married 41 years, my husband Chris, and we've raised three daughters, two of, but are now married. We have five gorgeous grandsons. So I would define myself as, you know, why mother, grandma, um, as well as a business executive, uh, in our business community. Uh, multidimensional complicated<laugh> is how I would describe myself.
Speaker 1:Oh, well, over the next couple of episodes, we will definitely get into that a little bit more, but what we're also gonna be discussing are setbacks and successes that you have had, have had. So just to kind of begin that whole conversation, I would love to have you define what a success and a setback are for you personally.
Speaker 2:For me, a success is a rewarding outcome for the people involved in the endeavor. Um, and that could be at home as parents, and it could be in the workplace on a team project, or it could be the turnaround of a major enterprise. Um, but for me it, it's that rewarding feeling that, uh, people and enterprises were well served by the actions you took.
Speaker 1:And then how about a setback? What would that be? Defined as?
Speaker 2:Setbacks are, I think, easier for me because for, for me, they've all fallen in the category of trials and tribulations you can learn from. Um, as a believer, I think transformation is a lifelong journey. Um, I'm always learning and growing, and usually from situations I'd rather not be here. Um, so those would be the setbacks that I think enrich us in our understanding of, uh, what god's up to and the role he has for us in his kingdom.
Speaker 1:Hmm. I love that answer. So today what we're gonna talk about is, uh, what you've identified as some of the most important successes in your life. So the first that I'd like to have us have you talk us through is when you graduated from Indiana University, Kelly School of Business, and you accepted your first real job. So walk us through what that experience was like.
Speaker 2:Well, I was very young. I graduated from college with a bachelor's and a master's degree at the age of 21. I had gone through a combined bachelor MBA program, is how I did that in four years. So I was truly very young, very inexperienced in work, uh, very deeply experienced in school. Um, and so it was an exciting time come out of that, uh, Kelly school, uh, where I had learned a great deal, uh, from my faculty and colleagues, uh, but was now stepping into the real world with Proctor and Gamble. I would tell you at the time, I didn't realize the importance of that first success. Um, because Procter and Gamble really set in motion my career and set in motion career relationships that influenced me for years to come. Um, it put skills in place that I very much needed post mba. Um, so it was a incredibly important starting point, uh, for my 40 year career that followed. Um, and I look back on it with, uh, very, very positive feelings. You know, I interviewed like everybody did coming out of business school hoping for that, you know, first great job that would set my career in motion. I was very blessed to go to Procter and Gamble. It was a training company. They invested a lot in me. I happened to meet my husband there too, which was an extra bonus. Um, but it was, it was a very important beginning. And I think as we look back over our lives, uh, we often see a couple of places that were way more important in our lifetime than we knew at the time. And that was wonderful for me.
Speaker 1:Aw. Well, and then the next success that you identified was your first major impact on a company, uh, which was when you proposed three new product innovations for Life Savers. Uh, so that sounds very exciting. So what did that look like?
Speaker 2:It was fun. You know, it was the first big opportunity I had to truly create a new business for a corporation. I was asked to map out a new product plan, leveraging the trademark lifesavers. Um, I came up through research and teamwork with three ideas. The first one was called Lifesavers Fruit Juicers. It was a regular lifesaver hard candy with 10% fruit juice, which was very trendy at the time. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. The second idea was, uh, lifesavers holes, which we thought, you know, there always had been a hole in a lifesaver. Maybe we should sell the hole, but of course, we didn't make the hole. So we had to make them and package them and create an identity around that, which we did. And then the third one was Lifesavers gummy Savers, which was the first United States entry into the gummy, uh, candy. Uh, which at that time was only kind of hard fruit gummies that came, those little bears outta Germany. So we created a really tender, juicy life savers flavor, uh, profile product. And of the three that was the most successful, uh, life savers companies became a hundred million business right out of the gate and still exists today as a great representative of the lifesavers paid money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was gonna say, that's my favorite<laugh> mine too, so that's pretty cool. Yeah, that's pretty cool that now I know who created it. Well, another success then that you also shared was when you first got into the world of franchising, which ends up being quite a big part of your story. Um, and this was via a position with Dominoes. So what about your time there was significant to your career trajectory?
Speaker 2:Well, you're right, this was a bit of a turning point, mid-career for me. I had spent the first 15 years of my career in what's called package goods marketing. That's basically marketing things that are sold in grocery stores, drug stores, mass merchants. Um, and I had spent a lot of time in the food sector, uh, handy gum, snacks, those kinds of things mm-hmm.<affirmative>. Um, so when I joined, uh, Domino's Pizza, it was a totally new kind of business. It was franchising a pizza chain, um, and it was retail, right? It was a business where you call and order a pizza and it's delivered to your home. You don't go to a store to get it. Um, and so it was kind of an all new thing for me. I was so excited to be working for the actual founder of the firm. Tom Monahan still was running the firm when I joined, which I thought was an exciting opportunity to learn, um, about a business from its founder. And it was, uh, Tom was also a very devout Catholic Christian, uh, which I admired, and I was excited. He was the first, um, known Christian I had worked for in business. And I was excited to see what it would look like to put your faith beliefs into action in the workplace. And then what really captured me about this business was the franchisee themselves. Um, they're all first time entrepreneurs into a retail business concept. They start with one pizza store, um, and build their career and business out of that experience. And so it was so, um, new and exciting to come alongside, um, family businesses and try to figure out how to provide them with good tools, good marketing plans, good products that would build their business and help them thrive. Many of them were first generation business people. Many of them are immigrants to our country. And, uh, I got really excited about being part of that endeavor. In fact, I spent the rest of my career in food franchising as a
Speaker 1:Result. Well, possibly the biggest career success that you've had, uh, was your time as CEO of Popeye's and those 10 years of transformative work that you did there. What I love though, when you sent me these highlights was that you specifically said that the best part of this time at Popeye's for you was servant leadership. So can you share more about that?
Speaker 2:Well, I would say in addition to being a, uh, food retail executive, my career was characterized by a fascination with what is good leadership. And from a very early stage, I was constantly reading about leadership from academics, from consultants, book writers, authors, uh, trying to understand. And I came across about mid-career, I was kind of disillusioned with some of the leadership I'd seen and said, you know, what would good look like? And I came across this idea of servant leadership, uh, kind of the theory of it, which Robert Greenleaf talked about, um, a lot early in my career. He was just another business person like me, trying to articulate what a good leadership approach might look like. And he said, Those who, uh, serve the people as the filter for decision making, uh, not only create the best results, but they create the best environment for people to do good work. I really bought into that. That made a whole lot of sense to me. I read other authors like Jim Collins from Good to Great, that talked about humility in leadership, uh, being, having an ambition for the enterprise, not for yourself. I thought that was compelling. I was a huge fan of Steven Covey who was writing about, you know, win-win decisions, um, and listening skills and some of the traits of good leadership. And so these were formative years. Um, eventually though I looked around and said, I don't see many examples of this kinda, I ne, you know, as I acknowledged earlier, I never really worked for faith-based leaders. I never really worked for values-based leaders. And I certainly had never worked for anybody who, uh, called themselves a, uh, servant leadership or a mindset of service leader. Um, so by the time I reached the Popeye's opportunity, which was truly, um, a fabulous capstone career experience, uh, very few people get to be CEO of a public company for nearly 10 years. It was exciting, rewarding, um, experience. But the thing that I'm proudest of is that we used that opportunity to live out the principles of servant leadership in the workplace, and it did create a place where people thrive and perform their best work. So we're publicly known for an incredibly successful turnaround of the Popeyes company, where the stock price went from$11 to 79. But what I was passionate about was getting the story out of how we accomplished those results through servant leadership. And that's why I wrote a book about it called Dare to Serve. I wanted to capture the lessons we learned and share them with others that hope to lead in that passion in the future. And so that was the fun of the Popeye's experience.
Speaker 1:<laugh>, the last success that you shared with me was how your family came to be. So how did adopting your daughter impact you as a parent and make this chapter the most satisfying success of your life?
Speaker 2:Well, I think when we are asked about success, particularly those of us in the marketplace, uh, we should think about the whole person in the whole life. Uh, because I always wanted to be married and have a family as part of my, uh, anticipated life plan from the very beginning. Um, and I would not be able to call any aspect of my life rewarding or successful had I not done. So, uh, your family is, uh, the foundation really of all those other things that you experience in life. And so, um, getting married was a very important decision. Deciding to have children and raise them, uh, in our faith was a very important part of our lives. And so we had, uh, two daughters that were, uh, natural born daughters, uh, Tracy, our oldest, and Katie our second. Um, and enjoyed raising them and seeing them develop into beautiful young adults, uh, with great giftedness and now their own beautiful families. Our third daughter we adopted kind of un unexpectedly. Um, she was adopted first by another family, and uh, when that did not work out, we brought her into our family. Uh, she was, uh, you know, our third girl, we thought more fingernail polish and more fun, um,<laugh>. And, uh, she has been a delight in our life. Uh, but I think the most rewarding part of it, um, you know, when you adopt a child, I think you go into it hoping to offer her something. I think what I rejoice in is what we learned from the experience of adoption because, um, you know, adoption of a teen girl is difficult. You know, she's in her identity formation. Uh, she's coming from a very challenging childhood. Uh, she didn't know what she wanted out of adoption in the family. And so there were some challenging years for her and for us mm-hmm.<affirmative>. But what I, uh, would call the success is that today she's a lovely young woman, uh, working, uh, in the city of Atlanta as a medical assistant, um, maturing and growing, um, and coming to a nu her own understanding of life and work and faith. Um, and we're just so proud that we could be a part of that, um, for lives. So it has enriched our family and enriched our lives to be part of her life.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm.<affirmative>, why do you think God allows us to have and experience success in our lives? Like what do you think it's purposes? Mm.
Speaker 2:Wow. That's a really good complicated question. So<laugh>, I'll give you my best shorthand from my response to that, which is I think I have, uh, come to believe and come to understand that the purpose of our lives is not our purpose or about us, but the purpose of our lives is in fact figuring out what God's up to and how we join him there. And so for me, success in the realm of, uh, my purpose is does it align with God's purpose? And have I done work that brings honor and glory to him more than it does to my myself? Um, and for me, I came to understand my work purpose as kind of resurrecting servant leadership, which really is the leadership, teaching and philosophy and actions of Jesus Christ. Um, and so if I could be evidence of that, if I could role model that, if I could teach it as, um, a platform for leadership in the marketplace, I, in some small, very small way, but in some small way was joining God at work, God, when he created work said it was good. Uh, it was only our nature that messed it up and created, you know, poor workplaces or toxic workplaces, whatever your word for it is. So if I could be one person working on, uh, God's team to make work a better place where people thrive and become, uh, close to him and use their gifts, uh, and do work that can be held up as, as glorifying to him, I would be really excited about that. If that's, that's how I think of my career of working for God.
Speaker 1:Next time I'm driven forward, Cheryl and I dive into the setback she's encountered in her career and life and how she has learned to acknowledge and learn from each one. If you enjoyed this podcast, please take a moment to subscribe and leave us a review to let us know what you think to learn more about forward. You can visit forward women.org. That's the number four w o r d w o m e n.org. Thanks for listening.