[piano intro] - Hello, I'm Nido Qubein.

Welcome to "Side by Side".

My guest today is one of North Carolina's most influential leaders in the restaurant and hospitality industry.

She leads a family-owned company, and has helped it become a regional powerhouse.

"USA Today" says, "This company serves the best fast-food breakfast in the nation."

In doing so, she made sure to keep intact the company's at-home feel, and it attracted customers ever since 1966.

Today we'll meet Kathie Niven, the CEO and president of Biscuitville.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Side by Side with Nido Qubein" is made possible by.

- [Representative] We started small, just 30 people in a small town in Wisconsin.

75 years later, we employ more Americans than any other furniture brand.

But none of that would've been possible without you.

Ashley, this is home.

- [Representative] For 60 years, The Budd Group has been a company of excellence, providing facility services to customers, opportunities for employees and support to our communities.

The Budd Group, great people, smart service.

- [Representative] Coca-Cola Consolidated is honored to make and serve 300 brands and flavors, locally.

[upbeat music] Thanks to our teammates.

We are Coca-Cola Consolidated, your local bottler.

[upbeat music] - Kathie, welcome to "Side by Side".

I gotta tell you, I often wonder what makes a Biscuitville biscuit so good?

- I think it's a lot of things.

I think it starts with the fact that it's a family recipe.

So when Maurice Jennings, our founder, started the company, it was a recipe that was personal for him, right?

And then I think the other piece of being family owned is, I think they feel like that biscuit and how that quality comes across to the consumer is personal for the family, and they take great pride in it.

So I think that's a big piece of it.

The other important ingredient is that we use the same three ingredients that we always have.

And that's a locally owned company here in North Carolina that provides our flour, which is made out of North Carolina winter wheat.

- 100% comes from that company?

- Yes, that's right.

- Is that not dangerous?

- We have backups, we have backups.

The second is we use shortening, and the third is our buttermilk, that is also from this area.

So the ingredients matter a lot.

And then I'd say the last thing is, as most people know that have been to a Biscuitville, we make our biscuits in front of a big basically floor-to-ceiling window so that people can watch us make it.

So the integrity of how we make it is really truly done the old-fashioned way.

- You're in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia.

Why aren't you all over the country?

It's a good product.

- I think the brand can certainly do that, it has a capacity and the appeal.

I think the family has always been committed to making sure that the culture of the company is in each one of the restaurants, and that just takes time to build.

And I think it's more about making sure that we go slowly enough to make sure that our processes are appropriate, the culture is appropriate, it meets the standards of the company.

- So Biscuitville is 100% family owned, it's not a franchise, a license-based business?

- That's correct, every restaurant is owned by the family and run by an operator who works directly.

- Yes, and how many people does it take to run one of the restaurants?

- It depends on the volume of the restaurant, but on average, I'd say about 35 people are employed.

We have restaurants with as many as, I'd say, 50, 55.

- Every restaurant is open the same hours?

- Essentially, five to two.

- From five in the morning 'til two in the afternoon?

- [Kathie] That's right.

- And obviously you've done extensive research to find out that's when the traffic comes in, and so on.

Do you deliver?

- Not yet.

- I interviewed on this show the CEO of Domino's Pizza.

We talked about how they began with that 30-minute promise, and then they changed things.

But a lot of families now are used to deliver, deliver, deliver, right?

They're businesses.

Kathie, tell me about your own background.

You've had an extensive background in the business, in the sector, I should say.

Where did you start and what was your first job?

- As soon as I graduated from college, I had spent the last four or five years really preparing for law school.

So I came out of college doing an intern with the district attorney in Graham, North Carolina.

And on the side, a friend of mine had just purchased a defunct Arby's in Graham.

And so she had asked if I'd come help her on the weekends, and I thought, "Well, I have a communication minor, but I don't know how much I can help you."

And she didn't know very much, I didn't know very much about the industry, which was sort of the magic.

Everything was possible for us.

So my father, he had been encouraging me to look outside of the legal industry and thought there might be a better fit for me.

So with a little bit of that and encouragement from Nancy Allison was her name, I ended up staying for an extra year.

And then before I knew it, it was seven years.

And we built those two restaurants to $1.5 million restaurants, which in Arby's is really a high-value unit.

So.

- Give us a range, I'm guessing now, but I suspect that Biscuitville does million and a half to $2 million a store in gross revenue a year, would that be accurate?

- Yeah, our average is about two million.

- Two million?

- And we have a few that are doing over three million.

- Is there a standard for that kind of business to say, "You gotta make X dollars in revenue to support that operation?"

- No, there's not, I mean, you have.

- There's no sector standard?

- There's really not, there are a lot of the top 10 that are probably at a million dollars a year average.

And you just have to sort of build to that.

So your labor model and your facility investments, really depending on that.

- So I suspect that one of your biggest areas of focus is people.

- Definitely.

- Your business is dependent on, yes, the recipe, yes, the flour, yes, but people, people make it or break it, people who know how to make the product, but people who know how to deliver the product.

What is it that you do to ensure that, A, you attract the right people, train them, educate 'em, retain them?

- I think one of the most important things that the brand has focused on since 2014 when we did the full rebranding project, a big component of that is how do we attract the talent that get us where we think we can go?

And I think most of the people that are coming to Biscuitville find that it's a place where we have agreed and spent years on this, we have agreed on our values, and that came from the inside, not from top down.

And in addition to the values, which we really looked at that as, who would you wanna work beside?

What traits do they have?

We added something recently in the last five years called cultural norms, and they keep moving and morphing, and those are just specific ways in which we treat each other.

And so the agreement is, you can come from any background, you can be anybody, and as long as we can agree on these basic norms, you're gonna love it here.

- I see.

- And if you're not willing to do that, you're not gonna stay very long.

And we preach that from day one.

I travel, in every new unit, I spend time with the folks who are coming in.

- [Nido] You do it personally?

- Personally, I've only missed one.

- [Nido] Wow.

- Where we go through each one of the norms and basically really earnestly let people know that if you're not interested in abiding by these norms that the company has set up, as a people, you're just not gonna have a good time here.

And that works.

- Give us an example of a couple of those norms.

- Treating people with respect is a big one.

I mean, that's an obvious one, but one of the norms that takes people by surprise, that they turn out loving is the concept of it's the communicator's role to communicate.

So I can't just yell something across the restaurant at you, and then when you don't do it, it's your fault.

It's my fault.

So making people accountable for getting what they need by asking the right way and effectively is a really surprising norm that came up from the people in the organization that has really made an impact.

And we have 19 of them.

And so they're very similar to that sort of sentiment.

- I mean, Kathie, you make it sound easy, but it's a very difficult thing to do, to run a business like you're running, where you have to attract, forgive me if I misstate it, but a certain level of employee who is going to make a certain level of income, by definition, otherwise the formula doesn't work, the business formula would not work, and then expect them to be magically wonderful and abide by all these cultural norms and do it with every customer every day, regardless of what's happening in the kitchen, regardless of what happened in their own life.

That's a very difficult thing to pull off.

- I think that's the magic sauce though, that is the secret ingredient.

I was in Columbia, we're opening a restaurant next week, and I was with that team last Thursday.

And what is amazing when you're actually with the folks who work for the company, especially your individual contributors that are a cook or they're working the front line, is you actually have a room full of incredible talent who tend to get defined by their wages.

And you recognize that almost everybody in that room, if given an opportunity, has the opportunity to go as far as they wanna go.

So it's kind of understanding why they're there and what motivates them.

- You mean they can become a manager?

- Oh, absolutely.

- Can become an operator, et cetera?

- Absolutely.

And when I have my training session, one of the things I really focus on is, "Why are you here?

Are you here because it's easy and you can walk away from it and have no worries?

Or are you looking for a career?

Are you looking to be developed to go somewhere else?"

But just having that conversation with them makes a huge impact.

And you'll find that there is a lot of ambition and a lot of talent that doesn't get tapped because sometimes, to your point, sometimes there's just this element of disregard because they've chosen a profession, which is interesting because a lot of other people making the same wage aren't treated that way.

So it's also a paradigm we try to dispel at the company.

- I think it has a lot to do with your own family oriented, I think that resonates with people, too, the whole notion versus being a large corporate entity based heaven knows where.

Kathie, you're competing with a lot of other food I call 'em chains, whatever you want to call 'em, businesses.

I mean, some of them have 15,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 units out there.

It's not like Biscuitville is in a world by itself.

Down the street from you on the left, down the street from you on the right, there are other people trying to take your customer, trying to take your employee, your price points, I suspect, are to some degree influenced by the market conditions.

And here we just came out of COVID and all that, and people seem to have reoriented the way they wanna work, where they wanna work, how hard they wanna work.

You make it sound doable and relatively easy, but I think you're doing some other things that are making you successful.

- I think, going back to being in Columbia last week, people love to be part of something great, they wanna be part of something important.

And I think one of the things that Biscuitville is able to offer is the fact that, one, there's so much accessibility.

So there's a lot of trust in that.

They can pick up the phone, they can call anybody.

- You mean on the job?

- Oh, absolutely.

- I see.

- I mean, the corporate office is accessible, I'm accessible.

- Oh, I see, I see what you mean.

- But so I think that makes people recognize that they're working for real people.

- I see, I see.

- Who care about them.

I think the second piece is, they all buy into the concept of locally sourced ingredients.

And that's special, and that's something that they don't.

- That gives 'em pride.

- It gives them a lot of pride.

And we talk a lot about the families who provide the food for us, and how grateful we are for those families and how they prepare their food and how they take care of the environment in the communities that we live in.

And so I think when you can genuinely build factors into your business that people can relate to and they care about, they become part of that plan, which is another big piece for us, is we really try to include our entire community in just about whatever we do, by sending out surveys and skip-level interviews, which I try to do every year, so they feel heard as well.

And I think all those little things really add up and make a difference.

- Are you insulted or are you okay when people say you're in the fast-food business?

- I think it's the category we're in, but I will say that.

- [Nido] You accept it.

- We accept that.

When we were rebranding in 2014, one of the things that we do internally is we've sort of rebranded the category to what we call quick casual.

And so when we are training, when we're talking to new employees, one of the things that we really focus on is, if you were to take casual dining, so your Paneras, your sit-down, sort of mid-tier restaurant level, we consider ourselves that type of quality and brand with a drive-through.

And so we really try to dispel this paradigm that the category of fast food means inherently that there's some quality issues or there's shortcuts being made.

And I think the company and the family have done a really great job of offering true, locally sourced, hand-cooked, griddle-cooked, all of our sauces are made in-house, that you can do all of that and still serve in an environment with speed.

- You say the sausage is made in-house, what does that mean?

It comes in large?

- We make Italian dressing from scratch, right.

Buttermilk.

- Oh, sauces, sauces.

- Sauces, right?

- I thought you said, "Sausages."

- Oh, well, that would be.

- You got my attention there.

- Really interesting.

[laughing] - I wanted to know more.

So Kathie, there's a joke that we, the consumers of the country, use, we say, "There's nothing fast about fast food," right?

You go and you stand in line forever.

How do you manage that piece of it?

- When COVID hit, I think that's when we really recognized that speed, we'd always been a speed company, I mean, it's important, it's breakfast, right?

Everybody's late, nobody leaves home an hour early for work, right?

So we're always dealing with consumers who are in a hurry, and they have very high expectations, and being late is a problem.

So that's a condition of being in the breakfast business that we take very seriously, we want to be convenient and we want to get people there on time.

So investments like double drive-through.

So every restaurant we build now, and I would say well over 60% of 'em, will be double drive-through, which has helped a lot.

But it's just a big focus for us, and we spend a lot of time making sure, how do you combine a hand-cooked, griddle-cooked egg that is cracked on a griddle, and get it out the door in 90 seconds, and make it the way you want it?

And there's a real process and formula there that works.

- Is there a standard that says, "From the moment the car comes into the driveway or the drive-through area, 'til the moment they leave, it's gotta be under X minutes."

Is there such a standard?

- 90 seconds is the standard.

- What is it?

- 90 seconds.

- [Nido] 90 seconds.

- Now, if you're behind 10 cars, obviously, it's gonna be a little bit different, it's based on how many cars, but.

- How does the kitchen manage that?

How do you predict?

There's 10 cars back there, every person wants their biscuit differently and they have their own requirements, it just fascinates me how that system can keep up with all these demands.

- It's a lot of talent, it goes back to sort of our earlier conversation, it takes a lot of talent to do what a lot of the folks in the kitchen are doing.

And if I took people from the street and said, "Here, wrap for an hour at Biscuitville during a $1,000 hour," it takes a lot of talent.

And I'll also say that it doesn't matter how many systems or processes you have in place, those are never gonna trump having a group of people who care about what's happening.

So when the group cares about how fast it is, when they care about the quality, when they care about what they're doing, it trumps the process and takes process into a completely different level.

And I think that's where we have a competitive advantage.

- Does the name Paula Marshall mean anything to you?

- No.

- She's the owner and CEO of Bama Foods in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and a good friend of mine, and answered this question, and I wanna ask you the same question.

She's kinda like you, she came up, she earned the right to move up.

You started helping your friend in Arby's on a weekend, and eventually became president in 2018 of Biscuitville.

2021, you became CEO.

Clearly you're doing the right things, you're a very impressive person, you speak with clarity and persuasion.

What is it about you that made you successful?

- I think I was a sponge, first of all.

I'm a continual learner.

And I look for that in the folks that run Biscuitville.

We're always looking for somebody who recognizes they can keep being better at what they do and their craft.

And I think the other piece is, I care deeply about the products I create.

And this really came from my mom and dad and just the family values of, "Leave it better than you found it."

And I think that's really ingrained and matters, 'cause people want to see that.

But I think the other piece that I encourage a lot of particularly the newer, younger folks at Biscuitville is, "Raise your hand, don't be afraid to raise your hand.

And it's okay to fail, people are okay, but what we wanna see is, we want you to raise your hand."

And I think that I prepared enough and was confident enough, and I was not afraid of failure as much as some people are.

So I think I was willing to raise my hand.

- So what would you say?

Our country's doing better and better in terms of more females occupying space in the executive suite.

And whether it's in financials, whether it's in food.

What would be your advice to young women who aspire to do well in a world that's ever-changing, global in nature, more competitive every day?

What would be the two or three things you would say to them?

- I neglected to say it earlier with my career, but having a great mentor, or group of mentors, and people you really aspire to emulate, or be like.

Oh my God, think that has just been such a fundamental part of my journey is finding the right people.

- And for you, was it a female, or male, or both?

- It was really mixed, it was really mixed.

And I appreciate that they gave up and sacrificed time to work with me, and I try to do that and pass that along.

But I'd say the first one is, you really have to find people that you trust, who have your best interest at heart is a big one.

And then I think the second one is, you've gotta also find the right fit.

I see a lot of potential in people, and they're in the wrong place, working for the wrong people, and their superpowers are just not able to be used properly.

So I think finding that right place is also really important.

- Yeah, passion is sort of a byproduct of being in the right place, doing the work that's important, making sure that you can create an impact.

Now, you're an executive in the Tar Heel state, your business is based in North Carolina, you buy from suppliers in North Carolina.

I suspect you have more restaurants in North Carolina than in Virginia or South Carolina.

When you look at the terrain in our state and you look at new businesses coming from everywhere to North Carolina, great climate, good regulation, welcoming business, all the things that make it, great place to raise a family, good life quality, all the rest.

What is it that makes you proud of our North Carolina situation we're in, in business I'm talking about, and what is it that makes you hopeful about the future?

- Well, you actually pointed it out, I think one of the most important things for being successful in the state, and I think it makes the state successful, is having a pro-work, pro-business state, that doesn't give unfair advantages to companies, but that supports the fact that companies employ our people.

They create the revenue that create the systems that make it so, so enjoyable to be in North Carolina.

So I would say the biggest thing for us is, when you're in a state that is pro business and the regulations make sense, but they don't cripple small businesses, it's becoming harder and harder to be a successful small business.

And I think that is the heartbeat of any really successful community.

So I think that is the most important thing.

- As we attract more businesses to North Carolina, and as you know, there are some significant moves in economic development in North Carolina.

Big companies coming to the state, employing tons of people.

In some cases, potentially 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people.

On the one hand, that's good for you, it creates a bigger customer base that can afford your product, and so on.

On the other hand, it competes with the human resource part of it.

- It's sort of a dual-edged sword for us, and not just us, but anybody that's operating currently in the state, it is exciting just to have the growth, right?

But there are some resource limitations and workforce limitations that we're gonna have to figure out how to keep up with that.

And for us, being an hourly wage at the restaurant level predominantly, it's also exciting to see opportunities for some of those folks to have these opportunities to move up in other industries.

But I think staffing being what it is today in our segment, it is gonna put a strain on that.

So it's just gonna, once again, show that the folks who are treating their people right and doing the right thing are gonna continue to win.

So it's a great time [laughing] for people who are not doing that to get their act together.

- To shape up.

[laughing] Yeah.

- Absolutely.

Competition is sometimes really positive.

- Yeah, so what's next for Kathie Nivan?

I mean, and you're the CEO of an important business.

Do you get your biscuits free, by the way?

- I don't.

- [Nido] You pay for them?

- I do.

- You pay full price?

- Well, we get a 10% discount.

- 10% discount.

[laughing] [Kathie laughing] So you save about 22 bucks a year, is that what it is?

[laughing] - That's right.

- Or something like that.

- That's right.

- What is it that you aspire to become?

- It's interesting because we were all sharing our goals at a retreat two weeks ago, and I've sort of named mind CEO 3.0, which is, what is it gonna take in my development, what changes do I need to make to be the leader that the company needs now, right?

We've got an amazing leadership team, they could take it from here, so what value do I bring now?

And I think part of that is spending more time doing what I did last week in Columbia, is really just getting out there and building that culture, but also creating opportunities for some of the folks who work for us who don't have it right now.

- And being in the front line and managing by walking around and being aware of your environment and the distinction that you create.

- That's right.

- Well, Kathie, you're a fascinating person.

Thank you for being with me on "Side by Side".

- Thank you.

- I will continue to pay full price for your product.

- Thank you.

[laughing] - I wouldn't want it any other way.

- We'll give you a discount, by the way.

- And I'm gonna watch that 90 second to see if I get in there 90 seconds, or 120.

- Count it, absolutely.

- You'll hear from me if it's 120 seconds.

- They're very proud of it, so I look forward to hearing it.

- Okay, thank you, Kathie.

- Thank you.

[upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] - [Announcer] Funding for "Side by Side with Nido Qubein" is made possible by.

- [Representative] We started small, just 30 people in a small town in Wisconsin.

75 years later, we employ more Americans than any other furniture brand.

But none of that would've been possible without you.

Ashley, this is home.

- [Representative] For 60 years, The Budd Group has been a company of excellence, providing facility services to customers, opportunities for employees and support to our communities.

The Budd Group, great people, smart service.

- [Representative] Coca-Cola Consolidated is honored to make and serve 300 brands and flavors, locally.

[upbeat music] Thanks to our teammates.

We are Coca-Cola Consolidated, your local bottler.