YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Behring

lines on the record: 96
first: 2024-12-30
most recent: 2024-12-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, something that I've come to appreciate at the stage of my career I'm at now is to focus your time on the things that make the most difference. Because the amount of noise In your day to day, be it on your personal life at times, be it at work, is high.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone once told me work really hard to put yourself in a position to get lucky. There's a little bit of luck involved in everything, but you up your odds, you up your chances through your controllable lever of hard work.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you get into a new situation or a new business, Try to find good common sense things to do and don't make huge business decisions about strategic things before you take the time to understand the business. Well, I think to an extent we apply that at Burger King and I think it's something that really prevents big mistakes. And usually by focusing on the common sense, things are opportunities to be harvested while you're learning about the business.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, my three co-founders, I mean, had a huge impact in my life as well. They found me in this MBA program, our alma mater, and took big bets on me. One of them, particularly, this guy took huge bats on me on a railroad and really believed in it and came a close personal friend. And Marcel, Georgia, they really took huge bets here when they came to build through G Capital. I'm forever grateful for that.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say one of the things that probably bothers me is if people aren't working at 110% or giving something their all. We never really cared if we're the smartest people, but always at least wanted people who are working at 100% and giving the project their everything. Eating short of that, that always bothered me.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I recently got quite involved with philanthropy, its recent very few people know about it. Our foundation has only three years. My wife's very involved with me. We were lucky to recruit this gentleman. There was an MBA at Stanford, went down to Brazil. It's basically education for young people and mostly digital education meaning programming, computer engineering, all the way from basic programming to college to master's to PhD programs have about 100 scholars now small, but we have big dreams for it. And it's a lot of fun. Hopefully in time you'll become better known.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love spear fishing, which is some combination of fishing and free diving and probably contrary to what we do here, it's probably the most inefficient way of fishing. But it's a lot of fun. You go to nice places. So I spend a lot of time doing that.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me really is creating 3G capital is probably the most important thing I've been able to get involved in in my career. And I would love this to perpetuate the firm. And I think that my co-founders have been a great inspiration that way their whole lives and careers in giving people opportunity, allowing them to chart their own path, allowing them to have the results and benefits and the wealth creation associated with creating their own path. And I would love that to continue here at 3G Capital.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not a conventional investment firm. My favorite aspect really centers around the people. I had this opportunity to go initially as CFO and then became CEO and ran the company both from the financial side and CEO side for nearly a decade. My favorite part of the whole process was getting to recruit, develop, train some incredibly talented special people who are now today running the organization. It's extremely fulfilling the people cycle from higher to train to grow to lead to be able to be part of this and part of someone else's success. It's extremely fulfilling. And so for me, that's been far and away, no close second, the most fun part of the job.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything that has happened that has enabled us 28 times return on our notion of capital in this time frame and how much more we expect to achieve with this business, so much of it has to do also with having entered a high quality, great business. There is no substitute for that. Particularly if you're going to hold it for a long, long multi-decade period, it needs to be a good business. I don't know that we are one of these people like a Steve Jobs or someone that's really, really smart and a genius that will be able to convert are so, so we're a bad business into a great business. So we need to find great businesses. And sometimes the greatness will be obfuscated by everything that's going on short term and the noise associated with this thing's going on short term. The fact that the business is a great business is no small part of what happened here.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it was my first deal. It was my first time running a company. And I'll apologize in advance for my lesson not seeming overly insightful. But frankly, it was just the importance of having a great team, which again, as the twenty nine year old who was doing the analysis on the deal after we bought the business and Alex came to me and said, we need to assemble the team, just understanding the overall importance on having A++ people involved in the organization who are fully committed to making it a world-class success until you're part of it. I didn't fully appreciate how important it was to have an incredibly talented team running the business.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incidentally, that's one of the things that's so great about this fully franchised quick service restaurant businesses, which is they're really not cyclical at all. Meaning on downturns, people trade down. Look at what happened to the EBEDA of McDonald's or Burger King or Domino's or all these brands in the great financial crisis. And the answer is not much. In most cases, it grows. So they are very resilient in that way, which is a very positive trait of this kind of business.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A way to answer that is what industries would we not want to look at? We want to own a fundamentally good but somewhat reasonably easy to understand business. And so you could think about what that knocks out. And ideally, a business that has a good moat, a long operating history, it's not likely to be disrupted or disintermediated anytime remotely soon. And ideally, businesses that aren't overly cyclical, so it's not like we're working so hard to run the business better and we just get the cycle wrong in place for too long. And those are some of the criteria that we look at. And maybe that's why we ended up owning some of these consumer businesses in the past because they fall into that bucket of somewhat easy to understand, been around for a long time, most likely not going to get disappointed.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that we at the moment have anything where we are really, really. Ready to boo the trigger on? I mean, we do have some pretty interesting proprietary situations in which we have been able to get close and get engaged and to work on, although there's nothing that's really mature to.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How often do you get to be a part of a great business led by a great team of people who you've worked with for a long time and have developed trust and respect for over their successful tenure in the business Patrick and Josh and the folks involved there? And so we're excited about the long-term outlook for the business”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think that between the liquidity that we have from these different investments over the years, we do have the capital every several years to try to start a new one of these. We're very excited about Hunter Douglas that we started two years ago in partnership with the Sonnenberg family. We think we can do both as long as we don't get out of the discipline of only starting a new thing every several years when we have people and when we have time to focus and so on.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The company has publicly guided, they can grow high single digits system-wide sales for a long time. And the cash conversion of that, given the nature of the fully franchised business, is one in which the company pays a lot of dividends today, by the way. We received two-thirds of our notional equity check a year. So it's very cash flowing and it has a great compounding line of sight ahead of us, great team. So we're super excited to own it for many years.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love the business, we, I think, at the moment are so excited, first of all, with the team that we have in place. We have this combination of talent that grew up in the business. We have had the fortune of finally, because we had conversations with our common friend Patrick Doyle for quite some time. Patrick really hit it out of the park in his tenure at Domino's. It's a landmark in this industry. And we're so fortunate to have him as our partner. And the combination of Patrick and the young team that we have there that came up through the business, I think we feel very, very good about people first. We feel very, very good about the continuation of the opportunity to open restaurants around the world and to grow same store sales in all four brands still. So as a combination of those two things, I think this is...”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have 30,000 restaurants north of 40 billion in sales, 50 billion plus or minus total enterprise value. The company recently had put out that it hopes to go to 60 billion in the next five or so years. We became a real big business.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The latest acquisition that we did was a company called Firehouse Subs. This is in the end of 2021. And so that's the fourth leg. We think about that. It's a large category, the subs category. And there are several smaller brands, Firehouse being one of them, that are growing at really, really attractive rates of return. We have an incredible product, the brand stands for something that is incredibly important in the communities in which it operates in terms of giving back. And we see room to grow this business domestically and globally for decades. I think we opened up the first international restaurant. It was under our ownership in Switzerland and we have ambitions to bring that all around the world. There's an example of a large subcompany that has quite a big global presence. And we think that there's plenty of room to have many, many more firehouse sub.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's when you don't grow as quickly as you can. Sounds pretty simple, but just making sure that we are delivering a great brand with great unity economics to a partner that is ready to be successful in that market. That's when the magic happens. In the case of India, for instance, we didn't rush in. We jointly developed a localized menu with our partner, I think, over the course of a year before we opened our first restaurant. So making sure you take all the steps necessary, both on the company side and the franchisees side to ensure success is probably one of the most important things we can do.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the most important avenues for us is making sure that we buy one of these businesses or when we own one of these businesses that we have great partners developing the brand in their home markets, that they're well capitalized, great local partners with incredibly strong unit economics. And naturally, you're not going to have 100% success or you're going to have bumps along the road. And I think with us, it's always learning from the mistakes that you make along the way with certain partners. Making sure you have the right local partner that's well capitalized with the right operating capabilities. Maybe in the early days with certain brands, maybe we went to a country too soon or too quickly or we picked a partner who had a lot on his or her plate with other businesses or other brands. And I think in any one of those factors can play.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the other aspect of that is now doing this the third time. It sounds like it works beautifully, but there's always bumps in the road. So what were some of the things you learned from going through it, either at Burger King or then at Tim Hortons and now at Popeye's, that you got more efficient that over time?”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The franchise business basically is a business where you partner with people that put their own capital and they're entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, they're excellent operators in their parts of the world. They have the ability to identify real estate. They have the ability to attract and train good managers. And then you bring a brand that has great awareness, great preference to the table. And that really enables them to win in such a way that from your standpoint, your P&L is mostly comprised of royalties and franchise fees. So it's very, very capital efficient and has a lot of room for it to naturally grow as long as you don't lose the focus that your business is to make sure that this franchisees make money. That is your business and that they have great returns on capital. You have to always keep line of sight that that's the goal of the business.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rough math just by virtue of doing that. Then you fast forward to today own a company three times as big in sales than what we bought. And again, a function of fast international and domestic expansion or restaurant count and basically launching a boneless product, which is a chicken sandwich.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at it backwards now seven years of ownership, and it's a great case in point to illustrate that the system in play. So you initially had a significant gain in EBITDA by virtue of the back-hand synergies. Pope Payus was, if you would, a subscale public company. So there were a lot of costs that could come out by virtue of being part of restaurant brands international.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were delivering and we began studying some of the other categories. And at that point, we were in coffee in burgers. One of the fastest growing categories both in the US and globally is chicken. And we felt that we ought to have a presence in chicken. We identified possible. And globally”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While there would be back of the house synergies in terms of finance, procurement, supply chain, legal, we actually felt it was very important for the brands to maintain their own distinct brand identity and brand management. Part of that is real estate development and marketing. I think it's very important that each of these brands has their separate management, separate go-to-market be seen differently in the eyes of the consumers.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you look at the real estate footprint as you're growing, you've got Burger King internationally, you now have Tim Hortons you're bringing out. Just thinking of a young brands where they've put the pizza hut alongside their other brands. How did you think about the real estate footprint of these two?”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, there was a big opportunity on the TIMS business on a consumer CPG level. Tim's went from being at retail other than the stores where we have a 75% share of coffee out of home in Canada. But we were not the leading brand on home consumption. And so that was a big opportunity. Of course, it required agreement with the franchisees on how to go about that. But today, I mean, that business quadrupled in terms of Ebita or something over the years. And we are the number one brand in Canada.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimately, what's driven and what's driving the value is the global growth of Tim Hortons. And so now throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia, you can go to a lot of countries that at the time of the acquisition you couldn't have a cup of Tims today. And speaking to the long-term nature of our plans and our ownership here, that'll continue to pay dividends and grow for decades.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into all of our ages and backgrounds. I was a CEO at the time for Josh Cobzar, now CEO, was our CFO. He was 27, our head of North America was 39. So it didn't help our cause, but I think, as Alex said, eventually when we all met and we talked to them about the plans that we had for the business and our global growth trajectory, not just for burgering, but for Tim Hortons, it all worked out.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The middle of this, I'll never forget, I was traveling in India touring restaurants that Bloomberg Business Week had been trying to write a story about us, about our management team at Burger King. It was fair to the details. The title of the story was Burger King is run by children.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're Todd. And we felt all the opposite of that. We thought it was a great business. We wanted to own it and develop long term. We wanted to take it to the world. And we felt that we could help Dick Tim's global. And so we felt that if we were granted the light of day in terms of going and talking to people at the board, they would understand that and hopefully that's what happened. And that helped the board then evolve from a little bit of a situation where this is diverging points of view to a more consensual position.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we felt that the business was good enough and that we had enough financial wherewithal to make a better offer that potentially would enable that side of the argument to prevail. And then we felt that there were concerns about us and about basically the Tim Hortons in the past had been sold by the founders to Wendy's and from Tim Hortons' perspective, they didn't feel that this had been a great development for them. And they were able over time to be spun off of Wendy's and they were independent again. The resistance to the deal was a thought process of do we need to be owned by a US burger chain again? And this burger chain sometimes could be maybe short term, maybe it won't focus on Tim Hortons, would be an ass.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we found that we spoke to a lot, try to find channels into the board. And then, of course, through those channels, gain insight into what was going on to understand was this a unanimous basically no, where no and we never would do a deal and everybody agrees, or is it something where there is some level of discussion and different views? And it turned out to be the latter.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember, this is somewhere I'd call you. I was the CEO at the time, and I said to Alex, I really feel strongly we should bet the firm, we should bet the business on this. To Alex's credit, I mean, he believed in it. He was willing to make the bet on the team running the combined business at that point, which in hindsight, it's like, oh, it was really obvious that Tim Horton's EBITDA is now 80% higher or whatever it is. And the cash flow doubled. We've expanded it globally.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Context This was at the time for us already a home run of a deal. We had returned 130% of the capital. It was paying a nice dividend. I think 10-ish billion dollar companies. It was a home run in all respects. And again, I think it comes back to the long term nature of how we operate. And even we said to ourselves at the time, most rational private equity firms would have sold.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where it politely wished us luck future endeavors. And then in each case we presented a second proposal which was responded in three hours with the exact same half paragraph letter. We later learned of the boardroom dynamics there where there were people in favor of people against, but ultimately were able to navigate that successfully to an announcement. I think we started in March, I think by late August we were announcing a deal. It was quite an interesting thing because Tim Hortons in Canada is a gigantic thing. I don't know that there is a consumer brand in this country that has the same amount of equity and weight. So this is something you had to talk to the prime minister about. It had to undergo a government review process and make a variety of commitments. It was quite the process.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had teamed up with us on the hind steel that happened in 2013, and we were able to approach Warren, show him the deal. He liked the brand, he liked the Tim Hortons brand. He was very enthusiastic to participate financing. So we had all the financing lined up. And then the challenge really became one of reaching agreement with Tim Hortons, a process that took several months and back and forth of proposals. I think the first proposal that we sent them took six weeks to get a response with absolute radio silence.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The more we learned about the Tim Hortons business, the more excited we were. I mean, Tim Hortons was a franchisor of excellence, incredible franchisee, community. It had most of the real estate in the steals. It manufactured and distributed the products. It was an incredible business. It has an unparalleled brand. And I was able to do a common friend to schedule a dinner with the CEO with the business in Toronto. We really hit it off. And he was amenable to a proposal from us. Then as we looked through the numbers, we needed financing not just that financing, but to make the numbers work properly in the right risk-adjusted basis. We needed a few billion of preferred equity. At that point, we had developed a good relationship with Warren Buffett. He was good friends with one of my co-founders, George Alema, for many years.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that helped the balance sheet. We were in a $5 billion market cap company, and then we continued to grow quite nicely. We continued to grow our system-wide sales at attractive rates. We continued to grow our EBITDA, our cash flow. I think we probably reached around 10 billion or so market cap company. And as Alex said, we like the industry. We like the franchise business model even more than we did prior to becoming owners and operators of the company. And we looked around the world, around different franchised restaurant concepts. And I think at some point we came across Tim Hortons and felt that it was one of the most special businesses and brands in any market in any category. We've seen anywhere. And Josh Cobzar, now CEO, led the work on that to get.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We didn't. We were approached by a spec and that was basically run by people that we respected and knew and they wanted to do a deal with us by virtue of which we would have become a public company. And of course that was a process in terms of discussing valuation and discussing how to deal with some of the incentives and things that are typically associated with specs for which there was a limited space here given the size of the deal. But that negotiation went well. The valuation was compelling enough. We respected the people that had the spec. We thought there would be good shareholders and good partners and then we decided to proceed. So we weren't thinking about it.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We ended up going public in 2012, year and a half into this, mid-12. And this was a late 2010 closing. And between the dividend that was paid and the proceeds of selling quarter of the business or whatever that was, we returned 130% capital, give or take. Everybody was made whole and we owned 70% of the business, which was at the time our IPO valuation implied four or five X modable the original notional investment, which was in and of itself returned.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. The first thing that needed to change for us to do that was our balance sheet. We levered what? Quasi seven times six and a half times off the gates. And we were a few years into this process back to two and change or three or not even three. So balance sheet first. So that was the first enabler. The second is we felt the first green shoots of what we were doing in terms of international restaurant growth expansion, in terms of turning the corner on the same store sales into the domestic system. So we saw the green shoots on the organic side coming up. And we had the balance sheet and we had the people. So we started to have some bandwidth in terms of people to do more. That got us again back on the hunt.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mid 30s, President of International was also hired out of the MBA program. These people have all been with us decade plus. But it goes back to what Alex is saying. I think that speaks to the long-term ownership horizon. The folks we hired, it's 2024. A lot of these folks we hired, we hired 2012, 2013, 2014. They grew up in the organization, and we knew that a decade in, they had an incredible amount of value, but you have to make a long-term bet on these folks.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we're fortunate. There were a lot of great people at the business in 2010. Meet with these people, and we'd ask them, say, what do you think we could do better? And there was no shortage of great ideas. And there were a lot of people who were promoted who really bought into what we were trying to do. And they had both the knowledge and experience in the business and the ambition. I'd say we also spent a lot of time recruiting folks out of business school. I would make regular trips to business schools, get the resume books in advance and cold email folks who I thought had impressive resumes. And if you get an email from, say, cold email CEO or CFO of this company, I'm on campus and do you want to meet? I got a nice response rate. And for people who seemed really ambitious and wanted to do something big, something maybe different, we would make offers on the spot. We hired a lot of great people.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this goal system that we have is a great facilitator at that. Evaluating people will never be 100% objective. But we had at least an objective basis to start from in terms of the goals for the year and how did that person stack up against those goals. And not only if they achieved them or not, but what is it exactly that they did or didn't do? So we had a system to do this quarterly and at the end of the year became apparent, I would say in 80% of the cases, it was pretty easy to differentiate who was doing more and deserved more responsibility and deserved more equity versus who didn't.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of their bonus, and if they wanted to, they could buy stock in what was then private Burger King, and we would match them as well. We essentially give them leverage. And so we really created this cultural alignment within the organization that we were all on the same team. We were all shareholders. We were all owners of this business that, yeah, we'll have to make some tough decisions and we're going to have to do certain things differently if we want the next five years or 10 years to look a little bit different than the last five. But I think everyone was aligned. Everyone was in the same boat with respect to where we needed to take the company.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other way we got the organization excited about the direction we were taking the company in is frankly through the equity ownership that we brought to the company, just like you did the railroad. We had this philosophy that for people who acted like owners and really held themselves accountable and cared, we wanted to make them owners in the business. And so we granted sizable stock options to top 150 people in the organization to become owners of the business. We also let folks who received proceeds as part of the Burger King take private transaction. We let them reinvest those proceeds into the company and we levered them. We gave them a multiple times matching. And the other piece that we did each year, we allowed the top couple few hundred people in the business to take a portion.”
2024-12-30 · Capital Allocators · Top 5 of 2024: #5: Alex Behring, Daniel Schwartz - EP.384 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source