Debi Benedetti: using psychology, Bon Appetit's VP builds up people, sales - Bon Appetit Management Co - Interview

When you ask Debi Benedetti who is responsible for the success and growth at Bon Appetit Management Co., the vice president of this Menlo Park, Calif.-based foodservice contractor quickly deflects attention away from herself and her company's co-founders, Fedele Bauccio and Ernie Collins.

"We are a very bottom-driven company," she explains. "We believe that our unit people are actually at the top of the company ladder because they are the ones interacting with the customers. They are the ones budding sales."

Many human resources executives agree that building up your people is a very smart tack to take, and Benedetti is well schooled in that approach@ She has a degree in psychology from Whitworth College, Spokane, Wash. And the strategy has worked. In only 10 years this $5 million start-up has grown to a 100-account contractor that generated $100 million in revenue in 1996.

Focusing primarily on corporations and colleges, Bon Appetit has built an impressive list of high-profile accounts up and down the West Coast, such as Stanford University, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard and Silicon Graphics. Now the company is aiming for steady and fairly rapid growth in other areas of the country.

The company's bold move to reposition itself from a regional to a national company is only one reason why it is going to become harder for Benedetti to hide behind her employees in the coming years. In addition, she is attracting attention personally as the president of the Society for Foodservice Management, as this organization makes some sweeping changes of its own.

There is little question that Benedetti can handle being the center of attention. She was an 18-year veteran of Saga Foodservice before it was bought by Marriott international in 1986, and her first managerial job with the company was in the cafeteria at Saga's headquarters in Menlo Park. Wasn't that just a tittle unnerving for a kid just out of college, whose professional foodservice experience consisted of four years as a part-time student employee for Saga at Whitworth and two months of management training at Saga's National Semiconducter account?

"Yeah, it was baptism by fire," admits the perpetually effervescent Benedetti with a laugh. "It was kind of like pumping gas into a car driven by the president of Exxon."

But Saga executives saw something in Benedetti they liked, and they decided that if she could survive the headquarters account, she'd do well anywhere. And she did; in 1980 she became Saga's first female district manager. People who know Benedetti understand exactly why she succeeded at Saga and continues to do well in the industry.

"She still carries an enthusiasm and passion for the business -- not only for her company but for the industry in general," says Richard Ysmael, corporate director of FoodWorks, the in-house foodservice department for Motorola Inc. "She has a tremendous amount of energy."

Life as a rising star for a national contractor, however, became almost too much for Benedetti to handle. In her tenure with Saga, she worked in 26 states and moved 10 times. After Marriott purchased Saga, she stayed with her new employer for only a year before deciding it was time to make a fresh start where she could have more control over her destiny.

She teamed up with Bauccio and Collins, two other Saga veterans, to buy an off-premises catering company in San Francisco and create what they hoped would be an upscale food management company.

"Our dream was to bring restaurant-style food, service and management to noncommercial foodservice," she relates. "Everyone seemed to be so focused on the business aspect of the industry. They were concerned about ROI, market share and blanket, penetration, and they hired business-oriented managers@ to run their units."

In contrast, Benedetti. Bauccio and Collins talked with prospective clients about almost nothing but food. When they sought managers, they put more weight on culinary training than on a business degree, on the premise that it was easier to train t chef to manage than it was to teach an accountant to cook. Their belief in the importance of food -- and Customer service -- is reflected in the expectations they place on their employees.

There is no standard menu or recipe file for Bon Appetit chefs and managers. Instead, unit chefs are expected to create menus suited to their accounts' customer base and to make those menus as flexible as possible in order to maintain customer interest and satisfaction -- changing them weekly if necessary.

"We may serve a four-cheese lasagna at one account, an all-white version at another and a spinach lasagna at a third," Benedetti says. "Our goal is to serve whatever the customers want."

Conversely, Bon Appetit is very rigid in the type of worker it hires.

"We have developed a very detailed profile of the kind of employee who we believe will succeed at Bon Appetit," she explain. "Basically, we look for independence, entrepreneurship, a love of food, creativity and the ability to solve problems.

"It takes a very special person to be in this industry," she continues. "You need to have a total grasp of the word `servant.' Your ego and pride have to be in place when you are preparing the food and dining room. But when you serve, you have to be humble and put your ego aside to be able to see whether you've truly been successful that day.

"If you aren't comfortable with that, you probably won't succeed with us."

Bringing in such employees, Bon Appetit gives them as much autonomy and responsibility as possible through a decentralized management system.

"We stole an idea from a Saga executive, who said, `It is the last 3 feet that count,'" Benedetti explains. "No matter what we do in the corporate office, it all comes down to the 3 feet between the server on the line and the customer."

The goal, Benedetti says, is to use line workers and other unit employees to build sales and increase check averages in individual accounts by "selling" customers on the value and the quality of the food being served. Generally, she notes, workers are successful: Bon Appetit says it builds customer traffic by an average of 15 percent and check averages by 15 percent to 20 percent when it takes over an account.

Benedetti's role in driving per-account growth is significant, since it stems from a corporate culture she was responsible for putting in place. She drafted the company's original mission statement and all of its strategic plans, culinary programs, and operational standards and concepts. She is proud of what she and her partners at Bon Appetit have accomplished, particularly concerning food. She claims the company was the catalyst for several food-related trends.

"We were the first company to put chefs in every unit," Benedetti says. "We were the first company to do exhibition cooking. We opened the first Japanese noodle bar in an institutional account."

When Bon Appetit takes over an account, it tries to open the kitchen and create a marketplace-type of feel to the cafeteria. Chefs are encouraged to offer cooking classes for customers; Benedetti says it "puts staff on stage, adds to customer appeal and increases check averages."

To achieve unit growth, Bon Appetit often increases raw food and labor costs, an approach that is sometimes disdained by other contract companies.

But because that often results in higher sales, "labor costs actually decrease as a percentage of revenue," Benedetti adds. "It just goes to show you that sometimes you have to spend money to make or save money."

Since 1991, when Bon Appetit bought Minnesota-based Consul Foodservice, the company has began taking its unique style of contract management national, growing "opportunistically" in the Midwest, Northeast and Southwest. In each area, Benedetti says, the company has used one account as a base from which to grow.

In the Northeast, where the State University of New York at Farmingdale was the first account, Bon Appetit has made inroads mostly in education accounts. In the Midwest, where Consul had business-and-industry accounts, the growth has been split evenly between corporate and education. In the Southwest, with accounts like the J. Paul Getty Center, corporate dining has yielded more business.

Although Benedetti put her efforts in college to studying psychology, she was no stranger to foodservice when she was hired full-time by Saga in 1969. She began her foodservice career at the age of 13, working the snack bar at the local swim-and-tennis club in Santa Rosa, Calif., where she grew up. She then worked for several summers in the kitchen of Young Life, a nondenominational Christian summer camp in Colorado.

"It was a great experience," she recalls. "Every month I would train a new group of volunteers. What I liked about it was that I was able to accomplish things and see rewards in a very short period of time. In addition, I was constantly working with people, and human dynamics is what we're all about."

Thus, it was natural for Benedetti to take a foodservice job when she enrolled at Whitworth, where Saga was the foodservice contractor.

When she graduated in 1969, she was accepted into the college's graduate program in psychology. However, she decided to go to work for Saga full-time.

"My goal was to earn enough money to pay for my graduate degree," she says. "But I got hooked on foodservice management and never went back to school."

Ironically, in all her years in foodservice with Saga. Benedetti never knew much about the Society for Foodservice Management, the organization of which she is now president, until 1989. Her "education" came about quite by accident.

"In 1989 we were managing a venue in San Francisco, where SFM held its national conference," she explains. "It turned out that SFM's hotel didn't have a big-enough ballroom to cater the closing banquet. So we were hired to cater the affair at our account. I got incredible exposure to the people in SFM."

What she liked about the organization was "the openness of SFM members to talk about their successes and their failures. The value of the information I got from people like Richard Ysmael, Gus Gregory and Jack Galione [all former IFMA Silver Plate Award winners] could not be measured."

Benedetti became an SFM board member in 1991, when the impetus for the changes she is implementing as president began.

"Five years ago we realized that 20 percent of our board members changed every year, and our president has only 12 months in which to make a difference," Benedetti explains. "No corporation with that kind of turnover could survive, so we realized we needed a strategic plan that could be used to guide the organization no matter who was in charge."

Benedetti brought a rare combination of forcefulness and flexibility to the strategic-plans debates, according to former SFM president Dick Kresky.

"Debi has firm opinions on a variety of subjects," says Kresky, Marriott Corporate Service's vice president of marketing. "But she also has the ability to listen and to bend her position in order to come up with a favorable solution to a problem. That's important when a group is trying to reach a consensus."

SFM's strategic plan has addressed both education and membership. On the education side, SFM's central office, managed by Foodservice Associates of Louisville, Ky., has taken charge of the regional conferences. Previously, conferences were planned by individual members in each region. Those conferences are now themed and feature professional speakers.

In addition, SFM has begun conducting benchmarking surveys, so that its members can measure their foodservice performance against that of their colleagues. In the spring SFM's site on the World Wide Web will be opened, giving members another place in which to network.

"At the same time the downsizing taking place in corporate America meant a decline in part of our membership base: the pure foodservice liaison," Benedetti points out. "These people were being given more nonfoodservice duties, and we were losing them as members. We realized that SFM would die a natural death if we stayed within the confines of corporate foodservice."

Last year the SFM board rewrote the bylaws to permit membership by professionals operating any retail-oriented foodservice operation within an institution. Several college and health-care foodservice directors have joined, and SFM has hired a marketing consultant to tout the association to the rest of the foodservice industry.

"Now we are really ready for anybody who is taking a retail approach to foodservice," Benedetti says. "We have identified and defined who we are. Now we need to expand."

Continued expansion is also on the board for Bon Appetit. Although Benedetti acknowledges that "we have achieved 10 times more than we ever thought possible," growth plans are still ambitious. Bon Appetit's executives have targeted 20 percent to 25 percent as the annual growth figure for the foreseeable future.

If that happens, however, Benedetti reiterates that it will not be so much a tribute to her oversight and that of Bauccio and Collins as it will be to the people they oversee.

"It is not us," she maintains. "It is really what the chefs and unit managers can accomplish. Our company will continue to be built on our absolute faith in their ability."

COPYRIGHT 1997 Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group