Summary:

Matt Hansen, COO of KBP Foods, shares his insights on building a highly profitable business by investing in culture and people. He emphasizes the importance of creating a strong culture that attracts great people and investing in their development. Matt believes that a great culture separates KBP Foods from other companies and leads to better results. He also highlights the significance of building trust and maintaining a balance between work and personal life. Matt advises HR executives to partner with operations and be present on the front lines to understand the challenges and support the development of a positive culture.

Key Takeaways:

• Invest in culture: Deliberately invest in building a strong culture that attracts great people.
• Develop your people: Invest time and money in the development and recognition of your employees.
• Balance work and personal life: Prioritize family and personal well-being to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
• Build trust: Make integrity-driven decisions and build trust with your team to navigate tough situations.
• Partner with HR: Foster a strong partnership between operations and HR to create a positive culture and support employee development.

Chapters:

Timestamp

00:01:00 Introduction to KBP Foods and Matt Hansen's role

00:03:00 Realization of the importance of focusing on people

00:05:00 Importance of having fun and enjoying work

00:07:00 Balancing the emotional connection with the need for results

00:10:00 Making tough decisions with integrity and looking out for employees' success

00:14:35 KBP Cares charity and employee participation

00:16:33 Providing career paths and opportunities

00:18:46 Importance of alignment and collaboration between HR and operations

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Matt Hanson. He's the Chief Operating Officer at KBP Foods. They own and operate brands like KFC, Taco Bell, and Arby's all across the country. Now he joined them when they were only around 30 stores and now they've got over a thousand. So he's a business leader who believes that culture isn't cheap, but the ROI is fantastic.

It's a real pleasure to have you here today, Matt. Thank you so much for joining us.

Matthew Hansen: I'm happy to be here.

CheeTung Leong: So Matt, could you just maybe quickly introduce us a little bit more to yourself your role at KBP and what KBP does?

CheeTung Leong: Wow, that's incredible. How would you describe your role

Matthew Hansen: I run the ops for the KFC team. We have about 840 KFCs throughout that territory. My job is to make sure that we have teams in place that operate our restaurants from the executive vice presidents to regional vice presidents to our area coaches that live on the ground all the way down to the general managers that we have systems and processes in place to have talent at all levels.

CheeTung Leong: In our conversation earlier we spoke about how you guys grew from a real kind of tight knit, almost startup with 30 stores and you're now at a thousand. Tell me a little bit about that journey.

And what KBP offered me at the time and a gentleman named Mike Kulp, who is the founder of KBP was a different way. A way that we start with focusing on the culture of our company, which in turn would attract great people. So my role has been throughout the 15 years I've been here is to make sure that we have enough talent in place that when acquisitions happen, that we're ready to grow.

During that time. And that's always been my role. It's hiring the best possible. I can that develop their people below them and develop their people below them that whenever that acquisition opportunity comes wherever it is in America, that if it's a fit for our company, that. We'll never be held back because we don't have leadership in place to do it.

We are constantly working on a bench of players at all levels and developing them so that as acquisitions occur we can go.

CheeTung Leong: That's really incredible to hear.

Matthew Hansen: I've been in the restaurant business my entire life. I was always the results guy. All of my promotions came because I got better results than anybody else. And I did it right through my people, not necessarily with my people. And I had an opportunity with a company was that before here to take a jump to a much larger role.

And my boss at the time was somebody I respected greatly put me through a series of assessments. And the very last step in these assessments was to spend a day with a psychologist. And he really challenged me on that. He challenged me on... You're at a level now where you can't force results.

You need to do this all through leading people. And he gave me a couple of challenges. And the one that was, that stuck with me to this day is. He said that, we're in a day where everyone's sending emails. I encourage you to make your thing is that you do a handwritten card every time you spend time with a leader.

And what I really noticed was the results were way better because people felt engaged and they're part of a team and they felt loved and appreciated. And that's stuck with me ever since. But the biggest part is I've always been somebody that If it's not fun, I don't want to be there. I, there's plenty of place in the restaurant to go work if it's not fun.

There's nobody on my team that reports to me that I don't love and want here. And then I gave that same ability to everybody on my team that if you don't like somebody on your team, go find someone that you do, make sure that you love and you're invested in not only their life or their work life, but you're invested in their personal life.

I'm very big on this and it's it's just flourish throughout our company, but it really all starts with the top at our company. And it's just worked its way throughout every level of our company. We believe that developing people and appreciating people just doesn't happen.

We need these people to get through this thing. We didn't want to lose anybody. The conversation never even came up.

CheeTung Leong: There's A Lot to unpack in that.

I'm going to start with a word that you use and you used this word people that you love and it's a very strong emotional word, especially in today's day and age, where there's a lot of cynicism about the relationships that we build in the workplace.

It's become very transactional, and you mentioned even COVID, where I think there's a huge amount of disillusionment. In the workforce that, that relationship they have with the employer is very much transactional and when the chips are down, they're just going to get dropped. So everyone just behaves like a free agent.

And it sounds like you've taken a completely opposite approach. How do you build that first of all?

Matthew Hansen: You have to hire clearly the right people, but , my opinion is in , in the restaurant business, especially it's a hard job.

And I might as well learn about their husbands and their wives and their kids and what they like to do and help them reach their goals in and out of work. I always say that KBP should never be first in anyone's mind. It's not in my mind. My faith and my family will always come before my work.

Now there are times you get out of balance but I try to always stay in balance here. I want my team to think the exact same way and treat their people the same way. There's a lot of insecure people in this business and I want to be surrounded by people that are secure enough to go hire the absolute best talent.

If someone's better than me at my job then come take it from me. I, and I truly believe that. I want everyone to get the best that they can in life. Maybe I'm just corny or something. I don't know. But I generally do love the people.

I have really 13 people on my leadership team and, I know all of their spouses really well.

And I think everyone else feels that same way. And when you do put in a lot of hours in this business, it's time away from family, it's time away from your spouse and your kids and. I want them to know that we appreciate that and that we love them and we care for them and we want balance. We always want balance.

And the rest of business, it's easy to fall out of balance, but having the right spouse or partner is somebody that, that will help you stay balanced. And my wife has been my balance . And most of my team is the same way.

You still have to be developing your people and getting results at our company. That will never change in this business. As much as you love people there are times you have to make you have to part ways with them because bottom line results do matter.

CheeTung Leong: As a leader, that's such a tough balance to maintain sometimes. how do you go about repairing trust and that, that sense of camaraderie and love with Everyone else that still remains on the team after you've had to go through a difficult

separation.

Matthew Hansen: I believe it's an

integrity driven decision. Every time you let someone go, it should really hurt. It's just not easy. And these ones weren't easy. But what I did in this case, cause he was very popular is I called each and every one of the 13 on my team, the 12 remaining ones at that point and told them exactly why.

This is something that that everybody that I talked to understood it. because they know I care about them and they know that I did this, that this was not easy for me. They knew that this was something that if it got to that point, there was enough trust there that they believed and trusted that I was making the right decision.

And then we actually helped him get another job at a restaurant company. Here in Kansas city, because I still want him to be successful. I still think he's a great person and a great leader.

CheeTung Leong: That's a really powerful story because I think that whole ethos of be a human honor your faith, honor your family, honor who you are, your core values, and then everything else stems from that.

Matthew Hansen: You have to make a lot of tough decisions in the restaurant business. There's decisions made every day at every level. It's a hard business. It's very hard. Again it's if you build that trust, it doesn't happen right away, but if you build that trust over time with something like that has to happen, which was painful for a lot of us.

They believe and trust your decision making . There's people that I hired years ago were terminated over the last few years for whatever reasons.

When the person that they report right then it's saying, I have to afford them the same opportunity. I can't say I get to love my team, but you don't get to love yours. But at the end of the day when they called me and said, this is why I had to do this move.

I fully supported 'em. I never second guessed them. I may have asked 'em a couple challenging questions, but when I knew that they were making the right decision and it was the right decision for their business I would never stand in their way.

The trust got to go both ways.

CheeTung Leong: That ability to put your ego aside, and look out for the broader team. Honor that relationship. I think very rare in the business world. And I want to pull on the thread that you mentioned earlier, where the, at KBP, you care very much about structure first.

And I'm tying that together with this idea of deliberately investing in culture, where it's sometimes a little bit of a misconception that, to build a great culture is free. And you're saying that, no, this, we're actually going to put money behind this. We're going to, we're going to make that deliberate investment around some kind of structure that helps to build culture for us.

Matthew Hansen: When I first joined Mike and I were out to dinner one night and he was talking about the company he really wanted to be. And it was this whole thing where in, in the restaurant business for sure. And probably In corporate America altogether. A large majority, I believe of companies hope they have a good culture.

They talk like they have a good culture. They may pray. They have a good culture. They may talk themselves into believing they have a good culture. But they don't invest in their culture. Culture is not accidental culture is very purposeful, a neglected culture.

Becomes your culture. Just only talk my culture at the boardroom and your store level people don't feel it. It's hollow culture. It's not a real culture. We believe that profits and results really matter, but it's not the first thing we focus on.

Money and guarantee put money into to building a culture. So we don't just accidentally or Cross our fingers and hope that we have a great culture we assure that we do and then with that We believe that a great culture separates us from most companies for sure in the restaurant business But probably in america where you have a really strong culture that attracts The best people.

And then when you have that pool of people that's far superior than others might have, you can get the best of those people, the people that really do believe what I believe in, that they believe that they want to be around people that they genuinely care for and love and want them to succeed.

And if you have that great culture that attracts those great people in this business, they get results. Instead of starting with results, we end with results. Create a great culture, invest in this culture. We invest millions of dollars in our culture. That'll attract great people that end up getting great results.

5 percent of our employees participate in our KBP cares fund. we have 15, 000 employees on our side and 89. 5, which our goal is to get to 90 percent this year. That's a staggering number that participate in this. And all we ask out of our hourly employees is to put 1 of every paycheck into the KBP cares.

And then when. An employee has a, has an event in their life, whether something as simple as a car breaks down or apartment fire or whatever catastrophe in their life, they can apply for a grant from KBP Cares and we help them out and we don't ask ever to be paid back. We'll do well over 600, 000 this year in KBP Cares.

I just got through going through a couple, what we call future leader breakfast last week in New York with with Mike that was talking to shift managers about, in this business, if you keep working hard, if you make sure you never jeopardize your integrity and you're always willing to learn, there's no reason you can't be making 70, 80, 90, well over a hundred thousand dollars in this industry one day, just by working hard and becoming an assistant manager, then a general manager, then an area coach. It's a very underrated industry and we were just trying to show them a path on how to get there. The ROI is well worth it

CheeTung Leong: so we're coming close to time . If you had if you had the opportunity to give advice to, say, a chief HR officer or someone in your position in another organization, how would you... Advise them to get started on what you're saying to create that intense care for people across the board.

Matthew Hansen: I was with a company that was driven by HR, and I've been by, with companies that are driven by finance but ones that are driven by HR can sometimes be very taxing. If HR is looked at as a negative. Inside of a company, that means they're handling it wrong.

I would tell an HR executive to become partners with operators, strong, strategic partners with operators to where they actually are in the room when discussions are happening and that they're they see how we act. They understand the business. It's easy to do HR from an office building.

on my upside here. I consider her somebody that I use as a valuable resource when we were doing new things. But I think if that relationship is strained or if one feels like they're over the other and they're not partnering with in some companies. Ops will just bulldoze right through HR.

And then some companies, HR will just bulldoze right through ops. Both those are bad ideas. You should be like a train track parallel where you're helping each other out. You're not constantly crossing each other's lanes, but you're there to support each other. And make sure as an HR person remember most HR people work Monday through Friday, nine to five.

And our stores are open til, well Taco Bell is open til three in the morning. It's a tough job . Having. Parallel tracks where you're working together to build development plans and do all these things that are so important to creating content and stuff that does drive culture.

CheeTung Leong: Matt, thank you. If people want to find you to ask you any further questions about your experience in the restaurant business or just your experience as a leader, what's the best way for them to do

Matthew Hansen: probably

email me. Be the best way that you can email me at it's m h a n s e n at kbpbrands.

com.

CheeTung Leong: Thank you so much, Matt, for hanging out with us today. And for those of you who are listening, I hope you enjoyed the show. Please. Do drop us to a review and tune in the next time where we'll have another great leader sharing with us their best practices in building an elite team.