Hire the right people
When Denegri was working at the Coca-Cola Co., Campero was one of his largest accounts, and he frequently met with the company’s CEO. Every so often the CEO would talk to Denegri about jumping ship from Coke and joining his team, but he always politely declined such offers.
Then the CEO requested an in-person meeting and said he would fly to Denegri.
“I really thought he wanted to switch from Coca-Cola to Pepsi-Cola because he never did that,” he says. “I always flew to him, not the other way around.”
He didn’t want to switch brands, he wanted Denegri to switch ships, and this time, he was successful.
“I thought I would never leave the company,” he says. “It was a great company. I was walking on clouds, but when I was given the opportunity to work for Campero and the opportunity to take it international, I didn’t really hesitate. I jumped ship right away.”
Denegri saw an opportunity to make a difference and to really be needed in a way he never felt at a large company.
“I use the analogy when I talk to my team about a carrier — those huge ships,” he says. “Do you know how many people are in a carrier? It’s about 5,000 people. It’s like a city on the sea. If you jump, many times, nobody will notice. This is more like a canoe. If you take a break to sneeze, you will make an impact on what’s happening. It’s the ownership, so you really feel the different kind of ownership.”
While it may seem like Denegri’s resume is irrelevant to hiring, it’s actually quite helpful, because he wants other people who will look for a similar opportunity and share his passion.
“You talk about (passion), but it’s really hard to know,” he says. “You look at their history, and you see what they’ve done. Then, we run into people who work for very large companies, and they have a good position, and they say, ‘You know what, I really want to leave this company to make a difference and come work for you guys.’ That’s the type of people that we look for.”
He says it’s also important to look for people who actually know about your brand.
“I interview them like I interview a franchisee,” he says. “So I say, ‘What is it that you like about the brand?’ I don’t want to hire anybody who needs to make X amount of money a year. We all need to make money. That’s OK, but that’s not the reason to come to work for us.”
In addition to knowing about the brand, Denegri wants to hire people who have ideas for it when they come in to interview.
“I ask them, ‘What would you do with the brand? Where would you take it?’” he says. “As far as anybody can do in an interview, they have their heart into these. The more they get exposed to the brand, the better it will be [for] the interviewing process.”
When you get a candidate that has the knowledge, then you also want to see how they react to the realities of your company. Denegri has his candidates visit one or two franchises so that they can understand what the company actually does.
Candidates go through about two weeks of interviewing with Campero, including three to four interviews with Denegri and another interview with each of his top executives. While it’s a lot of time, he says you have to do that if you want to be successful later.
He says, “The more time I spend with them now and the more money I spend with them upfront, the better it’s going to be, and it’s going to save us at the end of the day.”
