It was 1988, and George Katakalidis had
been playing soccer professionally in
the United States since he was 18. As a member of the San Diego Sockers, sidelined indefinitely with a broken toe,
Katakalidis — born in Greece and raised in
Canada — was thinking about life after
soccer when he had an epiphany.
“When I got injured, I started thinking
through what I could do, and it sort of
came to me,” Katakalidis says. “I love
people. I’m Greek. I should be in the
restaurant business.”
Though Katakalidis’ career as a restaurateur began humbly with two quick-service, food-court Greek eateries, today
Daphne’s Greek Cafe is the nation’s
largest chain of Greek quick-casual
restaurants, with 75 locations throughout California, Arizona and Colorado
and an annual revenue of $70 million.
Smart Business spoke with Daphne’s
founder and CEO about leadership, the
dangers of rapid growth and the importance of introspection.
Q: How would you describe your leadership style?
Leadership, per se, is not something
that is easily defined with one specific style. I truly believe that it’s a combination of many different styles and
experiences.
A good leader understands the situation and understands the problem
and takes into consideration the entire
environment — as opposed to singularly,
the problem — and then knows what style
of arrow, if you will, to pull from his quiver.
Q: How have you shaped your company’s
culture?
We are a meritocracy. There are a lot of sub-bullets and subvalues associated with that,
but there are no sacred cows. Nobody is
untouchable. Everybody has to earn it. We
try to make sure people are responsible,
and in a meritocracy, you see a ton of
responsibility. They’re responsible for their
actions, responsible for their results, and
so on and so forth.
Developing a culture starts with recruiting. You’ve got to try to get the right people
in the system, and if the right people are very responsible, it translates to the rest of
the organization.
What you’re doing is adding positive ions
to the bigger atom. At the unit level, you
want this responsibility from the unit manager, the general manager, and that, in
itself, permeates down to the rest of the
people. There’s no excuse why something didn’t get done. There’s no excuse why
there’s a dissatisfied customer.
There’s an understanding why there’s a
dissatisfied customer, but the responsibility is to follow up with that customer to
make sure that we can take care of their
needs.
Q: How can you recruit for those traits?
In the recruiting process, it’s very difficult. You’ve got some professional interviewers out there, so we’ve been very
cognizant that we don’t hire off a
resume. We need to make sure we spend
time with the individual. We make sure
that we let them know this is a special
company where people get rewarded for
doing great work.
It’s really tough to do. You just have to
make sure you have a lot of touches with
these individuals, meaning that you have
to see them in different formats, spend a
little time with them and get to know
them.
Q: Is it possible, as you’re adding people,
to grow too fast?
I heard a phrase at one of the
conferences I went to, which I
thought was brilliant — ‘Do not
outrun your headlights.’ In reality,
that’s the danger that a lot of people
face.
Growing too fast is relative, meaning how high are your high beams?
How far out can you see as a leader?
If you can see pretty far out, you can
go a little bit faster. If you can’t see
too far out, don’t go that fast. So
growing too fast is relative, and it’s
relative to the individual that’s leading.
Leaders need to be totally honest with
themselves. What are their strengths
and their weaknesses? What are they
really good at? They’ve got to put ego
aside. Once they really assess what
they’re good at, they need to do that
with the management team. Once they
understand what kind of team they
have and what kind of leader they are,
then they can assess how fast they
need to go.
Q: What advice would you offer a brand-new CEO working to grow his or her business?
The best advice I can give is to really, really introspect. Take stock of yourself. Really
spend some time and get to know yourself.
What are your strengths, and what are your
weaknesses? What do you love to do, and
what do you hate to do?
The next thing is to do the exact same
thing of your company and your management. Once you derive all of that information and you sort of plot it out and figure it
out and mull it over, then you take a look at
where are the real opportunities.
HOW TO REACH: Daphne’s Greek Cafe, (858) 784-0811 or
www.daphnes.biz
