From Bytes to Bites
THOMAS: A career switch from high tech to the restaurant biz calls on every bit of HBS know-how.
Photo Courtesy Scherrer
As a teen, Laurie Thomas (MBA ’93) didn’t devote her summers to extracurricular activities. Instead, the Wisconsin native worked, usually at her father’s manufacturing plant, which built the large machines that automate the production of cardboard boxes. “I’ve always been wired operationally,” says Thomas, who majored in industrial engineering at Stanford University before coming to HBS.
That background, coupled with her interest in people and management, made a career in Silicon Valley a natural fit. It’s a path that worked quite nicely for Thomas, who eventually rose to vice president of marketing at SuccessFactors, a software firm focused on employee performance and strategy solutions.
Then, in 1995, Thomas was introduced to chef Reed Hearon, and invested $200,000 in Rose Pistola, a restaurant specializing in the cuisine of Italy’s Liguria region. The San Francisco eatery was an immediate hit, winning the 1997 James Beard Foundation Award for Best New Restaurant in the country. Over the next three years, Thomas invested in two more of Hearon’s San Francisco restaurants. Things went well, until — as is so often true in the mercurial world of restaurants — they didn’t.
Thomas put her expertise in operations and management to work, helping to sort out some of the financial difficulties the restaurants were facing in the wake of the dot-com bust. In March 2001 she came on board full-time to help run Hearon’s company, Nice Ventures. “It was going to be a short-term change,” she recalls. “I thought I’d bring in some new financing, we’d restructure, and I’d go back to working in Silicon Valley.” By September 2003, the restructuring of Nice Ventures was complete. Thomas had taken the organization through Chapter 11, sold off one of the businesses, and bought out Hearon’s share of the business.
Six years later, as CEO of Nice Ventures, Thomas oversees management of Rose Pistola, Rose’s Café, and Terzo, which she opened in 2006. (The company also runs a booth every Saturday at San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Farmers Market.) No stranger to weathering economic downturns (she met employee payroll out of her personal checking account in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks), Thomas is as deeply involved as ever in the various restaurants’ finances and operations. “It’s been extremely stressful since December,” she admits. Debt and loan management, meetings with her seven-person senior management team, profit and loss reports, marketing plans, management issues, operations, tracking industry news, and staying abreast of what’s new in the food world are just several of the demands that have kept Thomas engaged in her new career.
“Crisis management is the norm in the restaurant business,” she notes. “That doesn’t work for me because I was trained as an industrial engineer, which is all about process, process, process. You can never completely eliminate fires, but you can put policies and training in place so that things run more smoothly.”
Thomas has also made a point of creating an environment that runs counter to the typical flat-out, overworked restaurant culture by instituting a bonus program for senior staff and keeping workweek hours to reasonable levels. While she’s put in long hours in recent months, Thomas has tried to maintain that balance in her own life, having recently completed a six-year board term for Meals On Wheels of San Francisco. In addition to riding and show-jumping competitively, she currently serves on the boards of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, an experience that has opened her eyes to the fascination and frustration of local politics. “Owning this business has opened a lot of doors for me,” says Thomas. “Learning new things, along with having the opportunity to work with my team and loving the product, are some of the biggest factors that drive me.”
— Julia Hanna
