How Cava CEO Brett Schulman earned the trust of the original founders

Cava CEO Brett Schulman isn’t your typical founder. Ike Grigoropoulos, Dimitri Moshovitis, and Ted Xenohristos had already opened a couple full-service Mediterranean restaurants and were looking to expand when a friend introduced Schulman, whose expertise was in consumer packaged goods, to them.

For Schulman, delivering results was key to earning the trust of the original founders.

“When I came in to help, I was immediately able to get it profitable and kind of prove my worth, and more importantly, me and the guys hit it off,” he said.

Together, they opened the first Cava in 2011, and today, it has grown to more than 460 locations nationwide. In a conversation with Founder Brew, Schulman discusses what he had to earn before being seen as a true partner, the leadership trade-offs that come with scale, and what he’s had to unlearn while growing the company.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When you joined Cava, what did you have to earn from the original founders before they truly saw you as a partner they could trust?

My co-founders started the brand back in 2006 with a single full-service restaurant…That organically grew and they opened a second full-service restaurant, and then had a customer want to partner with them to sell the dips and spreads at a couple local Whole Foods.

I wound up meeting them where that business ran into some trouble, and a friend of mine from college serendipitously called me and said, “Will you talk to my cousin Ted [Xenohristos]? He needs help with this business.”

She connected me with Ted, and ultimately they asked me to come help with the CPG business. They said, “We can’t pay you, but we can give you a stake of our equity, and our partners will give you a stake of their equity.”

When I came in to help, I was immediately able to get it profitable and prove my worth, and more importantly, me and the guys hit it off. We just related to one another, we viewed the world through the same lens, in that we wanted to make a positive impact, and we had ambitions, but we wanted to do things the right way.

They said, “Brett, why don’t you just be our fourth partner? Why don’t you come join us in all the Cava endeavors?”

I’m so grateful for the trust that they put in me. They’ll joke and say they hired their boss. I don’t feel like their boss. I’m their co-founder. I’m their partner. I’m just fortunate to have partners who, no matter what decision I made, always had my back and trusted me.

What kind of decisions get harder—not easier—as you scale?

People decisions—it’s the hardest, and they’re brutal. It’s the most soul-sucking part of the job…You have really good people, who are good humans who have done right by you, that struggle to keep up with the growth of the business and the expectations of their role, and you have to make very difficult decisions.

What has this role taken from you that you didn’t anticipate?

We’re opening 75 restaurants this year, that’s more than one a week. I can’t be at all those openings. It takes some of those more intimate moments from you that you have when you’re a smaller business.

What’s something you’ve had to unlearn as Cava has grown?

You can’t do everything. You have to be very clear and know what matters in the business, and disciplined about not chasing too many things. It’s like the metaphor of driving a little speedboat versus now driving an aircraft carrier. You can’t swing it around too quickly. If you want to innovate and you want to grow, you’ve got all these great ideas, but it’s about how you regulate and stay disciplined, because if you pull yourself in too many directions, you’ll do nothing well.

I’ve learned to be a much better listener and be less hardheaded. In my younger days I was probably a little more stubborn, so it’s helped me gather more information to make more informed decisions.

I’ve had to unlearn how I spend my time, and that I personally can’t be involved in everything. How do I influence outcomes and trust others to affect outcomes that I’m not directly involved in? The business won’t grow if I’m involved in everything.

The bigger the business gets, you have to be able to have great talent and people around that you’re able to direct and influence and hand off responsibility to. I’ve had to unlearn being involved in every decision or being involved in every initiative, and how I can lean on and trust others around me to deliver the outcomes that I believe are going to lead to our success.