The normal progression was to be
hired away to your clients, and that
happened to a certain degree. I’d
worked on a project and found myself winding up at Domino’s Pizza,
and that’s how I really got into the
food piece. I was on the real-estate
and store-construction side. I
moved into looking at applications
on how to build stores. We were
turning them over to operations,
so I was not involved in operations at all. And I was working in a
geography that I knew very well, in
those individuals, but I quickly
learned that the respect had to be
mutual. I had to take an extra effort
to demonstrate to them why they
should trust me and respect me.
That takes time, and I recognized
that I needed to earn their trust. I
had to really get to know them as
people first. If I only tied in to what
the business results were, that still
wasn’t going to be total mutual
understanding of respect.
I had some sessions with
them. I called them “expectation
sessions.” I met
with them one-on-
one and discussed
business very little.
I discussed more
about [how] they
got to their place,
what was their
business progres-
sion, how some
of them could,
in a strange way,
help mentor me. A
couple of them were
turned off. They just
couldn’t get past it. But a couple
of them responded to that and understood that I was really extending the olive branch versus putting
up my own wall, saying, “Hey, I
disagree with the fact that you’re
basically discriminating against
me because I’m young.”
Chavel, far left, with members of his executive team, participating in the Executive Game Challenge at the Sodexo
Pan Asian Network Group (PANG)’s third annual meeting.
Michigan. I became involved with
a regional pizza chain after that,
which was a series of Domino’s
franchisees that had left and
started a regional chain. That got
me more on the operations side of
the business.
I was 28 years old, sitting on the
board of a public company, where
the average age was about 72. I
was the one individual who had
“food knowledge” of this company
they had acquired. And I was to
transition that knowledge and do
it in a setting where I know they
were looking at me like “Who’s this
kid?” Here’s an experience of feeling
really out of place. How are you
really going to step up to your plate?
I really had a respect level for
Visconti: Tell me about your
career at Sodexo, because
you haven’t been here, relatively speaking, for that long
compared with [former CEO
and President] Dick Macedonia, for example.
Chavel: I think Dick was born
at Sodexo. Dick celebrated his
40th year right before he retired.
I’m here 16 years. I had a history
in my career of actually joining
companies and jobs that I really
didn’t—on paper—look like I
could deliver with. I went into Arthur Andersen, in the consulting
division, with not a big computer
background. I went into Domino’s
in their real-estate area with no
knowledge of real estate, and
when I say construction, my wife
starts laughing because she can’t
believe that I built over 1,000
Domino’s stores and I can’t do it
at home. I mean, if she asks me to
use the hammer or something …
I came to Sodexo in the
healthcare segment. I realized early
on that I would have difficulties
being in an office, in the same
square walls, in the type of
business that didn’t have multi-unit customers and wasn’t out
there in multi-geographies. So I
said to myself, “I’m in the multi-unit industry.” I liked franchising. I
had no knowledge of the other side
of the business, so the approach
that I took when getting involved
with Sodexo was getting engaged
or involved in the industry itself.
My wife was pregnant with
our first, and the thought was
that we had four grandparents
eagerly waiting in Detroit. We said
to ourselves that moving back to
Detroit would be the comfortable
thing to do, certainly for my wife,
but we thought, “Let’s just see
what this Sodexo job is all about.”
Sodexo’s job was in Pittsburgh.
And I remember saying, “Let’s just
wait a year and see what happens,”
and then 16 years go by. Sodexo
had many different changes. Seven
years later, I had worked my way
into healthcare from a regional vice
president, a divisional vice president, to really overseeing most
