Ron Shaich
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And I handed in this vision for a radical transformation of Panera to Bill Morton, who had become the CEO.
And Bill was my very dear friend, 20-year colleague, and looked at me and said, wow.
He said, I don't have anybody to work on this.
Would you go work on it?
And I said, yeah, I'll have some fun with it.
And $25 million later in another year, the executive chairman is working 80 hours a week on this vision for how to have integrated technology change the guest experience, change the whole deal.
I was loving it.
I had none of the ceremonial duties of being a CEO.
I didn't have to tell people what I just did.
I didn't have to tell them what I was going to do.
I just was dealing with the product.
And Bill came to me and said he personally had a problem.
He couldn't travel.
Something had happened in his family.
And he said, maybe we should make you CEO again and I should step down.
And we debated it because it wasn't what I wanted necessarily.
But it seemed to be necessary at a certain point.
And maybe nine months or a year later, we executed that.
We just swapped positions.
He became executive vice chairman and I became a CEO again.