They Were Afraid the VP Had Flipped Out

Herman Cain quit his posh job as vice president of the Pillsbury Co. in 1982 for a job as a burger flipper at Burger King.

The career move worried his wife, who had opted to stay home and care for their two young children. Cain’s colleagues looked for a new golf partner.

“They didn’t buy the idea that I wasn’t motivated anymore so I wanted to try something new,” Cain said. “They thought anybody who would walk away from a VP job to go do burgers, clean bathrooms and work odd hours had to be nuts.”

The gamble paid off.

Within nine months, Cain climbed to regional manager at Burger King and captained 450 restaurants in the Philadelphia region. His territory became the company’s best.

The young businessman had sealed his reputation as a risk taker--or in his words “a change agent.”

In 1986, Pillsbury offered Cain another challenge--rescue Godfather’s Pizza. The once-thriving pizza chain’s operating earnings two years before had plunged by 94 percent to $978,000.

Cain revived the company within a year by cutting its 911 restaurants to a more manageable 580 units. One year later, Cain and his executive team bought the chain from Pillsbury for $50 million. Since then, the company’s value has doubled.

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Now Cain, 51, is focusing his energy and charm on the National Restaurant Assn. The group’s chief executive officer since December, Cain has been working to boost the image of the industry’s 770,000 restaurants.

“We have a reputation of being made up of burger-flipping, pizza-slinging jobs with no careers and no benefits,” Cain said during a recent interview at Godfather’s headquarters in Omaha. “But that’s the furthest thing from the truth.

“This is one of the few industries that can provide career and ownership opportunities to the people that are least employable, least educated, but who simply have a will to do something with their lives,” he said.

As spokesman for the restaurant group’s 32,000 members, Cain tours the national speaking circuit with speeches that sound more like sermons or half-time pep talks. His voice jumps from whispers to blaring shouts of “We can do it!”

Cain demands attention and therefore he is in demand. His secretary sees him only once every couple of months because he is busy with speaking engagements across the country and work at the restaurant group’s Washington headquarters.

Cain also has published a book on leadership and recorded a compact disc of gospel music that features his baritone vocals. He also is in the process of filming a series of business-related videos.

Regardless of the medium, his message is simple: Anyone can succeed.

Cain should know.

He grew up poor and black in the racially segregated South. He shared a folding cot with his brother in the kitchen of his family’s three-room house in Atlanta. His father worked three jobs to feed the family--part-time chauffeur at Coca-Cola, night janitor at a bakery and barber in between. His mother worked as a maid.

Cain finished high school second in his class and became the first person in his family to attend college. He worked his way through Morehouse College and graduated to become a Navy mathematician.

“I think the special circumstances that I grew up in gave me that much more tenacity,” Cain said. “I think as a result, my self-determination was greater and I was better able to contend with the barriers while trying to get into corporate America and climbing up the corporate ladder.”

Cain entered the corporate world after earning a master’s degree at Purdue University and taking a job as a financial analyst for Coca-Cola. He later moved to Pillsbury, where he climbed the ranks.

“Most people think that achieving the American dream is getting to Easy Street. It isn’t,” Cain said. “The American dream is being able to go from the destination you’re at to the destination you want to go to. The American dream is not a destination, it’s a process. It is the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself.”

Cain’s next pursuit may be public office. A Republican, he has toyed with politics since 1994 when he helped derail President Clinton’s health-care reform plans during a town hall meeting in Omaha.

In front of a nationally televised audience, Cain asked Clinton: “If I’m forced to do this, what will I tell those people whose jobs I will have to eliminate?” For that, he earned the nickname “The Hermanator.”

He also served as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City, Mo., and was asked by Jack Kemp to serve on the federal Economic Growth and Tax Reform Commission. He campaigned for the GOP’s Bob Dole and Kemp last fall.

Public office was never a goal, Cain said. Instead, he was more determined to succeed in the business world and improve his golf game.

“I believe that I can be a politician, but do I want to?” he said. “It might boil down to that I have to. I’ve always done what I want to do. This may be the one time in my life that I may have to do it for others. Make a difference.”