Kerrii Brown Anderson ’79, former chief executive officer of Wendys International, shared lessons from her storied career as the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business’ annual Legends of Business speaker on March 4. Anderson encouraged the overflow crowd in LaRose Digital Theatre to seize opportunities, embrace change, give back to the community and cultivate excellent communication skills to succeed in today’s business environment.
Anderson, an Alamance County native and Elon trustee, shared highlights from the many steps of her career path, including stints on her family’s tobacco farm and as a teenage school bus driver. She explained her first “big break” came when she worked for Carolina Biological Supply after graduating from Elon. The CEO saw potential in Anderson, a certified public accountant, and helped her to pursue a career with KPMG, one of the largest accounting firms in the nation.
“Don’t be afraid to take opportunities from people who are opening doors for you,” Anderson said. “I think in these difficult times … don’t be afraid to let someone help you in whatever way they can.”
From KPMG, Anderson moved on to serve as a financial analyst for RJR Nabisco and corporate controller for The Key Company, a homebuilder in North Carolina. After completing her MBA at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business in 1987, she became senior vice president and chief executive officer at M/I Schottenstein Homes in Columbus, Ohio.
In 2000, Anderson took “the opportunity of a lifetime,” joining Wendy’s International as chief financial officer. Six years later, she became CEO and president of the company. Among the lessons she learned from her two-and-a-half-year tenure as CEO, Anderson told the crowd, were those shown on buttons worn by the company’s employees.
“Dave (Thomas, founder of Wendy’s) was always big on buttons, everybody wore different buttons,” she said. “These were the five tenets of our core values.”
The buttons read: “Quality is our recipe,” “Do the right thing,” “Just be nice,” “Give something back” and “Profit means growth.”
“Dave always used to say, profit isn’t a dirty word,” Anderson said. “It’s OK to make money, because when you get money, you can afford to give back. That was a very important element to Dave Thomas.”
Also critical to her success as CEO, Anderson said, was seeing change as an opportunity. She shared a story about how she and her team suggested Wendy’s offer a second flavor of its popular Frosty dessert for the first time in the restaurant’s 37-year history. Franchisees and store operators pushed back, saying the overhead required to provide two Frosty flavors would be too much to bear. Yet, when the vanilla Frosty was introduced, the product went from 3 percent of their product mix to 8 percent.
“Just because you’ve done something for 37 years doesn’t make it something you need to continue, so you’ve got to be willing to embrace change,” she said.
Finally, Anderson advised students to work hard to cultivate their communication skills, which she termed the most important quality of an effective business leader.
“Communication really is about listening,” she said. “If I could stress one attribute to my success, for me personally, or for anyone thinking, ‘How can I be better?,’ it’s to work on communication. And that means listening, listening, listening.”
A longtime supporter of her alma mater, Anderson spearheaded the IGNITE Challenge in February, which raised more than $180,000 from young alumni of Elon to support students, faculty and programs at Elon. For more information about the IGNITE Challenge, see the links under “Related Posts” at the right. Also, a scholarship endowed by a gift from Wendy’s International in Anderson’s honor is given annually to female students with financial need, wiht preference given to students from her home state of North Carolina, or Ohio, where Anderson has lived for the past 22 years.