Designer of Change: Thomas Kelly

Thomas is the entrepreneurial founder of MEXICUE, a chain of popular restaurants that has learned to thrive on change. We talked with him about how his approach to change evolved as his startup grew and matured.

You founded a successful restaurant chain that started as a food truck in New York city. That suggests you had passion and at least some relationship with change, right?

I started the business just over 10 years ago because I’m passionate about food and hospitality. As for change, I embrace it at this point, but it wasn’t always that way. When you start an entrepreneurial venture, change is inherent in what you’re doing — it’s not a choice. There’s just so much uncertainty and chaos and not much stability to balance it. For example, running a food truck was fantastic from a marketing and branding standpoint, but we quickly realized it was a horrible business model and we needed to change immediately.

We quickly started doing pop-up restaurants around Manhattan, and we started doing catering, and that was all in year one. Then at just about the one year mark, we opened up our first brick and mortar. That was something we thought we might do at some point, but it happened a lot faster than we anticipated. So at the start, change was ingrained in our business model as a necessity of survival.

So your willingness to change helped you get started. Were you able to continue with that attitude as your company got larger?

After the first year, we were pounding the pavement, desperate to raise investment funds, when we were introduced to Sandy Bell. He had started the restaurant chain, Ruby Tuesday, along with the world-renowned resort Blackberry Farm, so he was a valuable potential investor for many reasons. Fortunately, we hit it off right away and he became our backer and partner.

With Sandy on board, we moved into a full service model. His influence on me was critical, but I had to adjust from being an entrepreneur, a chef, and CEO to becoming a partner and not having 100% autonomy. In this phase, I was challenged to embrace change as it related to the evolution of our business with a professional investor and guy who knew what he was doing. I knew what I was doing with food and the brand, but the business model needed a lot of work.

At this point, I hit a change roadblock and became more resistant. In the traditional stance of an entrepreneur, I think, I was adamant about protecting my “baby.” I struggled with giving up control, but Sandy helped me see that change was an asset to MEXICUE and to every aspect of our organization. He didn’t talk about it specifically, but one of the most poignant things he’d remind me is, “Don’t confuse habit with wisdom.” We should be looking at everything, and making sure that we’re not just confusing the way we’ve done something with the way we should do something.

Slowly over time, I came to accept that continual change was a strategic advantage for the organization, for our menu development, our culture, our hospitality approach, our business model–all of it. We started to name it. We started to consciously talk of it as part of our culture, our DNA. That helped us stay open to changing our store format, our design within the stores, and our operational approach, and I started to see the advantages of embracing change in every way. When Covid hit, it was easier for us to face because we had our “change armor” on.

So has it become easier to deal with change now?

Now we’ve got seven restaurants and we’re opening new ones regularly. We’re at a couple hundred employees so when you’re making a change there are challenging implications. In the early days, everyone was in that same entrepreneurial frame of mind. Today, we have to explain the changes we make, because we’re not in survival mode anymore. It’s human nature to resist change, but communication helps. We’re getting better at that–explaining what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, and how it will improve our guest experience.

What’s important for us now is framing change as positive, as part of our brand. We acknowledge that this involves risk taking and mistakes and that’s OK.

Where do you think this openness to change will take you in the future?

We have to figure out how we evolve and adapt, and especially how we are going to interact with our guests digitally over the next couple of years. That’s changed a lot since COVID. Our industry is really slow to change. Covid helped to speed it along by forcing something as simple as digital menus with a QR code. Hopefully, we’ll continue to innovate in that vein. It’s going to be challenging figuring out how we evolve as a business that is, first and foremost, about bringing people together in person to have an experience together. But we’re trying to find ways to extend hospitality to people outside of the four walls.

Thanks, Thomas!

Find more interviews and insights like these in our latest book, Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World. Available now on Amazon or Rosenfeld Media.