While seasons of high demand bring excitement to small business owners, they often create additional stress that prevents them from providing the best customer experience possible. Regardless of your situation, here are five ways to sustain your business and yourself in the midst of chaos and keep the customer experience top of mind.

Related: How To Find the Right Time Management Method for You

1. Plan ahead

Poor planning usually leads to less-than-desirable results and dissatisfied customers. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or a newcomer to the rush of high demand, careful consideration of the steps ahead is essential.

Use all the resources available to manage inventory and order needs, set schedules, consider a new promotion or marketing campaign and invest in customer service by reviewing protocols with your staff. If a plan isn’t possible due to constraints, make a list of what you can accomplish with what you have. As a wrap-up to the season, use hurdles as a learning experience for future planning.

Related: 6 Simple Ways to Build Wellness Into Your Busy Workday

2. Maintain positivity

Alongside a plan, keep your employees engaged and positive by staying calm when unexpected events arise (which they will!). A positive attitude in the face of adversity can mean the difference between a minor setback and a complete disaster. Some additions to your bustling routine could include:

• Celebrating small wins for you and your employees, such as verbal recognition during a team meeting or a small gift.
• Reframing negative thoughts as opportunities to improve or additional steps to success.
• Encouraging collaboration to solve complex problems.
• Customizing your workspace with objects that bring you joy and peace (e.g., motivational quotes, photos of loved ones, mementos).

When practicing optimism, be mindful that dismissing negative emotions is more harmful than helpful. Continue to validate genuine emotions and experiences from yourself and your team. Highs and lows are part of the human experience.

Related: How Optimists and Pessimists Can Get Along

3. Delegate often

A culture of success is a collaborative effort, one that rests on everyone’s shoulders. As a business leader or owner, you may find sharing the workload especially challenging when tasks need to be handled in a specific way. However, a healthy workplace should be teamwork-centric.

By delegating, you play to your employees’ strengths and provide ample space to focus on more important needs. Start by establishing a system that empowers your team to take pride in success. Then, motivate them to actively pursue that success. Finally, uphold personal and team accountability to ensure lasting results.

Also, consider outsourcing tasks beyond your immediate team to the community, such as other small businesses. For example, your neighborhood The UPS Store provides a convenient, one-stop shop for items that are missing from your to-do list – from printing marketing materials to packing and shipping thank-you gifts to select customers or returning online purchases.

Related: Why Proper Delegation Guarantees Team Success

4. Balance rest and productivity

As a business owner, doing right by your business requires doing right by yourself. As The UPS Store President Sarah Casalan would say, “If you don’t listen to your body, it will speak for you eventually.” By acknowledging that being productive requires setting aside time for rest, you will find enduring success in greater amounts than you would by prioritizing output alone. Some other helpful tips to get started on balancing time off with work to-dos:

• Take short breaks to reset and recharge yourself.
• Focus on one or two large projects at a time or several small ones.
• Delegate nonessential tasks to your team members.
• Set clear, firm boundaries on when you plan to stop working (e.g., I must be home by 7 p.m. and will not answer messages or calls until tomorrow). Follow this up with a physical boundary, such as turning off notifications or devices.
• Schedule time to be with family and friends during off-peak moments.

5. Express gratitude

When stability resumes, and even during busy moments, don’t forget to say thank you. A study by University of Miami researchers found that gratitude is strongly associated with people feeling happier, healthier and more grateful. It can even improve relationships and make stressful moments easier to manage and overcome.

Unsure where you should start as the busy season winds down? Write letters to your coworkers expressing your appreciation, call a former boss and share how they made a difference in your life, or take a quiet moment to reflect on what you’re grateful for from the past year. To take it a step further, make gratitude a regular part of your personal and professional life. Keep a gratitude journal or spend a day each month sharing thanks and seeing what these new traditions bring you and those around you a year later.

The hustle and bustle of peak business seasons can bring a mix of emotions and priorities. To create lasting success for yourself, your business and the people you serve, plan early, lean on coworkers, family and friends and prioritize self-care when possible. When the last checkbox is marked complete, say cheers and thank you to those who helped you get there.

Though Tesla had a record-strong quarter in the final months of 2024, it wasn’t enough to stop the electric carmaker’s annual sales from dropping for the first time in its history.

Tesla posted record-high numbers for the final three months of 2024, delivering 495,570 EVs compared to 484,507 shipped at the same time last year.

However, Tesla’s annual numbers were down. The carmaker delivered 1,789,226 electric vehicles in 2024, a decline from the 1,808,581 EVs the company sold in 2023 and below analyst estimates by about 20,000 units, according to Barron’s.

Related: Tesla Sales Show Demand Could Be Speeding Up For Electric Cars

Tesla’s quarter results, while record-breaking, were also below Wall Street estimates of 504,800 deliveries, per Wedbush Securities.

Tesla shares were down nearly 6% on Thursday following the news.

Following President-elect Donald Trump’s win in November, Tesla’s market cap surged to over $1 trillion for the first time since 2022. Tesla’s market cap is $1.2 trillion at the time of writing.

One reason for the decline is increasing competition from international companies.

According to Bloomberg, a Chinese Tesla competitor, BYD, sold 4.25 million EVs and plug-in hybrid cars in 2024 compared to the 1.79 million EVs Tesla sold.

The U.S. EV market has also shifted to include more players. Clean Technica noted that Tesla commanded less than 50% of the U.S. EV market for the first time in six years in 2024. Ford, Kia, Hyundai, and BMW were all rising competitors that encroached on Tesla’s market share.

Related: Tesla Reports ‘Record’ Earnings as Musk Predicts It Will Become ‘the Most Valuable Company in the World’

“If they [Tesla] want to continue to see the growth they had, they need to expand to other sizes and price points,” Jeff Schuster, vice president of automotive research Global Data, told AP.

Analysts also told ABC News that in the U.S., early EV adopters have already purchased vehicles, but mainstream car buyers are still hesitant to do so; they are worried about the technical aspects, costs, how many miles they can go on a single charge, and where to find charging stations.

Related: Elon Musk Announces the ‘Cybercab’ and Other Surprises at Tesla’s ‘We, Robot’ Event. Here’s What to Know.

As the cost of living continues to rise in the U.S., a family of four needs to earn more than ever to live “comfortably,” according to a new report by GOBankingRates.

Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center’s 2024 Cost of Living data series, GOBankingRates researchers analyzed annual living expenses for a family of four in all 50 states. For the report, a “living wage” is defined as the income required to cover 50% of necessities, 30% for discretionary spending, and 20% placed into savings.

The data tells an expensive story.

Every state’s living wage was at least $82,000 a year. In 26 states, a family of four has to earn at least $100,000 a year to be considered “financially secure,” while in four states, a family of four would need to earn $150,000 to have a living wage: Hawaii ($259K), Massachusetts ($200K), California ($188K), and New York ($155K).

Related: Millions of Americans Are Getting a Pay Bump This Year. Here’s Where.

States once considered “affordable,” according to the report, (Florida, Virginia, Wisconsin, and North Carolina) now require a family of four to earn more than $100,000 to be “comfortable.”

Here are the most and least expensive states with living wages needed for a family of four.

Least expensive:

1. West Virginia

• Living wage for a family of four: $82,338
• Annual cost of housing: $13,454
• Annual cost of groceries: $5,731
• Annual cost of healthcare: $7,465

2. Mississippi

• Living wage for a family of four: $87,564
• Annual cost of housing: $15,846
• Annual cost of groceries: $6,750
• Annual cost of healthcare: $7,373

3. Alabama

• Living wage for a family of four: $87,607
• Annual cost of housing: $15,670
• Annual cost of groceries: $6,675
• Annual cost of healthcare: $6,949

4. Kansas

• Living wage for a family of four: $87,944
• Annual cost of housing: $15,517
• Annual cost of groceries: $6,610
• Annual cost of healthcare: $7,141

5. Arkansas

• Living wage for a family of four: $88,312
• Annual cost of housing: $16,504
• Annual cost of groceries: $7,030
• Annual cost of healthcare: $6,617

Related: Young People Earning More Than $200,000 a Year Are Fleeing 1 U.S. State — and Flocking to 2 Others

Most expensive:

46. Alaska

• Living wage for a family of four: $136,990
• Annual cost of housing: $25,854
• Annual cost of groceries: $11,013
• Annual cost of healthcare: $11,290

47. New York

• Living wage for a family of four: $155,738
• Annual cost of housing: $37,354
• Annual cost of groceries: $15,912
• Annual cost of healthcare: $8,607

48. California

• Living wage for a family of four: $188,269
• Annual cost of housing: $45,891
• Annual cost of groceries: $19,549
• Annual cost of healthcare: $8,213

49. Massachusetts

• Living wage for a family of four: $199,671
• Annual cost of housing: $49,600
• Annual cost of groceries: $21,129
• Annual cost of healthcare: $10,033

50. Hawaii

• Living wage for a family of four: $258,918
• Annual cost of housing: $66,412
• Annual cost of groceries: $28,290
• Annual cost of healthcare: $9,540

Read the full report to see where all 50 states rank, click here.

Nvidia shares grew 171% in 2024, leading to newly minted billionaires.

Tench Coxe, 66, a member of Nvidia’s board since 1993, has earned a place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index for the first time, the publication reported on Thursday.

According to the Index, Coxe is now worth $5.4 billion. He’s Nvidia’s third-largest individual shareholder, with 32 million shares, behind Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang (75 million shares) and fellow board member Mark Stevens (38 million shares).

Coxe isn’t Nvidia’s only billionaire board member. Stevens made the Bloomberg Billionaires Index for the first time in July 2024 and has a net worth of $9.3 billion at the time of writing. Another board member who joined Nvidia when it was founded in 1993, Harvey Jones, has a $1 billion stake in Nvidia, per Bloomberg. Huang, also a board member, is worth over $120 billion. He was first recorded as a billionaire by Forbes in 2017.

Related: He Bought Nvidia Stock in 1993. Now It’s the Backbone of His $8.8 Billion Net Worth.

Coxe, Stevens, and Jones have each been Nvidia board members for more than 30 years. According to Bloomberg, their net worth coupled with Huang’s fortune makes Nvidia’s board one of the wealthiest in the world.

^{Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images}

It’s not just Nvidia’s top brass that has benefitted from the company’s stock jump — Nvidia’s over 2,200% surge over the past five years has made long-term employees multimillionaires.

Related: Employees Who Worked at This Company for the Past 5 Years Are Now Multi-Millionaires in ‘Semi-Retirement’

A June poll of over 3,000 Nvidia employees showed that 76% were millionaires and one-third were worth over $20 million. Nvidia has around 30,000 total employees.

Even though the majority of respondents were millionaires, an August Bloomberg report indicated they were still working hard. The report unpacked the culture and expectations at Nvidia and concluded that the company had a “pressure cooker” environment.

Still, Nvidia has no problems holding onto employees. Its sustainability report for fiscal year 2024 details that overall turnover was 2.7% compared to the industry average of 17.7%.

Related: ‘Pressure Cooker’: Why Millionaire Nvidia Employees Are Still Working Until 2 a.m.

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The following excerpt is from Mark Siebert‘s book The Franchisee Handbook: Everything You Need to Know About Buying a Franchise. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Apple Books | IndieBound

While every item on the franchise disclosure document (FDD) is important, some may be more important to you than others. One of the big-ticket items you should be paying attention to is money: what you must put into the franchise and what you get in return.

It would be wonder­ful if there were a simple calculation to figure out your cost ben­efit, but there just isn’t. Unfortunately, because the FDD is such a complex document, many prospective franchisees try to simplify it, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the items dealing with fees and services (Items 5, 6, and 8).

Frequently, prospective franchisees will focus on either the franchise fee or the royalty and compare it to the competitors’. At a glance, the lowest fee seems the most attractive. Unfortunately, that’s the equivalent of going to a used car lot and buying the cheapest car you can find.

Related: Smart Tips for Successfully Navigating the Initial Franchisor-Franchisee Interview

Focus on royalties

It’s a huge mistake to make your investment decision based on the initial franchise fee alone. While you want a franchise fee that’s reasonable and competitive, it’s only one component of your total investment, and in most franchises, it represents a relatively small fraction of that investment.

For most franchisors, the initial fee isn’t a significant profit center. They have costs associated with marketing the franchise, franchise sales, legal documentation, training their franchisees, and providing them with initial support until they’re up and operating — all of which is theoretically covered by the franchise fee. So, while fees in the tens of thousands of dollars just to join the system may seem excessive, this isn’t where the franchisor makes its money.

Royalties should be much more important in your decision-making process. Let’s say you choose to pay a royalty that’s one percent higher than the fee of a comparable franchise offering. On sales of $500,000, that represents an additional $100,000 throughout a 20-year agreement.

But shopping based on royalty alone isn’t the answer, either. If you were to go to that same car lot and someone were to offer you a ten-year-old Chevy for $50,000, you’d think they were crazy. But if they offered you a brand-new Ferrari for that same price, you’d jump at it. The real question, then, is not price, but value.

Related: Never Buy a Franchise Without Researching These 5 Sources

Understand the fees

At this point in your analysis, though, don’t try to assess the value. Just have a good understanding of the fees you’re likely to incur. In addition to the initial fee (found in Item 5), Item 6 of the FDD provides you with a table documenting all the fees the franchisor will collect from you. So, if the franchisor has a 5 percent royalty and a 1 percent technology fee, you’d pay a total of 6 percent. Go through this section closely to determine exactly what your commitments will be.

Also, be sure you understand how these fees are actually calculated. For example, while most franchisors charge franchise fees based on gross sales, some charge royalties based on gross profit (revenues minus the cost of goods sold). Some franchisors may have different definitions of “gross sales” — for example, excluding taxes or gift card revenues.

The one set of fees you may want to view differently as part of this analysis are your advertising fees, referral fees, or national accounts charges. Unlike most other fees, these fees are geared toward driving revenue to your business. As such, you should view them as non-incremental (as presumably, the franchisor has designed them); they’ll benefit you directly and are based on the franchisor’s assessment of what’s been historically necessary to drive business to your door.

This is also a good opportunity to take a look at Item 8 of the FDD, in which the franchisor must disclose any restrictions on the sources of products or services that will be imposed on you. Any franchisor that’s looking to control quality will dictate the sources of any products or services that will impact the integrity of the brand — and that ultimately affects your costs, fees, and bottom line. Frankly, it’s generally in the best interests of the entire network to ensure that the franchisor enforces these brand standards.

Related: Which Franchise is Right For You? Follow These Steps

Item 8 disclosures

On occasion, the franchisor may be one of several suppliers or even the sole designated supplier of certain products and services. Many franchisors will choose to sell products and/or services to their franchisees. This will also be disclosed in Item 8, along with the revenue (not profits) that the franchisor or its affiliates derived from those purchases. Item 8 is also where the franchisor discloses any rebates or other incentives it receives from designated suppliers.

When the franchisor sells to you, it should have the opportunity to make a reasonable profit from those sales. In many systems, the profit a franchisor makes on product sales may allow it to reduce the fees it charges in other areas, such as royalties. Likewise, we’ve seen several franchisors who will redistribute manufacturer’s rebates to their franchisees or who will contribute some or all of those rebates into their advertising fund for the benefit of all franchisees.

If the franchisee is acting as a captive channel of distribution for the franchisor, make a note of it here. Later in your diligence process, you can ask any franchisees you interview whether the franchisor’s pricing is reasonable.

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This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features JW Wiseman, founder of non-alcoholic craft cocktail company Curious Elixirs.

^{Image Credit: Nick Kova. JW Wiseman, founder of Curious Elixirs.}

Launched in 2015, Curious Elixirs generated $2.2 million in its first five years — and skyrocketed past $50 million in the past five years. The brand has served millions of customers in some of the best restaurants in the world, including Daniel and The French Laundry; at nightclubs like House of Yes; and in their own homes through its direct-to-consumer business. The brand is projected to do $176 million in revenue by 2030.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

What was your day job or primary occupation when you started your side hustle?
Helping clean food startups like Daily Harvest and Chomps get their first million customers through my marketing firm Good Business, along with opening a bar called The Whiskey Brooklyn and the nightclub OUTPUT. It took about five years before we had enough steady cashflow for me to commit full-time to Curious Elixirs.

Related: How to Start a Side Hustle With Facebook, From 4 People Who Did It and Are Earning More Than $1 Million a Year

When did you start your side hustle, and where did you find the inspiration for it?
Working in nightlife and being a huge cocktail nerd in New York City, I’ve loved hospitality for ages…and ended up drinking too much. One winter’s night in 2012, I had over 20 drinks, and the next day I didn’t even have a hangover — that was so scary. I changed my relationship with alcohol and started drinking less. But I still wanted to be social and have an elevated cocktail experience — it literally did not exist at that time. So I set out to create it.

What we did was craft complex cocktails without alcohol using the world’s best ingredients with inspiration from cocktails new and old. We collaborated with bartenders, food scientists and herbalists. And Curious Elixirs was born.

^{Image Credit: Courtesy of Curious Elixirs}

What were some of the first steps you took to get your side hustle off the ground?
Tinkering in the kitchen, reading books on herbs and taking a chance to make something that had never existed: a booze-free craft cocktail with herbs and adaptogens to help you unwind.

While working on an early hibiscus negroni recipe one Sunday morning, the name just struck me out of nowhere — Curious Elixirs — and I kept working on it until it was finally ready for testing at parties in Brooklyn and Queens.

Related: ‘Hustling Every Day’: These Friends Started a Side Hustle With $2,500 Each — It ‘Snowballed’ to Over $500,000 and Became a Multimillion-Dollar Brand

Back then, we had a hotel in Rockaway Beach called Playland Motel, and for opening weekend, I made a Curious Elixir. I didn’t even label it as non-alcoholic, but people kept drinking that far more than the booze. I knew I was on to something.

To more about the non-alcoholic space, I sought advice from hospitality pros, while also apprenticing with food scientists. I learned how to adapt bartending craft mocktails to then scaling beverage production, with clean-label ingredients of the highest quality from around the world.

Related: Has Dry January Really Lifted Non-Alcoholic Beverage Makers’ Spirits?

What were some of the biggest challenges you faced while building your side hustle, and how did you navigate them?
When Curious began as a business in 2015, many of the alcohol-free ingredient extracts that make a drink bitter or spicy — like gentian in our Curious No. 1 or ancho chili in Curious No. 2 — didn’t exist yet. Creating these extracts and blending them to make sophisticated non-alcoholic cocktails takes years of effort and experimentation.

Another challenge was filming Shark Tank in 2018, and having the segment not make the show. Curious Elixirs was ahead of its time, and the sharks just didn’t understand what a massive opportunity the non-alcoholic segment was going to become. It’s still early even though we’re 10 years in. At the time, we were often running out of product to sell, so it’s a blessing in disguise that it didn’t air.

^{Image Credit: Courtesy of Curious Elixirs}

Related: ‘I Just Hustled’: She Earned More Than $300,000 Wrapping Gifts Last Year — and It All Started With a Side Hustle

How long did it take you to see consistent monthly revenue? How much did the side hustle earn?
Because of my experience taking Daily Harvest national, we launched Curious Elixirs with a monthly subscription called The Curious Cocktail Club. People loved the drinks immediately, so we had consistency from the jump, but it was tiny from the start. During the first five years of side hustling with Curious Elixirs, we earned $2.2 million.

Curious was also ahead of the curve because we were creating the curve. It took five years before Curious could pay me enough to focus on it full-time…that was in January 2020.

When the pandemic hit we had two waves of newcomers to non-alcoholic options: Those who cut back on booze right as lockdown happened, and then a second wave of people who drank too much during quarantine and decided to get “sober curious.”

What does growth and revenue look like now?
Curious is about to turn 10 years old. Our first year we did about $176,000, and now each year we’re comfortably north of eight figures of revenue with 30% CAGR (compound annual growth rate). Curious Elixirs is proud to be just crossing $50 million in revenue in the last five years with a 20.8x brand growth rate — all without any outside investment.

^{Image Credit: Courtesy of Curious Elixirs}

Related: She Started a Side Hustle That Earned More Than $1 Million in Year 1: ‘Manifest Your Best Life’

What do you enjoy most about running this business?
Our mission has always been to transform how we drink socially, and the past few years, it has really accelerated! People are waking up to find that life with less booze can be more fun, creative and memorable.

What’s your advice for others hoping to start successful side hustles of their own?
Start today. Right now. Take five minutes and build a side hustle with small consistent actions. And always stay curious!

Staying on top of your personal finances has never been easy. Tracking every dime and dollar that goes through your account each month means that you need to keep a close eye on all your expenses and stick to a determined budget.

The thing is, keeping track of your finances and knowing how your money is being managed shouldn’t feel like work. A colorful array of automation tools can now be used to help manage your finances more efficiently, making sure you never miss a payment or spend more than you have.

Finance automation is a big part of learning how to overcome the uncertainty of how to manage your money and allow yourself room to become more confident with how you spend, transact and save your money each month.

Related: How Setting Clear Financial Goals Can Transform Your Business and Personal Success

Take stock of your expenses

Before you can automate your finances, start by listing all of your monthly expenses and the date on which they need to be paid. Be sure to include all recurring bills and expenses such as rent, utilities, insurance, loans and other important payments.

There’s likely a chance that some of these payments have already been set up to be debited from your account each month. Should that be the case, make sure that you are aware of when each payment is due and deduct it from your account.

Remember to account for when you are paid and how certain payments will be deducted should the due date fall on a weekend or holiday.

Know your accounts

Now that you have an idea of your expenses it’s time to learn how to use your bank accounts more effectively. Should you be someone who has multiple bank accounts and credit cards, be sure to organize your most important bills to deduct from the account where you will receive your salary.

Next, familiarize yourself with how you may be using each account. For instance, your primary checking account should be dedicated to paying important bills such as rent, utilities, and insurance. Your secondary checking account should be dedicated to ordinary expenses and less important bills.

By taking more control of each account, you can begin assigning automated payments for each of your bills. This way you will know when to have enough money in each account, and it will help you keep better track of your monthly expenses.

Automate savings

Saving shouldn’t fall to second place when automating all of your expenses. Instead, look at ways in which you can set up an automated savings account linked to your check account. This would allow you to set up a date and desired amount to be deducted from your salary, and deposited straight into your savings account. Without having to do it yourself, you can give yourself more peace of mind knowing that your emergency funds are being taken care of, as reported by Bankrate‘s 2024 emergency savings report.

Related: How to Save Money: 10 Tips to Build Your Savings

Use a banking app

By using a banking app you can quickly set up automated deposits without having to visit a bank branch. Some banking apps have a plethora of personal finance features such as budgeting tools,spending and portfolio trackers, loan calculators and plenty of other useful resources.

Banking apps also help you to keep track of your account balances and different payments you’ve made. For example, a banking app will help you categorize specific payments and assign accounts to each. You can view previous payments, and you can place an account on hold should the need arise.

Each bank will have a different app that they prefer their customers to use. Learn how to navigate the banking app and which tools have been designed to make financial management less complicated.

Set up reminders

You likely have dozens of payments each month, and staying on top of each one means that you constantly need to remind yourself when a bill is due. Instead of having to write this down in your calendar or diary, see whether you can set up automated reminders using your banking app. Include important payment information and what each payment is for.

For instance, paying for things such as subscription services, which can be done monthly, quarterly, or annually, requires you to remember when a payment is due. In fact, according to a survey from ExpressVPN, 66% of consumers pay for subscriptions monthly, while only 10% pay annually or make a large lump sum payment, potentially causing a so-called subscription fatigue.

There might be some bills that you are sharing with someone, or they have taken over from you in recent years, and vice versa. Each instance will be different but try to incorporate methods that will help you stay more informed.

Use a budgeting tool

Finding that your paycheck is being stretched to its limits each month? Well, instead of wondering where all your money is going, and how you’re spending it, take a look at how a digital budgeting tool can automate your spending habits.

Some banking apps may already have a budget tool feature, or you may need to make use of a third-party app. Whichever you choose to use, automating your budget will tell you exactly where your money is going each month and how you can make smarter spending decisions based on your financial situation.

Related: You Won’t Have a Strong Budget Until You Follow These 5 Tips

Finishing thoughts

Technology makes it possible for your money and accounts to be automatically managed. Learning how to automate certain accounts and payments and being able to leverage available tools will help you become more financially confident and ensure you keep better track of all your bills.

Monica Rothgery is a natural leader. She has trained army soldiers, managed fast-food restaurant teams, built international franchise locations, and wrote a book about it all called Lessons from the Drive-Thru: Real Life Wisdom for Frontline Leaders.

The leadership journey fueled her unique approach to restaurant management and a mission to uplift frontline leaders. Serving in the Army gave her important skills that the former KFC Chief Operating Officer carries to this day as an author and speaker.

“Getting trained by the U.S. Army to become an officer is some of the best leadership training there is,” Rothgery said to Shawn Walchef, host of the Restaurant Influencers podcast.

But when she transitioned from military leadership to managing a fast-food restaurant, culture shock set in. There was no manual for leading people who had no prior professional training.

She quickly learned that the expectations set for soldiers, who received weeks of even the most basic training, didn’t translate to the world of restaurant team members. Many were starting their first jobs.

“When I told soldiers they had to do something, they had to do it. If I told a team member to do something, they could just leave, and sometimes they did.”

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The lesson she learned was that to lead effectively in this new environment, Rothgery needed to inspire her team on a much deeper level.

Caring about these people as individuals first, not just team members, was the key to getting them to care about the restaurant and the customers. This was a big change from leading an army unit. To inspire differently, she had to care differently.

Storytelling and a passion for recognition are at the heart of Rothgery’s leadership philosophy.

Her career soon gave her opportunities to test these across cultures. When she moved to Southeast Asia to help build KFC locations in Thailand, she brought the idea of using stories to inspire and unite. “Does appreciation transcend culture?” she asked.

The results surprised her: by focusing on recognition, appreciation, and storytelling, she motivated her team to outperform even their own expectations. Language barriers and cultural differences didn’t stop them from becoming their best.

Despite the successes, she still had a tough road ahead. The local culture was so risk-averse. The pressure to succeed made the fear of failure immobilizing. She recalled a particularly humbling moment when her team in Thailand was slow to embrace her strategies.

“I told the team, ‘I’m going to teach whoever wants to learn,'” Rothgery said. Out of eight in the original meeting, only two people showed up for leadership training.

Over time, it worked. One of those in that training became the COO of a franchise group. “That was a win,” Rothgery reflected.

Lessons from the Drive-Thru

Rothgery’s book, Lessons from the Drive-Thru, takes readers behind the scenes of her journey. She shares the hard-earned wisdom from her toughest days as a frontline leader.

Written for restaurant managers, her book distills leadership down to its core: “This is every mistake I ever made, all of the bad shifts and late nights,” she explained.

The book focuses on the stories from Rothgery’s early career in the 1990s, particularly her time as a general manager at Taco Bell.

“Being a restaurant general manager was the hardest job I ever had, way harder than being in the army,” Rothgery said. “I quit every day in my head, but I always came back the next day.”

Her stories are raw and honest. She empathizes with restaurant teams because she has been with them in those trenches. She believes good leadership can leave a legacy and change someone forever.

“I wrote this book for frontline leaders,” Rothgery emphasized. “The ones who think their job is just running the next shift. But they have the power to shape lives—most importantly, the lives of the people they manage.”

For Rothgery, the real heroes of the restaurant industry are those in leadership who deal with the pressures of daily operations, customer satisfaction, and team dynamics. “Your job is so much bigger than you believe. You change lives,” she said, urging restaurant managers to see the immense value in their roles.

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“You’re not the bottom rung of the food chain in careers. You’re a coach, a teacher, a pillar in your community.”

As her book continues to reach more readers, Rothgery remains on a mission to empower restaurant teams and show their value in the industry. “My dream is to lift them up and help them realize their potential,” she said. In her next book, she plans to expand on unlocking that potential from the bottom up.

“Frontline leaders are so often doing the job of the person underneath them, but if we could get everyone doing their own role, we unlock growth.”

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