Learning
to Speak
Franch(ise)
Shedding corporate culture took
some doing for Ellen Hui
BY DEBBIE SELINSKY
When native San Franciscan Ellen Hui left a career in
banking in 1989 to take on her first Popeyes Chicken &
Biscuits restaurant, she experienced a big culture shock.
“I was as dumb as they come,” she recalls. “In banking, there was a certain lingo and way of dressing and talking. The restaurant was a different culture of service, and it took me a long time to understand that.”
Before that epiphany, her assistant manager Alex had to say to Hui—more
than once—“Lady, go to the back and let me take care of this,” Hui recalls. “I
didn’t know how to handle customers’ complaints. If they said, ‘I don’t want this
piece,’ I just said, ‘Why not? They’re all the same size.’ I didn’t realize that I
should just smile and give the customers what they wanted.”
She can smile now when she remembers those growing pains, because she has
a firm grasp on the nuances of customer service, the restaurant business, franchising, real estate development, and running her own company, EBR Investments,
in San Francisco, as president and CEO.
Hui says she doesn’t sleep much, but she wakes up invigorated. “I love getting
up in the morning, I love my family, I love my employees, supervisors, managers,
and customers,” she says.
