Stewart, Julia

Chief Executive Officer of International House of Pancakes

B orn Julia A. Stewart in 1955 in Visalia, CA;daughter of Dan Stewart (a history and civicsteacher) and a physical education teacher; married Jon Greenawalt (divorced); married Tim Ortman (a filmmaker), August, 2007; children: Alec, Aubrey (from first marriage). Education: Attended the University of California—Santa Barbara, c. 1973-74; San Diego State University, B.A., 1977.

Addresses: Office—IHOP, 450 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale, CA 91203-1903.

Career

R egional marketing director, Carl’s Jr. Restaurant,1978-80; regional marketing manager, BurgerKing Corporation, 1980-84; marketing director, Spoons Grill & Bar/StuartAnderson’s BlackAngus/ Cattle Co. Restaurants, 1985, vice president for marketing, 1986-91; assistant general manager, Taco Bell/Yum! Brands, 1991, became western region vice president for operations, then national vice president for franchising and licensing, 1997-98; president of domestic division, Applebee’s International, Inc., 1998-2001; president and chief operating officer, International House of Pancakes (IHOP), 2001, chief executive officer, 2002, board chair, 2006.

Sidelights

J ulia Stewart has served as president and chief executive officer of International House of Pancakes(IHOP) since 2001. Her tenure has been one of tremendous success for the U.S. casual-dining chain, almost all of whose 1,328 restaurants operate under the franchise model. Though she had spent much of her career with other players in the restaurant business, including Taco Bell and Applebee’s, Stewart actually began her career at an IHOP restaurant back in the early 1970s as a teenaged waitress. When she was offered the top job in 2001, she told Los Angeles Business Journal writer Emily Bryson York, she felt “that little tug on my heart saying, ‘Oh my God, I started there as a food server, I get to go home.’”

Stewart was born in 1955 in Visalia, California, a farming community in the San Joaquin Valley, the agricultural center of the state. Her mother taught physical education, and her father taught American history and civics. Both viewed teaching as one of the most honorable of professions, and hoped their only child would follow them into it. “I remember going to class with my mom, seeing how unruly the kids were and thinking, ‘This is so much effort for so little money,’” she recalled in an interview with New York Times journalist Claudia H. Deutsch.

Stewart landed her first job as an IHOP waitress when she was around 15 years old. She was immediately entranced by the food service business. “I loved that you got feedback everyday,” she ex plained to York in the Los Angeles Business Journal interview. “You didn’t work a shift without learning what you did and didn’t do. How it worked, how many re-fires, how many tips. There was always some mechanism for knowing how you delivered upon their expectations and I loved that.”

Stewart won a scholarship to the University of California, but disliked the radical atmosphere of its Santa Barbara campus. She transferred to San Diego State University and planned to major in speech therapy, but some marketing communications classes she took ignited a desire to study business instead; she theorized that being a manager would be a form of teaching, because she would be im-parting knowledge and serving as a mentor. Nevertheless, her decision was a rebuke of sorts back home. “My parents were incredibly disappointed,” she recalled in the New York Times interview with Deutsch. “My father kept shaking his head, saying, ‘We raised you to believe that money isn’t the most important thing.’”

After graduating from San Diego State University in 1977, Stewart became a regional marketing director for Carl’s Jr. Restaurants, a popular Southern California fast-food chain. In 1980, she went to work for the Burger King Corporation as a regional marketing manager, and after four years moved on to Stuart Anderson’s Black Angus steakhouse chain, where she had noticeable results in reinvigorating the brand and bringing new customers into its dining rooms. She had long harbored a dream to some day run a company on her own, but knew she needed more than just marketing expertise to rise to the top of the executive ladder. To gain the required skills in balance sheets and profit and loss, in 1991 Stewart signed on with a management training program run by Taco Bell, which was owned by PepsiCo Inc. at the time. She spent her first six months as the assistant general manager at a Taco Bell—a move that her friends and family saw as a step down.

But Stewart’s management skills were quickly recognized by her mentors in the training program, and she rose rapidly through Taco Bell’s ranks to become its western regional vice president for operations, overseeing 1,000 restaurants and, in 1997, its national vice president for franchising and licensing. In 1998, she was hired by Applebee’s International, Inc. to run its U.S. division. She improved the bar and grill chain’s numbers with a new ad campaign under the slogan, “Eating Good in the Neighborhood.” She had been hired at Applebee’s, however, with the assumption that her position was a stepping stone to eventually running it altogether. She went to see its chief executive officer, Lloyd Hill, and said, “‘It’s been three years. It’s time,’” she told David Farkas in Chain Leader. “He said, ‘Nah, I don’t think so.’ And I said, ‘Then it was probably best to leave.’”

Stewart, the mother of two, spent a few months out of work before IHOP invited her to become its president and chief operating officer in December of 2001. At the time, she was the only woman who was running a publicly traded restaurant company in the United States. Within a year, she advanced to the post of chief executive officer, and in 2006, added board chair to her list of job duties. IHOP’s recognizable A-frame restaurants, topped by distinctive bright-blue roofs, had been an American landmark for decades, but had struggled to hang on to customers in the 1990s in a much more crowded field. Stewart went to work revising the franchise model, and changed it so that IHOP now helped its fran-chisers secure credit to build their own restaurants, rather than the previous method in which IHOP bore the construction costs for new units.

As Stewart had predicted, franchisees now had more of a personal stake in seeing their businesses succeed, and the numbers improved. The stock price for IHOP also rose, doubling between 2002 and 2006. In August of 2007, Stewart led a bid to take over her former employer, Applebee’s, which was now in serious financial trouble. The $2.1 billion deal went forward, and IHOP acquired the 508 company-owned Applebee’s restaurants, the largest casual-dining chain in the United States. Her plan involved turning them into franchise units.

Some IHOP franchisees refer to Stewart as “the Velvet Hammer” for her management style. Even her parents came to view her choice of career as a positive one in which she could contribute to society. Her father once came along one day on her Taco Bell job as she visited several restaurants. Seeing how she served as a mentor to her staff, who were mostly teenagers, he apologized for doubting her choices so many years before. “He said, ‘You do teach, you do coach, and I really am proud of you,’” Stewart recalled in New York Times interview with Deutsch. “I still tear up when I talk about this.”