Corporate Green Thumb
Early on, José J. Cofiño of Pollo Campero discovered a gift for growing companies.
By Conrad Dahlson
Little do the folks at Taco Bell, Disneyland, Counterpoint Systems Inc., and Pollo Campero realize how much they owe a 79-year-old Cuban immigrant lady named Conchita Cofiño.
They’re actually millions of dollars in her debt according to her son, hotshot hospitality and restaurant executive José J. Cofiño, 48.
The man who in the course of his career made corporate turnarounds and voluminous sales increases for all those companies would never have had a career at all, he says, without mom’s drumbeat phrase as he was growing up: “Education, education, education.”
Doña Cofiño had just $200 in her purse when she brought nine-year-old Jose to the United States, but she kept up his studies from the time she cadged a parish priest into helping with his schooling to his graduation from Georgetown.
Not long out of college, Cofiño was snapped up by the PepsiCo (now YUM) Taco Bell chain - where he discovered a gift for growing companies that turned out to be a kind of corporate green thumb.
As Taco Bell vice president of the GoldenWest Zone he upped the number of restaurants from 180 to 320 while boosting store sales 25 percent. Then in the Northeast Zone his 500 Taco Bell restaurants topped $400 million in revenues.
Sent to Brazil as president of PepsiCo Restaurants International, he fattened total brand sales by 35 percent.
What’s his secret? “It all comes down to people,” Cofiño says. “You do a lot of networking to find talented, motivated people. It’s great to watch them become a team. You give them the right environment…and then as a leader you stand out of the way.”
From PepsiCo Cofiño was taken on as vice president of Disneyland to develop the 300,000-square-foot Downtown Disneyland retail, dining and entertainment complex.
More amazing growth occurred in the software sector when he engineered the sale of fresh ground software, LLC, to Counterpoint Systems, Inc, a move that exploded into a ten-fold sales increase in only 10 months.
Now Cofiño is president and CEO for Adir Restaurants Corp., managing the firm’s wildly popular Pollo Campero restaurants for six western states that serve some 2,500 diners each on any weekend day.
Maybe his success “all comes down to people” because he likes to see his protégés climb the ladder of success “just like mom moved me forward,” he says. “I’ve created a lot of valuable companies, but I’m proudest of seeing people who worked for me in top positions.”
If many leading executives owe a lot to José Cofiño, he’ll tell you he owes it all to mom.
