SEASON 1: EPISODE 5 TRANSCRIPT
Looking Forward, Giving Back: A Baker’s Recipe for Success
Cordia Harrington: When you hit a wall or you get down or you get depressed, the first thing you should do is go help somebody else. Because that will change your mindset and it will reset your heart. Do something for somebody else, and that'll help straighten you out quicker than anything else.
Dr. Greg Jones: Our world is facing significant challenges, and at every turn, another conflict seems to await, yet we survive, we overcome, we even thrive by relying on an intangible and undeniable gift. Hope, it fills us, connects us, highlights our individual purpose and unites us in the goal to do more together. Hope fuels us toward flourishing as people and as a community. My name is Greg Jones, president of Belmont University, and I'm honored to be your guide through candid conversations with people who demonstrate what it really means to live with hope and lean into the lessons they've picked up along their journey. They are The Hope People.
Today's champion of hope is Cordia Harrington, also known as the Bun Lady. Cordia is the founder and CEO of Crown Bakeries, serving brands like McDonald's, Pepperidge Farms, and Five Guys. Her company's revenue tops over $400 million, and she's recently ranked in Forbes Top 100 List of America's self-made women for 2023. The Cordia story started as a single mother of three struggling to make ends meet. As an agent of hope, Cordia believes in empowering others by creating opportunities to improve their lives and the lives of others. She does so by investing and lifting up those who need a helping hand in hopes that one day they too will pay it forward and do the same.
I want to begin just by asking you about where you're seeing signs of hope in your own life and in your work. What's giving you hope these days?
Cordia Harrington: I love the sparkle in the eyes of new associates that have joined us and they see a future, a future career, and I get very excited about that hope. I see hope in my grandkids' eyes. Everything to them is joy, and everything with them is joyful. I love coming to Belmont campus where the students are so talented in so many different ways, and I leave here leaving inspired and excited about future generations.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's great. You're an agent of hope, a person who inspires that kind of hope and joy in others. I want to ask you about where you found signs of hope as you were growing up and getting started in your own business career, who were exemplars who inspired hope in you?
Cordia Harrington: I've always been a person of faith. In fact, when I felt hopeless or had a big setback, it was my faith that renewed the hope and the belief that tomorrow's going to be better than today. So I would say I'm grounded in faith, but as a little girl, my dad and mom neither went to college. I was first in my family to go to school, but we had cousins, Roy West and Hatch, lived in Waco. I was born in Waco, Texas. When we would visit Waco, we would get to go to their country club. Wow. I'd never been to a country club. And then their cousin Beverlin would send me clothes every year and I'd get so excited to get to wear Beverlin's clothes to school.
So I saw hope in families that I trusted and felt close to. And I think as I look through my life, whether it's friends or family, you see something that looks exciting and that you, "oh, I hope I get to do that one day. Oh, I know them. If they can do that, maybe I can do that." And I think that it boils down to we get hope from other people and sometimes we give hope and we don't even realize we're doing it.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's beautiful. You talk about being first generation to go to college, and I love the story of you going to the University of Arkansas, I think a Home Ec major?
Cordia Harrington: It's correct, a Home Ec major.
Dr. Greg Jones: Kind of our journey from Home Ec to business entrepreneur. Talk about your time in college and your kind of early years as a single mom.
Cordia Harrington: Well, at the time my dad said, "You need to experience this and you can go for one year." And I got there and I loved it. And I wasn't about to not finish because I had met the greatest people, had the greatest experiences. So I worked several jobs and paid for my way through. And then I fell in love with my college sweetheart, Bill, and I didn't even know anybody that had been divorced. And so going through a divorce when my kids were one, three and five, I was super sad because I was very much in love with them.
And I was super alone because I was ashamed, ashamed that I failed with the most important thing in my life and I didn't want anybody to know, I mean, how stupid is that? But it was a time where everything shifted in my life and all of a sudden every focus had to be on how I was going to care for and provide for my three sons. So I started out in the real estate business and bartered from my office and leased my chairs and desks, $1.50 a month per chair, $3 a month for the office from Burs office machine, who's still in business, believe it or not.
And built a real estate company, back then in '81, interest rates were 17.5% and the bankers thought I was crazy, and it was the first woman owned business in the state at the time, But it worked. And we just did simple things like if a house looked cluttered, we'd go in and clean it up before we put it on the market. If a house was extreme, hot pink walls or red walls, we'd paint them white, things that are called staging today. We just called it common sense back then. And through that experience, I was lucky enough to get to meet the Foyer Han family who moved to town to buy the McDonald's. I sold them a home. They lived right on the lake. They had a beautiful car. They spent a lot of time with their kids.
So when they said to me, "You work really hard, you ought to buy a McDonald's." I'm like, I didn't even know until that point that you could own a McDonald's. And I loved their lifestyle, where they were with their family, they had two children, a boy and a girl, and they got to spend every weekend with them. Well, me, single mom, using a college student when I had to go out to work, real estate was very much nights and weekends as you can imagine.
Dr. Greg Jones: You opened a real estate business and first woman owned business. I think part of what inspires hope is that future orientation, which is also that kind of entrepreneurial spirit that looks at what could be not what currently is. Was that true of you growing up?
Cordia Harrington: I believe so. At the time I thought it was a curse because I couldn't go into any situation and just be satisfied. I had to improve it, I had to fix it, I had to move it around. Didn't matter if I was president of Junior Auxiliary, which I was in Russellville, I could always see a better way. And I think my dad and my mom gave me that freedom. They just said you could do anything you'd set your mind to. So it never crossed my mind that I had to accept the way things were. I was always glad to challenge the status quo or to try something new or to make money in ways. It just the love and support I got from my family gave me the confidence to give things a try.
Dr. Greg Jones: It's amazing. When you talk about getting divorced with three young kids, a lot of people that would be a setback, hard to recover from. You've always been resilient. Where did that come from, that resilience and ability to keep looking forward?
Cordia Harrington: Well, believe me, I have cried myself to sleep plenty of nights. So it's easier to talk about today. It was very hard. I felt very bad about myself and I thought a lot less of myself for being in the situation of going through a divorce. But inside it clicks, you go I can either wallow in this or I can look forward and try to figure out a better life for me and my kids. And I think when you've got other people depending upon you, then it's easier to say, I might not want to go down this path for me, but boy, I want to do it to make them proud or to give them the things that I want to give them or give them the opportunities, the education. And if you think about life today, isn't it more fun when we're trying to help others get ahead or reach their goals? So I just think it was a hard but important life lesson.
Dr. Greg Jones: Well, you've lived it so well, so you get into the franchise ownership world.
Cordia Harrington: Yes.
Dr. Greg Jones: And you had acquired how many?
Cordia Harrington: I bought one in Effingham, Illinois. Great little town at 10,000, right on the interstate between St. Louis and Chicago. And then I had the blessing and opportunity to build two more. So I owned three and they kept inviting me to own more because I think I was a very good operator. I took really good care of my people and I held the standards very high in my organization. But that's hard work. We were all in there just pounding it out, trying to hire the right people, take care of our customers and do what McDonald's wanted us to do. It was such a privilege to have that opportunity.
Dr. Greg Jones: It's amazing. Now, you along the way discovered that you were interested perhaps in trying to talk McDonald's into outsourcing-
Cordia Harrington: Well, the men in my co-op, we were all assigned to different committees. Co-op is an advertising group where people pull their money together and they share an advertising expense, TV, radio, all of that. So our co-op advertising group was Central Illinois, the central Illinois Co-op, of which I was a member and the only woman, the only woman in the state, the only woman in several regions. But I had to miss a Co-op meeting. I guess it was maybe I was even there. They thought it would be fun to put me on the bun committee. So I took it as a joke and I went to the bun committee meeting, which was held in Kansas City, and I loved it, Greg. They talked about flour prices in Russia, and sesame seeds in Guatemala and global supply chain and pricing protocols.
And I would come back to report on my bun committee meetings and they'd go, "Okay, zip it. that's enough. We don't want to hear anymore." But I was so excited about it. And then I learned through that committee that McDonald's wanted to have diversity in their supply chain, and I just knew that was me. I just knew that I would be the perfect diverse supplier for them. I mean, I went to interviews. I sent pictures of myself standing in front of flower silos. I got a baseball signed by Red Schoendienst who is a cardinal that's in the Hall of Fame and said, I want to be your Hall of Fame baker. I drove them nuts. They told me no. Over a four year period of time, 31 times, no, no, no. When they finally said yes, I was on cloud nine because it's yes with a handshake. So it was more important to McDonald's that I really understood how McDonald's works, that I understood how to make a bakery work.
Dr. Greg Jones: Being told no 31 times.
Cordia Harrington: But you know what? If you really think about it, look at the talent that's come out of Belmont in the music industry. I wonder how many times Brad Paisley and Trisha Yearwood and different ones told no, or that they didn't have the right sound. And I think that this story is perfect for any industry, any goal that you may have. You just keep asking the question to different people in different ways until you get your yes. No's not an option.
Dr. Greg Jones: It's a great lesson for all of us, and it's not easy to be told no, it's got to dent your confidence every now and again. How do you pick yourself back up to get to that yes?
Cordia Harrington: Yeah, I would get close and I would think, oh, this is it. This is going to really work. And in the meantime, that was a national level with the corporate people at McDonald's. The local regional man, Kevin Dunn, the president of our local region, was trying to have me expand my restaurants, so they would dangle like Augusta, Georgia, there were eight restaurants out there, you need to go buy those. Or they kept offering me different pools and so I was prayerfully trying to figure out what got had in mind. Well, my gut was telling me I could do this. I could really be a supplier, and I was determined to take that path over the restaurant for one key reason. And it goes back to my children because if you look at my plants, they're highly automated and the people that we have are skilled workers that have a great income. I could offer great career paths to people in the baking industry.
And you know what that did? That gave me time with my sons. So it was very motivated. I didn't like the work I had to do along the way, but seeing that the goal would be that I would actually have more time with my kids, kept me focused on figuring out a way to make it happen.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's great. Talk about the development of the Bun company and then it continuing to grow.
Cordia Harrington: Okay. The first bakery opened in Dixon, Tennessee to serve seven state area buns for McDonald's, and that was in April of '97. And over the course of the years, we grew and added an English muffin line to make the breakfast sandwich for McDonald's in '99 in Nashville. And then we started a biscuit line to serve Tennessee Pride biscuits. We were doing Pepperidge Farms, Sara Lee, and we kept growing, but a big change took place in '19, about three months before Covid hit, I was at an American Bakery Association dinner and 500 people in the room, randomly I'm seated next to a guy named Greg Purcell, who was the founder of Arbor Capital out of Chicago, and they only invest in food companies. And we were just chatting about how we saw the future of this industry, what it would take to succeed in this environment.
And it was like I found my brother from a different mother. And we had so much fun talking about it, and I'd say, but I think we need to do da, da, da, he'd go, "I was thinking the same thing." It was just a magic conversation. So about a week later, he came to Nashville and about a week after that I went to Chicago and 67 days later, what we wrote out on that napkin at that dinner happened when he became my partner. We owned 100% of the business until that point and invested a bucket of money for our growth for the future. And it's very exciting, today we have nine plants across the US. We built a plant in Guatemala for mission work, but the plants that we've got in the US are big and beautiful. We've added, I believe, five lines within the nine plants.
We did a lot of it going through Covid, and when I look at how God timed all that, I just have to sing his praises because the alternative to that would've been that three months later when Covid hit and all of our restaurants shut down, I couldn't have cash flowed and I would've been laying on the bed in the fetal position with all of our family's net worth tied up in these bakeries. And as it was to have a partner that was like-minded faith-based, same vision, he's going, "Don't worry, we'll get through this. Let's just buy another one. Let's just buy another one." So he gave me hope during those times when had I been alone or just my leadership team, just my family, we would've been scared to death.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's a beautiful story of friendship, and when I think about your story from first generation student, Home Ec major, the University of Arkansas to business entrepreneur and CEO of Crown Bakeries, that's a pretty extraordinary story because that entrepreneurial spirit that you've embodied throughout your life is so much a part of the fabric of this university and that kind of we can if, and just always looking aspirationally at what the future can be, and there is something about the kind of, well, why not? When you think about that kind of entrepreneurial mindset, what advice do you have for young people?
Cordia Harrington: I think the most important thing that we can share with people getting started is to look at the real goal where you want to be, and if I use my own life as an example, I really wanted to be able to play a major role in raising my children. I did the job of owning and running restaurants because when I got my restaurant, that's what I thought I'd be able to do. I was doing real estate nights and weekends, and I knew that wasn't working. Yeah, I was making the money, but I wasn't there when the kids were home from elementary school and on the weekends when they wanted to play soccer and baseball. And I know my own kids, we all want to come right out of school and be president of a company, but just keep the big goal in mind while you're doing the mundane things to set you up to be successful when you get to the big goal.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's wise advice.
Cordia Harrington: And there's no shortcuts.
Dr. Greg Jones: Yeah. You've been involved in Belmont for quite a while now. Why stay involved?
Cordia Harrington: I love the entrepreneurial approach and how no matter what college you're in Belmont, we send the message that you can reach your dreams. And it's not rigid, it's not pass or fail. It is how can we help give you the tools you need to reach your dreams? During my life, I've tried to do three things in business and in my personal life, and it's create opportunities, make a difference, and impact lives. And Belmont fits right in that, and I believe that the little bit of work I can do here, hopefully it feeds into the big initiative of from Belmont to anywhere.
Dr. Greg Jones: As a country that's been challenging with Covid and mental health challenges and young people particularly are disoriented. And what advice do you have for someone who's feeling discouraged?
Cordia Harrington: That's easy. When you hit a wall or you get down or you get depressed, the first thing you should do is go help somebody else, because that will change your mindset and it will reset your heart because that act, whether it's opening a door for somebody walking in a building, or whether it's making a meal and taking it to them, or whether it's making a phone call to your grandmother or your mom or your dad or somebody that you know they want to hear from you, do something for somebody else and that'll help straighten you out quicker than anything else.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's really wise advice, and it gets back to that pouring into somebody else that is often so inspiring for ourselves so when we can reach out in those ways. Also, what I love about you is the way you're always looking at what's next and new opportunities and new possibilities. When I see you, it always feels like you're just starting out. You're so excited about the next possibility.
Cordia Harrington: Thank you.
Dr. Greg Jones: You give a lot of hope through employment and empowerment. Talk about how that philosophy has been embedded in who you are and how you've built your organization.
Cordia Harrington: Well, as an entrepreneur, I remember that feeling of awe, that twinkle in my eye, that awe at opportunities, and I am grateful. I can name every person along the way that gave me a chance, and owning these bakeries has given me the chance to do the same for others. One of our plants here in Nashville off of Armory Drive, 87% of our workforce is immigrants, and they have that sparkle in their eye. They've left their family and friends and come to America to try to give their children a better life, and it's an absolute privilege to help. We've been able to help them get cars. We've been able to help them get homes. We've been able to help them build homes. And it inspires me to see that sparkle and their hard work and all they're trying to do is the same thing I was trying to do, give a better life for my ki
Dr. Greg Jones: Thank you for participating in this conversation with The Hope People. Our aim is to inspire you to become an agent of hope yourself, and to help us cultivate a sense of wellbeing for all. To join our mission and learn more about this show, visit thehopepeoplepodcast.com. If you enjoyed this conversation, remember to rate and review wherever you get your audio content.