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In training
Former Hooters girl gives a hoot about how chain's perceived
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Kat Cole refers to her climb up the corporate ladder as a Cinderella story. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. While the fairy-tale heroine relied on a ragtag team of rodents to outfit her for the royal ball and then waited passively for the prince to return her glass slipper, Cole took charge of her destiny at an early age. And, ironically she made the move from Hooters girl to vice president of training and development in a seemingly male-dominated concept that trades on women’s sex appeal. “In nine-and-a-half years I went from orange shorts to vice president,” she says.
In 1998, Hooters was looking for its best trainer to open a new store in Sidney, Australia. When management approached Cole, who was still in her teens at the time, she said she’d get right back to them and then called her mother to ask how she could get a passport. The two discovered that if she went to Miami, she could get a passport in one day. Cole, who had never been on a plane—“I had hardly been out of Jacksonville (Fla.),” she interjects—flew to Miami that same day, got her passport, flew back, worked her evening shift and then called corporate back the following day to let them know that, yes, she did have a passport and would love the opportunity. “In 36 hours my life was changed,” she says.
Cole spent five weeks in Sidney, where “fell in love with training,” she says.
At 20, Cole—who was too young to rent a car when she traveled for the company—went to the Bahamas to open the Hooters restaurant there. “I showed up and there was no roof, the floors weren’t finished and tables weren’t assembled. The workers were on Island time,” she says, adding in order to stay late to get the job done, they wanted triple pay.
The humidity had ruined the crystal sheen on the table tops and bar and had to be repoured six times to get it right. “I learned how to pour the liquid sheen, which is an art, by the way,” she says. And, to top it all off, portions of the kitchen equipment weren’t completely assembled.
She told her training team that either they leave paradise and go home, or they pitch in and help.
“Not getting it done was not an option,” she says. “It never occurred to me to go home.”
It was daunting, but she took in stride. “It’s all about perspective,” she explains. “What better place to build a refrigerator than in the Bahamas?”
Learning self-reliance
Cole was the oldest of three daughters, raised by a single mother. “‘Can’t’ wasn’t in our vocabulary,” she says. “We had limited money and if my mother paid for cheerleading camp, I knew I had to knock it out of the park, because someone else (in the family) was missing out on something in order for me to be a cheerleader.”
Because her mother worked long hours, Cole was given grown-up responsibility at a young age. “I had to take care of the girls until I could work at 15,” she says. “We were left alone a lot and I had to figure it out. I was told to feed the girls, but I wasn’t told how to do it.”
And, while it was her movie-star looks—she’s a double for Tom Cruise’s wife Katie Holmes, only better looking—coupled with her natural exuberance that was the winning combo for getting a greeters’ job at Hooters when she was 17, she’s “always gotten the bigger picture.”
“This is going to sound so Miss America, but it’s not. I’m improving the world one person at a time,” she says. That “one person” refers to her staff at corporate, the women who man the front of the house and the customers. The managers at Hooters are the “Mayors of Hootersville”—they’re “the host of a party” every day, she says.
Hooters is supposed to be fun, she adds—it’s in their mission statement.
 Hooters Girls are trained to acknowledge women and children first, and to read a table to see how much interaction is wanted, according to Kat Cole, center. |
Cole even thinks it’s fun—well, maybe not fun, but certainly an intriguing challenge—to defend her concept. She remembers being at a Women’s Foodservice Forum conference a couple of years ago where the women at her roundtable snickered when Hooters was flashed on the screen as a silver sponsor of the event.
Rather than be insulted, Cole took it as an opportunity to educate her peers in the restaurant industry about the company that’s been good to and for her. “All of the front of the house are females who put themselves through college, who are mothers and who move up through the (ranks of) the company,” she says. “It wasn’t just me (who was promoted), I’ve seen people ahead of me and behind me move up. Almost all the directors at the company are women,” she adds.
She’s handled a smorgasbord of challenges from finding a way to convince her entire Brazilian staff of Hooters girls that it wasn’t demeaning to serve men while wearing a skimpy outfit (this in a country with nude beaches, she marvels), to keeping the brand alive during a legal battle between the founders and the company that bought the rights to franchise the concept.
“The skills I learned in the orange shorts still serve me today,” she says.
