""I had two things I wasn't going to do," she tells Entrepreneur with a laugh. "I wasn't going to be a teacher, and I wasn't going to be a secretary. And, of course, I went to work as a secretary.""
"In 1994, her husband purchased 10 Captain D's restaurants in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The decision wasn't hers, she said, but she supported it while raising two young boys, one of whom was on the autism spectrum. "I was focused on my kids," Starnes says. "I didn't really think of it as my thing.""
"Starnes admits she was shy and inexperienced. But she quickly began hosting weekly manager meetings, trying to learn as much as possible from her more seasoned team. She spent nights at her kitchen table calculating food costs, down to the number of servings in a batch of coleslaw. "It wasn't pretty," she says. "As a matter of fact, some of it was kind of ugly. But I thought, I've got this opportunity, and I need to make it work.""
Lisa Starnes was 22 and working as a secretary at the then-parent company of Captain D's in the 1980s. In 1994 her husband purchased 10 Captain D's restaurants in the Dallas–Fort Worth area while they raised two young boys, one on the autism spectrum. A year later he suffered a heart attack and Starnes assumed leadership of a struggling 10-unit portfolio that had lost money in its first year. She hosted weekly manager meetings, studied food costs down to coleslaw servings, closed four underperforming stores after losing $700,000, and rebuilt the business into a $10 million enterprise.
Read at Entrepreneur
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