Entrepreneur Resources Your source for small business information
With over 25 years of executive-level experience across the hospitality and broader consumer industries, Kimberly Grant brings a unique perspective to every role she takes on. This is evident in her current capacity as an independent director for Performance Food Group (PFGC), a Fortune 100 company specializing in food distribution. At PFG, she has demonstrated her ability to influence operational excellence across pivotal strategic and financial decisions as the company has achieved continued growth.
Throughout her career as a chief executive and board member, Grant has capitalized on her extensive leadership experience while putting the focus on driving innovation. “Innovation is your approach, and quality is your execution,” she explained in a recent interview. Embracing innovation as a vehicle for change has helped Grant’s companies through difficult stretches and positioned them for long-term success, keeping creativity and agility at the forefront of her approach.
Kimberly Grant’s ability to see the big picture when it comes to strategy and achieving goals has helped the companies she has led and advised to experience marked success. This has included guiding numerous companies through vital merger and acquisition opportunities and achieving watermark enterprise valuations. Grant attributes her unique leadership style to her diverse background in operations and finance, which has given her the ability to understand the finance and logistics aspects of business and piece those together to drive sustainable growth.
Kimberly Grant on Remaining Adaptable in the Face of Change
Grant’s comprehensive approach to business operations has significantly contributed to the success of her brands, even in the most difficult times. The COVID-19 pandemic presented extensive challenges to organizations worldwide, and the food service industry in particular remained altered ever since. Using innovation and creativity as guideposts, Grant helped the companies she advised to navigate the ever-changing landscape and not only survive during a very difficult time but to thrive as the new normal emerged.
Adaptability is also a strong point when analyzing Kimberly Grant’s approach to corporate operations and strategy. She understands that consumer interests and needs have shifted drastically in a post-pandemic world. By remaining agile and creative, Grant has helped brands create more than products and services meeting guests where they are and focusing on the value of the experience.
“Consumers are desperately seeking frictionless service experiences and are willing to pay more and at times be inconvenienced in order to get the service and quality they desire,” Grant shares. Post-pandemic, Grant believes many brands have taken advantage of the consumer, increasing prices to the point where the value equation is now broken. All brands, regardless of price point or sector, need to be cautious about the value equation because at a certain point, guests will simply lapse or seek other alternatives.
Kimberly Grant’s Focus on Innovation
As someone who has built a career on pushing boundaries and driving change, Kimberly Grant understands the importance of staying ahead of the curve in today’s fast-paced business environment. By remaining innovative and ready to try new approaches while adapting quickly to what works and what does not, her teams can quickly implement new campaigns, products, or services that address ever-changing market needs.
“Innovation is about the art of the possible and not giving boundaries to approaches,” she explained. “Be open-minded about any approach that is acceptable.” Grant believes that this adaptable attitude can lead brands to some of their more successful ideas. In one example, she shared that, while brainstorming with her team during her tenure with the Four Seasons, they landed on the concept of what it truly means to be epic. This evolved into a philosophy that permeated the entire company and ultimately drove guest experiences.
Grant’s attention is not solely placed on generating new ideas. Holding her teams to a high standard for quality is just as critical. Whether working with luxury brands or services at more accessible consumer price points, Kimberly Grant takes pride in her work. She pushes everyone around her to pursue quality and excellence in all efforts. For her, successful work is about doing “the very best quality for what you do,” regardless of the industry, target audience, or end product.
How Kimberly Grant Helps Fuel Company Growth
All of this hard work manifests itself in growth for the companies Kimberly Grant helps lead. She brings a passion for growth to her role as an independent director and strategic advisor to emerging growth companies, specifically looking for new ways to help the companies expand market penetration while retaining and nurturing existing customers. With a track record of driving market expansion and revenue growth in her previous roles, she takes a bold approach without throwing caution aside.
“I always caution when you’re going through that growth is, you want to grow fast, but you don’t want to grow faster than you can manage and you can control,” Grant shared. “And that’s hard to know, like: When should you start franchising? If you start too late, you miss the window. If you start too early, you might not be ready. So, I think that’s a real point of inflection for a lot of brands and a lot of companies.” There is a dramatic difference between a company that grows and a growth company. Grant works with founders and CEOs to help organize the critical building blocks needed to be a successful growth company and guards against growing for the sake of growing at all costs.
For Grant, the opportunity to help guide organizations forward is both a privilege and a responsibility. She remains committed to using her unique perspective and expertise to serve each company’s mission and values. “A lot of companies have way too much going on, and they’re unfocused,” she observed. “And so, as a result, they’re not as effective or as results-oriented as they could be if they were more focused. And so I like to advise people, and I’ve done this when I lead organizations, is to come up with operating tenets.”
These tenets help Kimberly Grant’s companies combine innovation with teamwork and a growth model that can amplify the areas that her businesses excel in. Honing in on the exact products, services, and messaging that best resonate and integrate with customers can help companies accelerate their growth while remaining strategic and cautious, as needed. “What I mean by operating tenets is that it’s like you have to have three or four governing criteria that if you’re going to go into a new business, you’re going to go into a new project, you’re going to take on a new client. It has to fit within a framework of what you’re best at and why you exist.”
In all of the roles Kimberly Grant takes on, she brings a novel approach to innovative, strategic corporate operations. From bolstering efforts to communicate strategy plans and helping emerging companies craft capital raising campaigns, she has a hands-on, tactical methodology that enables her to use her vast executive experience to inform agile and long-term strategy.
