Tracy Britt Cool has spent the last five years getting schooled on spotting talent and running a business. Now she’s the newest female CEO in the Berkshire portfolio.
Just after graduating from Harvard Business School in 2009, Tracy Britt Cool showed up on Berkshire Hathaway’s (BRK.A)(BRK.B)Â door. In her arms: a bushel of sweet corn and tomatoes from her family’s farm in Manhattan, Kansas. She hoped to woo the company’s famed CEO Warren Buffett (Trades, Portfolio) into hiring her. It worked. The following fall, Cool joined Berkshire as Buffett’s financial assistant.
Five years later, Buffett’s giving Cool, now 30, her first big operating role. On Monday, the Oracle of Omaha announced that Cool will become the CEO of Pampered Chef on November 1, replacing founder and current chief Doris Christopher, a home economics teacher who started the Pampered Chef in 1980 by selling kitchen tools from her basement. Christopher will remain at the company as chairman. In 2002, Berkshire bought the company, which sells its products through a network of independent consultants, mimicking the Tupperware business model. The price wasn’t disclosed, but at the time, Pampered Chef had over $700 million in revenue and 67,000 consultants.
More recently, the company’s growth has stalled. Christopher came out of retirement in December 2013 to temporarily take the reins from then-CEO Marla Gottschalk, the former SVP of financial planning and investor relations at Kraft, whom Buffett had hired in 2006. Though 2009 proved a bright spot for Gottschalk—Buffett listed her as one of the execs who increased profits despite declining sales in Berkshire’s annual report—Pampered Chef’s more recent years were bumpy. According to Berkshire’s annual reports, earnings declined in 2011—and in 2012 and 2013 both revenue and earnings took a hit. The company also thinned itself with layoffs: Since 2008, its headcount has declined 20%.
To be sure, Buffett has admitted publicly that Berkshire has struggled with retail, in part because of technology’s constant reshaping of shopping behaviors. But for the past few years, he’s sent Tracy in to clean a few of his retail companies up; now he’s hoping she’s the one to right Pampered Chef’s path.
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Tracy Britt Cool isn’t an attention-seeker. She doesn’t command or crave the spotlight or spout rhetoric on small screens and conference stages the way some of her more media-trained peers do. But Cool’s earnest, Midwestern sincerity and her kind demeanor give her an unstudied relatability not unlike her billionaire boss’ folksy charm.
She’s also quite serious. Growing up on her dad’s farm (her parents separated, and each ran one), her work ethic has often been described as meticulous. “I always said she was an old soul growing up,” Cool’s stepmother Lou Britt told Fortune in March. (Cool didn’t cooperate for this piece; her comments in this story are from past conversations with Fortune.)
Her high school teachers remember a mix of precociousness and humility—and an ability to multi-task at a very young age. “She was quiet and hardworking,” recalls her high school accounting teacher Glenda Eichmann. Mary Ellen Morgan, who taught Cool English, remembered Cool’s involvement in many extracurriculars, often in leadership positions. “She was very well liked and very well respected,” says Morgan. “She wasn’t the homecoming queen, but that wasn’t anything she strived for.” Cool was president of the Farmer’s Market as a high school student, while also balancing schoolwork, clubs, and her friends. Troy Morgan (Mary Ellen Morgan’s son) was part of her friend group and says Cool’s time management was “evidently out the roof, being able to juggle and balance everything.”
That ability would follow her to college. After graduating first in her Manhattan High School class, Cool headed to Harvard in 2003, where she studied economics and quickly became a staple in campus women’s groups. Harvard’s famed Women in Business (HUWIB) organization named Cool president in 2006, a title earned after she developed HUWIB’s 2005 fundraising campaign and raised more than double the funds compared to the previous year. She also headed the Women’s Leadership Project, an organization focused on high school students. She then founded Smart Women Securities (SWS) in 2006, an investment literacy group for female undergrads, with several classmates. In 2007, she told her hometown newspaper The Mercury that she spent “much more time” on her extracurriculars “than I ever spent on classes, that’s for sure.”
Continue reading: www.fortune.com/2014/10/30/tracy-britt-cool/
