Though she’s now finance chief at the kind of fast-casual restaurant where you’re sure to find people dining alongside one another, for much of her career, Tricia Tolivar was sitting alone.
Metaphorically, that is: When she started out in public accounting, she was often the only woman with a seat at the table.
On paper, her ascent through the corporate ranks looks both linear and swift: While working at Ernst & Young, she got to know people at Autozone, where she worked in the internal audit department before transitioning into an operations role.
But there were no women in AutoZone’s senior leadership at the time, she told CFO Brew, and while the experience was ultimately a positive one, the challenges of being a woman with a fast-track career soon came into focus when she became a single mom. She ultimately opted for a career pause, taking a little over a year off to focus on her family and re-entered the workforce at EY, where there were now “even more women in the organization” leading to more flexible work arrangements that worked for her growing family.
Now, as CFO of fast-casual Mediterranean purveyor CAVA, she’s happy to sit alongside an executive team that she says is nearly 45% women.
“I think it’s just a true example of the progress we’ve made and the power of working with a diverse workforce, and what that can mean to your opportunities for the business,” she told CFO Brew.
Her leadership at CAVA has clearly been effective: A February report from Placer.ai found that while restaurant visit growth slowed overall last year, at CAVA, it increased 40.1%.
Learning on the job. Just as she’s witnessed changes in the number of women in finance, her personal relationship to those three beckoning letters—CFO—has changed as well.
“When I started I had this very linear approach to how I thought I could become a CFO,” she noted, thinking she’d jump from internal audit to financial planning and analysis (FP&A) or a controller role then make the move over to the top seat. “In reality, that isn’t always the best path.”
She’s a big advocate of learning from the role you have—and at CAVA, sometimes that means stepping into roles you don’t have at all. The company encourages team members to “work shoulder-to-shoulder in our restaurants every quarter,” Tolivar explained, and the practice has quickly become a crucial tool for the finance team.
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The proof is in the…pickled onions.
Previously, CAVA teams sliced their beloved pickled onions in-house, she noted. But when Tolivar visited restaurants and asked what change would improve restaurants’ workflow, she remembers team members coming back with a resounding answer: “If I didn’t have to slice onions, I’d be much happier.”
The solution: Tolivar and her team partnered with the company’s produce supplier “to slice the onions and preserve all of their freshness, and deliver them to the restaurant,” thus eliminating the sole task that was the bane of many employees’ existences.
“That was a huge win,” she said. “It’s an opportunity for us to give something back to our team members, and make their jobs easier, because, in the end, happy team members lead to happy guests—and that results in a happy P&L.”
In Tolivar’s eyes, it’s that all-crucial guest experience that’s going to spell success for other dining establishments in our current high inflationary environment.
“It seems like there are encouraging signs around the economy, but at the same time, there’s the reality of credit card debts increasing, and we’re sensing that consumers are feeling more strain,” she said of the challenges that dining establishments are currently facing. “One of the most important things that we can do as an organization, and restaurants more broadly, is make sure we continue to provide an incredible value for your guests, so they find more reasons to come back and enjoy your food.”
Full circle moments. For CAVA, that playbook has been working. Currently, Tolivar and her team are focused on sustaining the company’s long-term growth after its 2023 IPO.
“Being able to take CAVA public, and ringing the bell at the IPO was a memorable experience, but certainly it is not the destination,” she stressed. “It was one step on our journey.”
But that’s not to say CAVA’s IPO wasn’t a seismic event—particularly for Tolivar’s family. When her daughter was asked in a recent high school interview to describe her most memorable family experience, Tolivar’s hard-won emphasis on balancing her family and career came full circle.
“Much to my surprise, she called out watching me ring the bell on opening day at the New York Stock Exchange,” Tolivar recalled. “That was something I wasn’t expecting, and it certainly touched me. I didn’t realize what an impact it not only had on me, but the rest of my family.”