While Adam Rymer’s promotion to CFO at Chipotle might have been accelerated—his planned January 2025 appointment was moved up to October 2024—working a wide variety of roles across the company and having an important mentor prepared him to jump right in, he told CFO Brew.
With 15 years’ experience at Chipotle, he’s touched most aspects of the business at some point. His Chipotle tenure “started at one of our most entry-level positions in our support centers,” he said, and he even “spent a few years in HR,” acknowledging that his journey has “been a little more unique than some career paths, especially in finance.”
For all the variety of his career, “my first role in finance” at the fast-casual chain is the one “I look back at the most.” In that post, Rymer worked in “what we call now field finance,” essentially a corporate finance role. “I spent time in our restaurants three or four days a week,” talking to general managers and field leaders about what was (or wasn’t) working.
Even now, he says those two years were “probably the most impactful time” when it came to learning how to connect the dots between personal relationships, the world of finance, and the front lines of the business itself.
Jack math. Former Chipotle CFO Jack Hartung gave Rymer’s early Chipotle career an important boost.
Rymer says “the best gift I ever had” was the fact that Hartung held the top finance seat for the entirety of Rymer’s time at Chipotle.
“He’s a teaching CFO,” Rymer said. “And what we mean by that is, he’s not one to just ask for something, and get an email, and leave it at that.”
Instead, Hartung digs in, and includes everyone in his learning process. “Through that process, he does things—we call it Jack math—where we’ll get out a piece of paper, and work through a problem together so he can either understand, ‘Oh, I didn’t understand the angle you guys are coming from’…or through that, we also learn how he’s thinking,’” Rymer said.
It was Hartung, too, who advocated for Rymer’s accelerated appointment after Chipotle’s former CEO, Brian Niccol, left to take on the CEO role at Starbucks shortly after Rymer was announced as the incoming CFO.
That quickly changed Hartung’s role, Rymer pointed out. “What we needed from him at that point was [to] help ensure a smooth process, and help get our new CEO up to speed,” he said.
Hartung touted Rymer’s readiness for the position, adding that he “could have taken over the role in July,” and that “gave me all the confidence in the world,” Rymer said.
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Stepping up. For weeks leading up to his (accelerated) first day, Rymer, Hartung and the rest of their core leadership team had many conversations about “how we want to keep everyone within finance very much…informed on what’s going on with the business, what it is that we’re working on, what it is we’re not working on, and why those decisions were made,” Rymer said.
Given the uniqueness of this particular CFO takeover, their team was able to set that communication plan in motion on Day One of Rymer’s new gig. Now, as he gets more settled in to the top finance seat, Rymer wants to carry on Hartung’s legacy of fostering an environment “where everyone has a voice,” he said.
“The smarter everyone in my organization is, whether it’s at the entry-level position all the way up to the people who report directly to me, Chipotle will be better as a result of that,” Rymer added. “And so that’s where I really take a lot of inspiration with [Hartung’s] leadership style, as well as the culture that was created around here.”
Avocados always. Rymer also feels well-prepared to meet the challenges facing other fast casual dining establishments in 2025.
“I am very interested in how the industry goes from here, given the challenges on price,” he continued. “You’re seeing it with value right now, and I think value works in the short term. It doesn’t work in the long term, especially in the franchise business, because it’s really going to hurt the franchisees’ ability to make cash flow and keep their businesses going.”
One other thing on his mind in 2025? Avocados, always.
Guacamole appears in “roughly half” of all of Chipotle’s transactions, Rymer said. “The funny thing about avocados is they’re very volatile,” he added, and those dramatic ups and downs “can affect us.” But that also makes Chipotle an interesting case study for other CFOs dealing with fraught supply chains.
“The beauty of us having kind of a fortressed balance sheet, running our own restaurants, we can deal with the ups and downs of that,” Rymer said, noting that “usually it normalizes over time.” The other key in mitigating volatile price swings? A diversified supplier base, so they’re no longer exclusively reliant on suppliers in Mexico and California.
In any case, Rymer’s ready for you to add guac.