Ownership Mentality with Harrison Wladis
On Wednesday, February 9th, day two of the first-ever Virtual Winter 2022 Summit, MCMP heard from Harrison Wladis. Harrison is a University of Michigan Alumni, as well as a former President of MCMP. Harrison graduated from Michigan in 2021 where he received a Bachelor’s degree in Communication and Media Studies and Russian.
Following graduation, Harrison moved to Miami, Florida where he now works at one of the most prominent quick service restaurant companies: RBI, otherwise known as Restaurant Brands International. RBI hosts a multitude of worldwide chains such as Tim Horton’s, Burger King, Popeyes, and Firehouse Subs. Harrison is currently a part of RBI’s Leadership Development Program where he is a member of the Operations team which primarily works with Tim Horton’s.
Harrison emphasized the fact that RBI’s primary goal is to build the most loved restaurants in the world. Being that RBI was formed in 2014 and is such a young company, there are many opportunities to grow very quickly within the firm. Additionally, Tim Hortons, the restaurant Harrison works closest with, only has 620 locations within the US, so he receives a high level of ownership in his work. Harrison has loved the amount of responsibility that has already been entrusted to him, even though he is only in his first rotation of the Leadership Development Program program. This vast responsibility is referred to as “Ownership Mentality” at RBI, and is a key value within the company. Ownership Mentality essentially pushes employees to work to their full potential daily, and to take full accountability within their given role. Even though Harrison is less than a year out of college, he loves the fact that he is treated the same as long-tenured employees, and emphasized that his mentors and colleagues have made his transition very enjoyable.
Day to day, Harrison’s tasks include tracking the speed of service, overall satisfaction, and health inspections at various Tim Hortons locations. He continuously reports on these metrics and gives creative strategies to improve them, specifically using Excel, which he mentioned as a critical skill to have for incoming RBI employees. Additionally, Harrison collaborates with the digital operations team on their work for new campaigns and projects, while simultaneously teaching stores how to promote these offers to customers. An exciting example of this occurred when Tim Hortons collaborated with Justin Bieber, which was an exciting project for Harrison to jump in on, as it was in the works right when he joined the company last summer. Lastly, Harrison helps to curate training guides for new products, and even assists restaurants in taste-testing potential food and drink items.
The meeting closed with a short Question and Answer session led by Harrison. He answered several questions from MCMP members, and gave some meaningful pieces of advice. He highlighted the essentiality of networking during college, and even remarked that it is the most important factor when embarking on job searches and interviews. For those interested in potentially working at RBI, he recommended not to let the food and beverage industry limit you, even if you feel you're not the most passionate about the field. While Harrison is very passionate about this industry, he knows many who aren't, and are simply enjoying learning critical, general business skills through their roles. For current Michigan students, Harrison highly recommended taking a class with Professor Jimmy Draper, as he recalled the professor’s engaging demeanor and fascinating course material. All in all, listeners left the meeting with a complete understanding of RBI and a renewed fascination with the food and beverage industry.
—- February 2022, by Rachel Coffield
