DALLAS -- When Joe DePinto finds his inbox filled with foreign emails, the CEO of 7-Eleven Inc. knows his segment of Undercover Boss has aired again somewhere. "Most mornings when I wake up, there will be 12, 15 emails waiting in my inbox," DePinto told The Dallas Morning News. "The mornings that I've got 40 or 50, I know it has shown someplace else, like Korea, England or Australia."
It's a phenomenon the 48-year-old CEO could not have imagined when his marketing staff talked him into doing a pilot episode of an untested reality show a little more than [image-nocss] a year ago.
He initially told 7-Eleven chief marketing officer Rita Bargerhuff that she was nuts to suggest it. But on February 21, 2010, the world saw a scruffy-faced Joe DePinto, aka Danny Rossi, put on an orange 7-Eleven smock and handle rush hour at a busy store on Long Island, try his hand at making doughnuts in the corporate bakery in Baltimore and distribute fresh food and sandwiches on the night shift in North Texas.
(Click here for previous CSP Daily News coverage of DePinto's experience. And watch the preview below, or click here to view.)
He let coffee puddle onto the floor. He became Lucy on the bakery conveyor line. He nearly fell on his face wheeling boxes. And he ended each day absolutely exhausted.
"Seven days nonstop," DePinto told the newspaper. "I got a dose of three different shifts. It brought me back. I've had a job since I was 13 years old. I started out as a paperboy, worked a myriad of manufacturing, hotel, all kinds of different jobs."
Since its debut, DePinto's Undercover Boss segment has rerun twice on CBS and been picked up all over the world.
DePinto grew up in a typical Midwestern family in Des Plaines, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. He fell in love with West Point the moment he saw it in high school. "The place is steeped in tradition and makes you proud to be an American," he said. "I wanted to serve my country, and that's a pretty good place to start to do that."
That military bent and his commitment to servant leadership are the guiding forces of his management style today, said the report. The pairing is not incongruous, he added.
"At the core, it's about support. I was an artillery guy. I was taught, 'There is this maneuver element out there--the infantry and the armory. Your job is to support them.' That's all we did. We worked to support those guys. It's the same thing here," he said. "Our franchisees and our store managers are the ones who get it done every day with our customers. Everybody in this [Dallas headquarters] building, our job is to figure out how to best support them so that we reduce the time and energy that it takes to get done what they need to get done."
His marketing staff, led by Bargerhuff, persuaded him that going on the show would be a wonderful way for him to walk the talk, the report said. And it was free publicity. Ultimately he acquiesced. "I thought, 'OK, cool. We'll get a message out about 7-Eleven and life will go on.' I never imagined how big this would be."
When the producers of Undercover Boss, Studio Lambert Ltd., Los Angeles, wanted him to go on Oprah to promote the series premiere, DePinto balked again. Studio Lambert would not let him see the show in advance but gave a sneak preview to his marketing team. "It gave us chills," PR director Margaret Chabris told the Morning News. "It was awesome. It was real and moving."
DePinto said: "They came in after seeing it and said, 'You're going on Oprah."
Doug Brooks, CEO of Brinker International Inc., said DePinto was a perfect fit for the Dallas-based restaurant company's board: a sitting CEO and global retailer who has experience with franchisees, public boards and restaurants. "No matter what we're talking about, I find myself looking at Joe and asking, 'What are you guys doing at 7-Eleven in this regard?'" he told the paper. "You can ask him any question about any part of the business and he's all over it."
He added, "The show did a great job of bringing to life who Joe is, how he acts and how he treats people. He's got a big heart and a big brain."
Eli Holzman, executive producer of Undercover Boss, said, "He threw himself into his undercover mission like the military veteran that he is and embraced the opportunity to see his company through a different lens. His gift of a 7-Eleven franchise to truck driver Igor Finkler ranks as one of the most generous rewards ever bestowed by an 'Undercover Boss'."
DePinto was so moved by North Texas deliveryman Finkler's patriotic spirit and work ethic that he waived 7-Eleven's $150,000 franchise fee for a store that opened in May.
A year later, what are the effects of going undercover? For one thing, DePinto told the paper, he is still trying to figure out how to get more unused food into the hands of the needy. When an employee tossed out doughnuts at the end of the shift in Shirley, N.Y., on the show, DePinto came unglued. He did not realize that the store could not ship its leftovers to the local food bank because they had been handled.
"That to me is a disconnect," he said. "We've got food that we throw away at night. It needs to go to the needy. If we can get it figured out, it will be a very big deal."
7-Eleven has created a program that identifies people who are ready for advancement and pinpoints the ones who need extra training. "We have a whole pipeline of talent here. We're going to tap into it," DePinto said.
And there is a greater emphasis on maintaining and servicing the stores--a big issue for franchisees. "We've gotten significantly better at it, but we still have a long way to go," he told the paper. There is an emphasis on streamlining processes so that employees and franchisees do not get bogged down in corporate red tape.
"I thought changing the culture would happen much quicker," he said. "We have about 20,000 employees, and if you include our franchisees, it's over 200,000. Changing the culture in a company with that kind of DNA, it takes a long time. But we're on a great trajectory."
So what was the biggest lesson DePinto learned? It was not so much an epiphany as a reality check, he told the Morning News: "Our people don't have a lot of major needs. They want to be appreciated for what they do and recognized for their performance. I always knew that, but it can easily get away from you in the heat of daily business. We have hardworking people out there. I realized that when I was standing up all day, I was beat at the end of the day. Oh, man, my knees were sore. I don't do a lot of that anymore. And yeah, I like that title next to my name."
Catching up with the employees who trained Joe DePinto on Undercover Boss: Igor Finkler, the overnight deliveryman in North Texas who emigrated from Kazakhstan with only $50 in his pocket, has his own 7-Eleven. "Joe DePinto gave it to me on Oprah," Finkler told the paper. "It was the most shocking moment of my life. My delivery truck was my baby, but my store is my baby now." Dolores Bisagni, coffee queen of the 7-Eleven in Shirley, N.Y., is recuperating from a kidney transplant. "She is a wonderful lady and such a great personality - a person folks gravitate to, and she certainly won me over," DePinto said. "I'm optimistic but also cautious as I know this is not an easy recovery." Waqas Nabi, who threw out the doughnuts in New York, was promoted to a guest/customer experience consultant for 7-Eleven in Florida. DePinto wrote a letter to help Waqas get into a graduate program at the University of Central Florida. Phil Shearin, who did his best to train DePinto at 7-Eleven's Bakery Express Mid-Atlantic, is selling some of his artwork commercially, thanks to DePinto's encouragement.
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