35-year-old CEO of a $100 million company: Getting fired was the ‘best thing that ever happened to me’

When Pinky Cole lost her job five years ago, she got upset. She’d never been fired before, and her ego was bruised.

Then, surprisingly, the crushing blow turned into relief and reassurance, she says — because getting fired was the push she needed to turn her side hustle into a full-time job.

″[Getting fired] was the best thing that could have happened to me, because it made me go all in on my business,” Cole, 35, the CEO and founder of Atlanta-based vegan burger chain Slutty Vegan, tells CNBC Make It.

Slutty Vegan is worth $100 million, Cole told forbes last year. Its 11 locations span Georgia, New York and Texas, boasting burgers, hot dogs and fries with provocative names like “One Night Stand” and “Sneaky Link.” Public figures from Viola Davis to Spike Lee rave about Cole’s food.

It’s come a long way. In 2018, Cole was a casting director for the OWN Network’s therapy show “Iyanla: Fix My Life.” She’d been there for about two years, and thoroughly enjoyed her job, she says.

She’d also spent about four months building Slutty Vegan as a side hustle, hawking vegan burgers from a shared commercial kitchen. That’s partly why Cole got fired, she told make it last year — spending too much time focusing on her new business.

It didn’t make the experience any easier to swallow. But when the anger wore off, Cole looked for a silver lining and found one staring her in the face, she now says: “The day that I got fired, Snoop Dogg ate from our restaurant.”

Perhaps Slutty Vegan had long-term potential, Cole recalls thinking. She opened her first brick-and-mortar location in January 2019.

“And then my business started to go even more viral, and everybody was talking about it,” Cole says.

How to never ‘make the same mistakes again’

Cole refers to herself as “an expert in failure,” stemming from both her firing and her first attempt at running a restaurant, a Jamaican eatery in New York that burned down 2016.

“One, it taught me to make sure you have fire insurance — I didn’t have it — and two, hard times don’t always last,” Cole said at the FAST LTD last month. “There is a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Her failures extend to Slutty Vegan, where she’s still learning how to be a CEO, she says. Last month, for example, Cole settled a lawsuit with ex-employees at her Brooklyn, New York, location over unpaid wages — not a situation many bosses would want to be in.

Rather than let her shortcomings stunt her growth, she says she prefers to find ways to learn from them so she won’t “ever make the same mistakes again.” The burned-down restaurant — which led to a $17,000 wage garnishment, Cole says — taught her the importance of hiring “a proper accountant” to handle business taxes.

In Slutty Vegan’s early days, Cole tried to do everything — run the brick-and-mortar location, flip burgers in the food truck and manage the finances of both simultaneously. The lesson that time, she says: Don’t spread yourself too thin.

For anyone struggling with an emotional gut-punch, like getting fired, just “take the first step” toward getting back on your feet, says Cole. You don’t need to plan the next 10 years of your life tomorrow. You only need to plan whatever’s immediately ahead.

Source: CNBC