Hooters’ chief executive paves his own way

Coby Brooks is vague at times when asked about his occupation.

The 39-year-old president and CEO will often start out by telling strangers he simply works in the “restaurant business.”

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VINO WONG / vwong@ajc.com

Coby Brooks, 39, is president and CEO of Atlanta-based Hooters of America, a business his late father, Bob Brooks, built into an international brand. Coby Brooks has tightened the chain’s focus on its core operations, and it is holding steady in an economic downturn.

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VINO WONG /vwong@ajc.com

Jessica Simpson takes her orders during a recent lunch hour at the Hooters in Lawrenceville. The restaurant chain has hired an executive chef to upgrade the menu.

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“Once you say Hooters, you’re going to be in a conversation for a while,” Brooks explained.

It’s a small example of a major difference between Coby Brooks and his father, the late Bob Brooks, who built Atlanta-based Hooters of America into an international brand. Bob Brooks relished in the Hooters name, plastering it across airliners, speed boats, race cars and golf tournaments.

Hooters, thanks largely to Bob Brooks’ bravado, is world famous for buxom waitresses in tight white tops and bright orange shorts.

But beyond the skimpy uniforms, there’s a deeper story shaped by family relationships and tragedy.

From the beginning

Bob Brooks’ ascent to the top of a food-service and restaurant empire is a familiar rags-to-riches tale in American business. Raised on a tobacco farm in South Carolina during the Great Depression, he graduated from Clemson University with a degree in dairy science.

He made his first fortune on Eastern Foods, a nondairy creamer business he started in 1966. Then, nearly two decades later, he loaned $50,000 to a Florida businessman trying to expand a fledgling restaurant concept called Hooters.

He spent much of his time building the Hooters brand and fighting for control of the chain. He attached the Hooters name to other ventures — golf tours, race cars and short-lived Hooters Air.

He also had legal battles, both internal and external. In 1997, Hooters settled a lawsuit filed by men who said they were illegally denied jobs because the chain only employed female bartenders and servers. Four years later, Hooters of America, Bob Brooks’ Atlanta company, paid the original Florida creators $60 million to settle issues over who owned the trademark.

Joining the business

Coby Brooks was a teen-ager when his father first bought into Hooters.

“I was the most popular kid in school,” said Brooks, who attended Woodward Academy and then Clemson University.

He worked summers at Hooters’ restaurants. But when he graduated from college, Brooks lined up an interview with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division.

But his father intervened, talking him into working for the family business for a year. Before the year was up, Coby Brooks’ older brother, Mark Brooks, was killed in a plane crash along with Alan Kulwicki, a Hooters-sponsored race car driver, and two others.

The loss of his brother in 1993 changed everything. Coby Brooks said the tragedy made him realize the importance of family ties, and he decided to stay with the company.

“Everybody was trying to stick around to keep things together,” Coby Brooks said. “Dad was distraught. I was distraught. Everybody was upset.”

A painting of Mark Brooks and the other passengers killed in the crash still hangs in the main lobby of the Hooters headquarters.

Going through such a tragedy made Coby Brooks a stronger person, said Yvonne Kendrick, Coby’s mother. He and Mark were 2 1/2 years apart in age, but they were raised like twins, she said.

A former Eastern Airlines flight attendant, Kendrick met Bob Brooks in 1965 when they were set up on a blind date. On their first date, he took her to the Playboy Club in Atlanta.

She spent more than 30 years working with Bob Brooks before their divorce in 1997.

Bob was brilliant and hardworking, but he was determined to do things his way, Kendrick said. Coby watched his father and realized you could take a less direct approach to succeed, she said.

“He sees a more gentle way of getting the same thing done but without ruffling feathers,” Kendrick said.

Rough roads

By 1999, Coby Brooks was having his own difficulties in the family business. It was a strain having his father so heavily involved in both his personal and professional life, he said.

“Neither one of us were equipped to handle each other at that time,” Coby Brooks said. “He couldn’t leave … so I did.”

Coby spent two years in Thomasville working on real estate development, but he kept in touch. His father would frequently send the Hooters plane to South Georgia to pick up Coby for business meetings. The cooling-off period helped when Coby eventually returned full time.

“When I came back, he was much more apt to listen,” Brooks said. “Not that he listened a lot, but he did listen more.”

The next move in Coby Brooks’ career, though, took him and much of the company by surprise. In 2003, Bob Brooks made an early morning call to his son at the Hooters headquarters in Atlanta. Assemble the managers for a meeting, said the elder Brooks. When he arrived, Bob Brooks announced the current president was leaving and Coby Brooks would take the helm.

The room was silent.

“Nobody asked a question,” said Coby Brooks, then head of the construction and development division. “I didn’t ask a question either. I didn’t know what to say.”

Change in leadership

The transition from the first to the second generation in a family often is not smooth, said Marion McCollom Hampton, co-author of “Generation to Generation: Life Cycles of the Family Business” and a partner in OMBI, a family business consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass.

The first generation typically is a strong-willed entrepreneur, McCollom Hampton said.

“They’re used to being in control,” she said. About a third of family businesses fail in the transition from first to second generation, McCollom Hampton said. OMBI recommends families start years in advance to prepare for handoffs. It’s important to talk openly within the family and the business about the process to ensure things go smoothly, she said.

Coby Brooks said his father wasn’t big on talking about decisions before he made them.

He was “only direct,” Coby Brooks said. “He was a straight-line kind of guy.”

Despite the abrupt change in leadership, Coby Brooks said the handover worked well, save one high-profile exception.

After making his son president and CEO, Bob Brooks decided to start Hooters Air. Coby Brooks tried to tell his father that it was hard to make money in the airline business over the long haul.

“He didn’t care if everybody in the world told him not to do it,” Coby Brooks said. “It was going to happen. … He admitted later, shortly before he passed away, that he may have bitten off more than he could chew with that airline.”

Since taking over, Coby Brooks said he’s primarily tried to evolve the restaurant concept his father helped build, not take it in an entirely new direction. It now has more than 450 outlets worldwide and almost $1 billion in systemwide sales.

Hooters has hired an executive chef to improve the menu and expanded more aggressively overseas. It has added more comfortable seating, launched wireless Internet service and upgraded the television systems. Those moves have helped keep Hooters sales steady, even during the recession, while fending off competition from a new crop of restaurants with servers in sexy outfits.

Hooters, which originally had only beer and wine, also has started offering liquor drinks. Bob Brooks resisted the change because he was afraid it would turn Hooters into a bar, leading to fights and tarnishing the brand.

Shortly before Bob Brooks’ death in 2006, Coby persuaded his father to fly to a Hooters restaurant in Florida that was the first to serve liquor. The elder Brooks, a diabetic, drank little in his later years, but he sampled some of the offerings.

“He said, ‘You know this is not bad,’ ” Coby said. “We actually got the go-ahead from him a week before he died.”

Friend of franchisees

Coby Books has spent much of his early years as president and CEO visiting franchisees. When he took over, Hooters and its franchisees were often at odds.

“We weren’t giving them the support they needed,” he said. “We weren’t giving them the direction they needed.”

The change in management style has come at the right time, said Gary McCully, president of the Hooters Franchise Association.

Bob Brooks was the kind of guy who would chew you out during the day and then take you out for dinner that night, McCully said. If you won his respect, Brooks was loyal to you, he said.

But his style did not always work well with those outside the core Hooters of America family.

“The franchisee community and Bob never really did dance well together,” McCully said. Early on, Coby Brooks renegotiated franchisee agreements, lowering royalties in the short-term if a franchisee would remodel an existing store or build a new one.

Bob Brooks’ personality was good for building Hooters in the early years, but Coby Brooks’ personality has been a good change as the chain has matured, McCully said.

“Coby sees the value in having everybody play together on a different level,” he said. “At this stage of the concept, it’s very welcome.”