Thirty-three-year-old Black man, Damola Adamolekun, has been making his mark in the restaurant industry as the first Black CEO of popular Asian restaurant chain P.F. Changs.
Since 2020, he has been working tirelessly to ensure the company would continue to succeed in an ever-evolving climate. One of his notable accomplishments was improving its dining experience, which he initially felt was lacking.
“The brand was still as strong as I remembered,” Adamolekun said at a recent Restaurant Leadership Conference on Apr. 12. “The quality of the food was still good…[but] what was missing was the experience around the meal. The lighting was too bright. The music was non-existent.” The décor? ‘Beige central.'”
As such, he worked with P.F. Chang’s team to make improvements. Together they revamped the restaurant’s dining rooms, revised its menus, and initiated more seamless delivery and to-go order services.
“Good design doesn’t have to be expensive,” Ademolekun said.
He added that he changed the name of a popular menu item, Asian Mac & Cheese, saying it didn’t correlate with what he and P.F. Chang’s team were doing with the business.
“You can’t just put ‘Asian’ in front of the name,” he said. “It wasn’t core to what we did. We strayed a bit on the menu.”
Today, the chain has been operating about a dozen franchises with a casual fast-food environment around the U.S. According to Top 500 chain data from Technomic, he also led the company to a 31.7% rise in sales during 2021.
However, Ademolekun has envisioned many more fast-casual locations, with plans to expand to 1,000 and more across the country.
The businessman has been a partner at Paulson & Co., an investment group that collaborated with TriArtisan Capital Advisors to purchase P.F. Chang’s for $700 million in 2019.
He was also on the board of directors at the International Tower Hill Mines LLC, a Canada-based mineral exploration company.
Adamolekun previously received a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Brown University in Long Island and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School in Massachusetts.
“My message would be to…dare to believe,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post on Apr. 6. “I’m an immigrant. I moved to [America] when I was nine, and one thing my dad always said was that in this country, if you focus and work hard and be the best at whatever it is that you do, whether it’s business or law or medicine or whatever, if you’re the best at whatever it is that you do, you can be very successful. And I hold that to be true.”
