Valerie Daniels-Carter 19(?)(?)–

Food company executive

At a Glance…

Sources

How many hours per day go into running 61 Pizza Hut and 31 Burger King restaurants? It’s hard to imagine. Yet Valerie Daniels-Carter juggles all these responsibilities easily, despite her exalted status as chief executive officer of Milwaukee-based holding company V&J Foods. Hard work is part of her winning strategy. However, faith in the efficiency of her 2,600 employees also plays an important role – in fact it is so important that her company motto reflects it. Made up of the letters YATSE (“You are the Standard of Excellence), it is a motto that is familiar to all of her staff members, as well as a constant reminder of how she values them and regards them all as proud contributors to V&J’s spectacular success.

If anyone is a living example of YATSE, it is Daniels Carter herself. An entrepreneur well-known in Milwaukee business circles, she is a determined woman of tight focus, who learned the value of clear-cut goals early in her life. “Negativity wasn’t part of my childhood,” she recalled during a December 1997 interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “We grew up with our parents telling us you can achieve anything you want to achieve.”

Along with a determination to succeed, Daniels-Carter intensely studied the fast-food industry. As she told Black Enterprise magazine in August of 1998: “You have to have a true understanding of the industry you’re entering. And you have to surround yourself with a circle of key advisors, accountants, attorneys and counselors.”

Daniels-Carter has stayed close to her roots. As a child from a working-class family, she grew up in central Milwaukee and graduated from the city’s Rufus King High School. She then attended college at Lincoln University, where she set the foundation of her future career by pursuing a bachelor of arts in business administration. It was a wise choice, one that opened up a world of opportunity to her.

In 1978, as soon as she graduated from Lincoln University, Daniels-Carter returned to Milwaukee to be come a management trainee in the First Wisconsin National Bank’s retail and commercial lending department. She soon found that there were several advantages to working in the financial field. From her earliest days as a bank employee, she was able to gain a solid knowledge of the criteria on which the banking industry bases its lending practices. She also learned how to work with customers, keeping them abreast of interest changes, and making sure they understood the terms of their loan payment responsibilities. All of this information would serve her well in the future, when she was looking at the banking industry as a customer rather than as an employee.

By 1981, Daniels-Carter was ready to move on to a more complex area of the financial world. She became an auditor in the underwriting department of MGIC

At a Glance…

Born Valerie Daniels; daughter of John and Katharine Daniels; married to Jeffrey Carter, widowed 1999. Education: graduated from Lincoln University 1978; Master’s degree, Cardinal Stritch College, 1982.

Career: Joined Firstar Bank, (formerly First Wisconsin National Bank) retail and commercial lending, 1978; Auditor for MCIC Investment Corporation, 1981; V & J Foods co-founded by Daniels-Carter and her brother, John Daniels, in 1984, with one Burger King Restaurant; by 1998, owned 37 Burger King Restaurants; acquired 61 Pizza Hut restaurants, 1988.

Member: President of the board of Milwaukee World Festival Inc.

Awards: Named Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young and Merrill Lynch, 1994; honored at the Black Women’s Network of Milwaukee’s 17th Annual Women of Color Recognition Dinner, 1997; received the Sacajawea Award for Creativity, 1997.

Addresses: Office —6933 W Brown Deer Rd., Milwaukee, WI 53223-2103.

Investment Corporation. Within a couple of years, how ever, she began to focus on the idea of going into business on her own. As always, sound reasoning lay behind this decision. Having followed the direction of the finance industry for several years, she now began to see a growing tendency towards mergers between banks a trend that has always spelled “downsizing” for thou-sands of workers.

To avoid losing her job through any future downsizing, Daniels-Carter joined forces with her brother, attorney-John Daniels, and the two began to look for business opportunities for her. Together, they investigated retailing, manufacturing, and co-branding. However, they rejected all three on the grounds that each seemed to offer only short-term prospects of success. She continued to explore different avenues, avenues that offered the possibility of long-term success. “… I really wanted to focus on things that would be long term,” she told Black Enterprise, reminiscing during a 1998 interview. The industry that seemed to offer her the greatest opportunities was franchising. Daniels-Carter and her brother surveyed the fast food scene in Milwaukee, and noted that the city was not over-supplied with Burger King restaurants. They decided to obtain a franchise from this restaurant chain.

Daniels-Carter opened her first Burger King restaurant in 1984. At first, she worked behind the counter herself. However, she quickly became so busy with administrative details that she had little time for hands-on duty. From this first restaurant, her holdings climbed steadily. By the end of 1996, Daniels-Carter own a total of 37 Burger King restaurants in the Milwaukee area, and grossed $36 million in sales. Not content with this success, she looked for another opportunity to expand her fast-food holdings. She soon found it in one of the country’s most popular chains—Pizza Hut.

Pizza Hut had been a fixture of American life since 1958, when two college-student brothers opened their first restaurant in Wichita, Kansas. Offering food which had quickly become a favorite all over the country, the one restaurant had multiplied rapidly, soaring to more than 7,200 in the United States by the mid-1990s, plus 3,000 units in more than 86 other countries. In the summer of 1997, in a deal that took more than nine months to complete, V&J Foods bought 61 Pizza Hut restaurants in Rochester and Syracuse, both in New York State. This huge investment was widely reported by the business press, which counted 98 fast-food restaurants in the V&J lineup. Daniels-Carter now headed the largest minority-owned fast-food franchisee operation in the country. According to Pizza Hut spokesman Jay Allison, this purchase provided a coup for the franchising company, despite the fact that they have 5,400 other franchisees running more than 8,000 fast-food operations. “Both she [Daniels-Carter] and her brother have a record for running great restaurants and prompting diversity in their company,” Allison told Nation’s Restaurant News in January of 1998, “and we love to have operators of this caliber inside our organization.”

As with other Pizza Hut franchisees, Daniels-Carter’s restaurants are subject to strict on-going evaluations. Carried out to ensure that all franchisees offer the same high standard of hygiene, customer satisfaction and financial efficiency, these evaluations are the responsibility of a 35-strong staff, who regularly visit restaurants and go through a checklist of 300 items. And in company with other franchisees, Daniels-Carter knows that if she has a problem, she can work it out jointly with the Pizza Hut management, and also has the chance to evaluate the criteria by which her restaurant is being checked.

The hard work that Daniels-Carter put into building her company has earned her several awards. In 1994, she was named Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst &Young and Merrill Lynch. Daniels-Carter was also honored in 1997 at the 17th Annual Women of Color Recognition Dinner held by the Black Women’s Network of Milwaukee. That same year, Daniels-Carter and Brenda Skelton, a senior vice president of Midwest Express Airlines, were presented with the Sacajawea Award for Creativity.

Daniels-Carter believes fervently that successful people must give something back to the community that has helped them on their way. She feeds the hungry from her restaurants every Thanksgiving and allows her restaurants to be used for fundraising purposes. She also staffs her restaurants with local residents.

Although Daniels-Carter has achieved remarkable success in the fast-food industry, it could not protect her from tragedy. In early 1999 her husband, Jeffrey Carter, a long-time employee at a company called Hentzen Coatings, was killed when he fell off of a snow covered roof. Daniels-Carter has taken solace in her faith, and plays the organ at Sunday services.

Sources

Books

Friedman, Jack P. Barren’s Dictionary of Business Terms. New York, Barren’s, 1987.

McLamore, James W., The Burger King. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1998, p. 50, 126.

Periodicals

Black Enterprise, November, 1997, p. 17; August, 1996, p. 68; August, 1998, p. 70-1;

ComputerWorld, August 24, 1998, p. 31;

Fortune, August 4, 1997, p. 31.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 18, 1997, Business, p. 1; December 9, 1997, Business, p. 1; October 2, 1996, p. 1; January 7, 1999, p. 3.

Nation’s Restaurant News, January 1998, p. 184.

Other

Additional information for this profile was obtained from Franlnfo at http://www.franinfo.com; and Pizza Hut History: 1954-Present at http://www.pizzahut.com/usualcorpstuff/PHHistory/PHHistory_homeHTML.

—Gillian Wolf