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Patrick Quinlan: The CEO Cooks for Camaraderie

Article by: MTR | Photo by: Rivet Software

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This CEO of Rivet Software, a leader in financial reporting, makes good food a big part of his business.

MTR: When did you get into cooking?

Patrick: When I was in the Army, I served in Desert Storm, and I had to eat MREs, ready-to-eat meals, for 9 months. And I started to genuinely hate food. When I came back, my family took me out to dinner at a restaurant, and I had this fabulous meal. I hadn't had a real meal in nine months, and I had this amazing meal. It had a huge impact on me. Where I learned to cook—I came back and that was right before Christmas. My family's German and we celebrate Christmas on the 24th, not the 25th. And on the 25th we woke up and were like, “What are we going to do?” And Dad said, “Let's go to brunch.”

So we found the one restaurant in Denver that was open, this little breakfast restaurant. When we got there, the whole place was in melt-down, because every Jewish and Buddhist family in Denver was there but none of the staff showed up. And my dad sold me into slavery. I was 20 at the time, and he told the kitchen that I would work for free if they bought breakfast. So I literally walked into a kitchen of a restaurant for the first time in my life and I've been in a kitchen ever since. Dad wanted a free breakfast.

MTR: Now, in your role as CEO, at the busy time for the company, you hire a caterer to come in and make meals for you. Why is that expense worth it to you?

Patrick: It's two things. One is: what money does it save me? And the other is: what benefit do we get from it? The average salary in my company, let's say is about $40 an hour. And I've got 150 people, and they're all going to get up and leave for an hour for lunch. That costs me $6000, because they just will walk out the door. There's some level of, I don't want those $6000 walking out the door every day, so we're better off bringing food to them and having them be able to focus on what they're doing. So that's the cost/savings component of it.

On the other side, during peak season, when we're extremely busy, people are working 18-hour days, and food is fuel, food is energy, so we want to make sure we find a combination of comfort food and healthy food that can keep people working through those 18-hour days that go for 2 to 3 weeks at a time. Staff cannot live on pizza alone.

MTR: You get everyone making bad food choices, you end up with people falling asleep.

Patrick: What we've learned is, it's interesting actually, the first time we did it, we got all healthy food. Just super healthy food. And halfway through it, people were like, “We're done with the healthy food,” because they're working so hard, they really want comfort as well. We do need to find the fine line between... You know, once in awhile, we'll go get Chick-fil-A. But most of the time it's healthy.

MTR: You also cook for your executive committee. Why does getting together over a home-cooked meal help with a high-level business conversation as opposed to doing it at a restaurant?

Patrick: I think it builds great camaraderie. When you're at a restaurant, it's very formula-driven. Come in, sit down, get your drink, get your food, have a conversation, get out the door. When we do these dinners at home, for the first hour and half we're often standing around the kitchen, there's cooking going on, people are having appetizers, we're eating, we're talking, you're not just talking to the people to the right and the left of you because people are able to mingle and walk around. And then we sit down, at two different instances, for a primi and a secondi, and people sit with different people.

I think the planning that I have to put into that is something that's noticed on even a subconscious level, that there's a lot of love and caring and passion that goes into that. And people just sense that, and when they leave an evening of a dinner like that, there's an afterglow that you just don't get at a restaurant.

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