When Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. moved its headquarters from Denver to Newport Beach, it brought some 15 people with it, including Chief Executive Brian Niccol (already a local), and Chief Financial Officer Jack Hartung, who was new to OC.
“We had to recruit locally,” Hartung noted on Jan. 30, during our annual CFO of the Year Awards event.
Not a problem: Chipotle now counts some 250 people at its Newport Center HQ, with positions filled by workers from OC’s restaurant, technology and marketing industries, among others.
Count Hartung a convert to OC. “The talent level here is incredible,” he said while accepting an award at the event (see story, page 4). “What a place to work.”
It’s not just the quality of OC’s workers, it’s their work ethic, Hartung and other local execs note. Good luck seeing an empty parking lot at the HQ of Palmer Luckey’s Anduril Industries (see story, page 36), any time of the week, for example.
For area workers putting in long hours and no time to cook, Hartung and Chipotle have a solution for that.
In last week’s quarterly earnings call, Hartung said the $24 billion-valued company (NYSE: CMG) would, for more than half of the 150 to 165 new restaurants it plans to open in 2020, include “Chipotlanes,” drive-thru lanes dedicated to mobile orders.
For more on the CFO event, see our coverage throughout this week’s edition.
Area businesses and their workers are hard at work on the giving front as well.
In the wake of the devastating fire at the Irvine location of Working Wardrobes on Feb. 2, “We have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support from the Orange County community,” notes Orange County Community Foundation President and Chief Executive Shelley Hoss.
OCCF’s donors have contributed “more than $80,000 over the past four days [to Working Wardrobes], including two grants of $25,000 and two challenge grants totaling $20,000, which when matched will total over $100,000,” Hoss said.
That funding is in addition to corporate support that’s been provided directly to Working Wardrobes by firms including Pacific Life, Edwards Lifesciences, and Pacific Premier Bank (see story, page 1), officials with the charity tell the Business Journal.
For more on how to help Working Wardrobes, see page 20, and hear more from Hoss in this week’s Leader Board on page 83, part of our Largest Charitable Gifts coverage.
University of California-Irvine School of Law’s second-ever Dean L. Song Richardson, and her department are hard at work addressing the legal issues of the future—see page 14 for more on how they are keeping up with challenges posed by artificial intelligence.
UCI Law’s founding dean, Erwin Chemerinsky (now at UC Berkeley), along with current UCI Adjunct Professor of Law Mark Rosenbaum, meanwhile, are litigating issues from 30 years ago.
The duo last week joined Pete Rose’s lawyer in a petition to Major League Baseball, to reinstate the Cincinnati Reds great, who has been banned from MLB (and is thereby ineligible for the Hall of Fame) since 1989 for betting on baseball.
The petition notes Rose’s penalty is unfair compared with MLB’s discipline for steroids use and, more recently, electronic sign stealing.
