Dessi Sarabosing has a simple recipe for success in business.
“It’s about being brave, accepting risk and being willing to learn on the job,” said Sarabosing, the senior vice president of finance and accounting and acting chief financial officer at Real Mex Restaurants in Cypress.
The company owns and operates restaurants under the brands El Torito, Acapulco, Chevys Fresh Mex, El Torito Grill, Las Brisas, Sinigual, Who Song and Larry’s and Pink Taco. There are 100 or so locations altogether, combining for about $330 million under the ownership of backers led by Lake Forest, Ill.-based private equity firm Z Capital Partners LLC.
She stepped into the CFO role a year ago. Sarabosing arrived at RealMex a short while after it had emerged from bankruptcy following a skein of double-digit declines in revenue, and a run of four chief executive officers in five years, said Lindsay Hulley, a partner at Rutan & Tucker Law Firm in Costa Mesa, who introduced Sarabosing as a Rising Star honoree at the Business Journal CFO of the Year awards at Hotel Irvine on Jan. 25.
“‘Uh oh, what did I get myself into?’” Sarabosing said. “The company was extremely broken when I joined.”
The parade of CEOs and other company leaders “treated business symptoms instead of curing the disease,” she said.
“The employees were demoralized and food quality was poor,” she said.
She began renegotiating contracts with an eye on improving food quality, brought in finance and accounting systems, and implemented predictive analytics to match the number of employees to customer traffic patterns during the day.
“A small percentage of my work falls in the traditional CFO duties,” she said. “CFOs really have to be strategists and constantly thinking of ways for their company to transcend the industry.”
The company now knows, for example, which restaurants need more bartenders, the number needed, and when to staff them during the day.
“A lack of bartenders during peak hours means a missed food order, one less drink, and eventually a loss of customers,” Sarabosing said.
The biggest change was in regard to the customers: Treat them like guests visiting in your house, as people who need to take a break from the day and who need a place to refresh their spirit.
Sarabosing over the past year has helped stabilize the company. Employee morale has been reinvigorated, operations are streamlined, and the company could make an acquisition before the year is out. Sarabosing never thought she would work in the restaurant business again. She didn’t take to the industry early on, when she worked in her father’s restaurant in Bulgaria as a teenager, where she was a hostess, waitress, bartender and dishwasher.
He opened the business to provide for his family after he left the coal mines due to bad health and tumult that followed the fall of a long-ruling communist regime in 1989.
“It’s hard work in a restaurant, and customers’ preferences are really volatile,” she said, “but we were a poor family and all of us worked hard to help.”
“My dream was to work in the U.S. and give back to my family and friends,” Sarabosing said.
Sarabosing in 2002 was the first in her family to graduate from college, Sofia University, the “USC of Bulgaria,” Hulley said.
Sarabosing received a marketing internship after graduating, with Los Alamitos-based Claim Jumper Restaurants, but was asked to take a bookkeeping position with one of its restaurants in Laguna Hills.
She accepted and rode on the 4 a.m. Orange County Transportation Authority bus from her Santa Ana apartment to her accounting job along the coast.
She also worked as a waitress, a salesperson in a mall, and took a couple of accounting classes at night at California State University-Fullerton.
“I really wanted to build a life in America,” Sarabosing said. “This was when Sarbanes-Oxley became active and the Big Four accounting firms were hiring.”
She passed the certified public accountant test and received job offers from every Big Four accounting firm.
Sarabosing began working at Ernst & Young shortly after the exam in 2004 because it offered the earliest starting date.
She accepted a financial reporting position with cosmetics maker Arbonne International in Irvine in 2008.
She expected to help the company with an initial public offering, but it ended up declaring bankruptcy and negotiating several debt restructuring agreements.
“We negotiated with 50 banks individually to convert the debt into equity,” Sarabosing said. “It was a tremendous experience.”
She earned an MBA from the University of Southern California in 2012 and moved to Taco Bell as the director of financial planning and analysis.
The company was recovering from the national embarrassment of “fake beef,” an early social-media public relations challenge that led the chain to disclose that its beef also contained sugars, yeast, corn starch, soy, cocoa powder and other ingredients that made up about 12% of the ingredient.
Sarabosing moved quickly up the corporate ladder and gained experience as the fast-food restaurant company recast its brand.
She traveled to work on projects for Taco Bell’s parent company Yum Brands in Louisville, Ky., and on KFC operations in Dusseldorf, Germany.
“My career eventually flattened out,” Sarabosing said.
Laurie Lawhorne, who worked with Yum and its numerous restaurant brands from 1994 to 2009 before moving to Real Mex, offered Sarabosing a position as the company’s VP of finance in 2014.
“I was excited and ready to move on to the next challenge,” Sarabosing said about revitalizing Real Mex.
“I felt that she and I spoke the same language and shared the same ideas about turning around the business,” she said.
Sarabosing became the senior finance person with the company.
Sarabosing said her next goals are to improve operations and grow the business.
Each of the restaurants uses raw ingredients every day, marinates its foods for 50 minutes, and uses a lot of labor.
“So we’re thinking about centralizing food preparation and creating a distribution system to improve efficiency,” Sarabosing said.
Real Mex almost acquired the Souplantation restaurant brand from Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp. in San Diego but decided to step away from the deal because the two companies couldn’t agree to terms, she said.
It’s in the market for other opportunities, and would consider a deal that would double its size in terms of the number of individual restaurants it operates.
“Our target company will have about 100 locations outside of California,” Sarabosing said. “Every restaurant business has to transcend the current market to be successful.”
