What Procter & Gamble taught Chipotle CEO Brian Niccol

Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi explains Chipotle CEO Brian Niccol's background and how it helped make him a successful executive.

Video transcript

JULIE HYMAN: Shares of Chipotle have skyrocketed since Brian Niccol took over as CEO all the way back in March of 2018. Before he had-- the company, though, he was a recent college grad working at Procter & Gamble. The road of his career caught the attention of our Brian Sozzi. And that's where we find his take today. Brians got to stick together. Is that what it is?

BRIAN SOZZI: Something like that. You see me sleuthing. I'm still going over all the transcripts from our All Markets Summit earlier in this week, just trying to pick up things that maybe I missed that investors should know about these leaders. I happen to think it is very important that investors know about the people leading the companies that they are invested in. But Brian Niccol, believe it or not, started working at Procter & Gamble on Scope mouthwash. Hear his story.

BRIAN NICCOL: You never really know where your journey is going to go. But I was very fortunate to get my first job at Procter & Gamble. I got to work with a lot of great people. They took the time to invest in me so that I became, I think, much better at marketing and general management skills. And I've taken that with me down the road.

And here I am at Chipotle. One thing I did discover while I was at P&G, had the opportunity to work on Pringles, is, I loved working in the space of food. And it just resonated with me. And so fast forward. Here we are today. I still strongly encourage you to use Scope mouthwash, but obviously, I'm a much bigger fan of guacamole and burritos these days.

BRIAN SOZZI: Yeah, no, just an interesting there, little nugget. And my experience has been, just talking to a lot of many leaders for many years, Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo, they just churn out a ton of top executives. There's just something about those processes at those older companies, whether it's in the-- how they teach marketing, how they teach leadership. I can't tell you how many people get poached from those organizations to work at mid-level positions and then ultimately end up in a CEO job like Brian Niccol.

And I look at two names, two people that I've gotten to know through the years, that's Chip Bergh, the CEO of Levi's. He started-- he created the Swiffer, which-- the Swiffer device over at Procter & Gamble. Then Clorox CEO Benno Dora-- or former CEO, I should say, he worked at Procter & Gamble as well. And he ended up at Clorox. It's just interesting to see the journey for a lot of these executives.

But my take here is that it is very important as an investor. Do a search on the internet. See how these company leaders grew up, where have they worked, what have they done. Pull up their LinkedIn profile, and the information is right there. Start putting two and two together. I think it will go a long way to explain why companies are doing good and then why companies may be doing bad.

BRAD SMITH: That's really encouraging, especially for a person like myself, whose background was in marketing before getting more into kind of the sales side and the integration. And of course, they go one and the same in one facet or another. But hearing that about Brian Niccol and the CPG side of his background, too, really gives you some insight into how he thinks about the behavioral construct of the consumer and how that's ever changing and what he's navigating Chipotle through with that, too, now.

BRIAN SOZZI: Yeah, and it's no disrespect to Chipotle. This is a restaurant operation increasingly becoming global, over 3,000 restaurants. But when you work on a global brand like a Pringles and have those complicated operations, that is incredible experience to ultimately take over. And for him, he went to Yum Brands, spent many years at Yum Brands, created the Live Más slogan while at Taco Bell, ultimately using all those skills that he learned at Procter & Gamble. And now he's putting it all to play over at Chipotle.

BRAD SMITH: Really remarkable. All right, well, I ordered one of the burritos just-- well, the burrito bowl influenced by, of course, Brian Sozzi and Brooke DiPalma.

JULIE HYMAN: You only got one, though.

BRAD SMITH: I only got-- but I doubled the meat.

BRIAN SOZZI: I just got two.

BRAD SMITH: I did double the meat, yes.

JULIE HYMAN: Ah, OK. All right. By the way, Brad remembered he does have his own Netflix account.

BRAD SMITH: This is true.

JULIE HYMAN: Update, update on a story we were just discussing.

BRAD SMITH: I'm in the financials, folks.

BRIAN SOZZI: And you're paying for it.

BRAD SMITH: Big time.