cinnabon to auntie anne s pretzels. get this, her career started off as a waitress at hooters. your story is remarkable. pretty much everyone knows it. she was a hooter s waitress and now look what she s doing. do you ever get sick of that? the whole she was a hooter s waitress thing, one, it s true. everyone had a first job. mine just happens to be a little more i worked at a gas station. i did. so many executives started in restaurants. there are a lot of skills to be learned there. what is behind this is team building and brands. so i don t mind if that is what it takes to get people interested, that is somewhere in the headline, because i m very proud of what follows it. you have said there are
it s pretty simple. and so, all i did was apply the same habits that i built as a waitress. reporter: cole soon went from taking orders to giving them. with management sending her to open new hooters restaurants all over the world. a few people within the executive ranks i could count on, and she was certainly on the top of the list. reporter: she quit college to work full time. by age 26, hooters had named her a vice president. if you have someone who s willing to drop out of school because they have a passion, that s probably an indication of a fire in the belly and an understanding of what their purpose is. reporter: at 30, she applied for her mba, getting a letter of recommendation from the founder of cnn, ted turner, whom she met at a non-profit. i appreciate all of the help that i got. reporter: but cole didn t have much help growing up. at one point, her mother, newly divorced, could only afford to spend $10 a week on food. i didn t want to be defined by where i
she started out as a waitress at hooters at age 17 and rose up through the ranks. she never graduated from college and now she is the president of cinnabon. take a listen to her story. so, this is where some of the food science happens. the dough will rise reporter: cat cole knows a thing or two about rising. come on through, brenda. reporter: it wasn t long ago, she was the one carrying the tray. cole started her career at age 17 waiting tables at a hooters in florida. now she s traded buffalo wings for the boardroom, as president of cinnabon. everybody had a first job. not everyone worked at hooters as a first job, but a lot of people were waitresses. mine s just a little unique, so it makes it a little more fun to talk about. reporter: cole runs a $1 billion franchise empire, one that employs 12,000 people, but she says that first job as a hooters server gave her a taste of what she had to do to succeed. if they don t have a great experience, then you won t have a go
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when we speak to lenny davis, the attorney for a. rod s legal and media team. all right. thank you so much, joe. also, later this hour, no one is laughing at the new game teens are playing on the streets. it involves sucker punching unsuspected victims, and police are calling it a possible hate crime. also, next, she started out as a waitress at hooters, and now she s a powerful ceo. we ll tell you how cat cole did it. people don t have to think about