On her time at Beaver…
I came To Beaver as a non-traditional student. I had been at Brookline High School for three years and then I decided to redo my junior year and I came to Beaver for 2 years. I think that there were 24 kids in the senior class. You could have a ton of autonomy as a result of that, and they were surprisingly progressive in that sense. The cool thing about Beaver is that they allowed me to follow the path of what I found was interesting and continue down self-reflection and self-education.

There were lots of leadership opportunities, there was also not a lot of BS at Beaver in those days and I think that maintains itself today. I remember for my senior project, it felt like I did mine earlier than others, like I started it in December. It was amazing. I essentially got to focus solely on my senior project which took me to Nantucket and I got to be a research assistant and live there for 5 months under Beaver’s awning. It had nothing to do with food or business but it was research and independence, and so, definitely, I think that Beaver looked at me as a person and not as a kid or a student. I brought that expectation to the rest of my life. Peter Hutton and Charlie Sachs were very, very instrumental in looking at me as a person, not as just a student.

On her career path…
I graduated from college thinking that I was going to be a national ski patroller. I was a licensed Wilderness EMT and my dad said, “You must be kidding me,” and I was like, ‘What do you mean? I’m 18.” As soon as I left college I started to work for the predecessor of Wayfair, which was an internet furniture company called the Home Portfolio. In those days for the internet, you still plugged your computer into the phone line and it made that weird AOL noise. From there I was recruited to go work for Yahoo in the beginning days of Yahoo. I worked there both in Boston and in New York as a national salesperson. From Yahoo, I got back into the nonprofit sector. I became head of corporate fundraising for City Year. While I was in college, I should say, I took essentially a year off from college, although I got credit, and I worked for Ted Kennedy in education and public policy in Washington, DC. So I worked at City Year and then I went to work for Mayor Bloomberg in New York and I loved that more than anything but it was also during the hiring freeze in New York and everything was sort of crazy. From there I applied to law school, but I did not get into Harvard Law so I thought, “Well what am I going to do with my life?”

So I went to cooking school, something totally different, and I don’t know why. Cooking school just came up for an idea. I thought I would open a social cooking school because I thought that Boston needed that. I had been living in New York for five years and I went to cooking school. I ended up moving back to Boston for an internship at a restaurant that is no longer there. Actually, a current Beaver parent gave me my first shot at running restaurants. It was David Rosenberg and I will always be indebted to him as a result of that. He knew my mother very well, my mom was their pediatrician, and he said to me one day, “Your mother is just like chicken soup; she just makes everything get better.” He gave me the opportunity to run a restaurant when I had never done anything in a restaurant except for cooking. That was at the Biltmore in Newton in 2005 or 2006. I was there for close to two years and then I opened up my own restaurant in 2010. That was The Gallows, then Banyan, then five Blackbirds. That’s the sort of quick and easy career path explanation. I continue to do a lot of nonprofit stuff on the side.

On creating a concept in the restaurant industry…
The restaurant industry for me feels like the only industry that is holistic in the sense that it is both qualitative and quantitative. You have to understand finance, you have to understand the quality aspect of it, you have to understand hospitality. There are so many factors to it, it’s wild. But, that’s why it’s such an interesting business. I actually don’t do much of the creative side anymore, sadly, just because I have 250 employees and it’s become a large company at this point.

But, as an example, Blackbird opened 5 years ago. Gallows had been 4 years running and was a sustainable business and I was looking for something new to do. I didn’t really know what that was going to be. I was always looking for new restaurants, but I was also a brand new mother at that point. I had my first kid in 2012 and then my second one in 2014. I was in Chicago and I tried a doughnut at this place called the Doughnut Vault and my mind was blown. I never knew that doughnuts could taste like this one did, and I’m not really even a doughnut person. I’ve never sought them out or really cared about them, but it just rocked my world and I thought that we were missing that in Boston. So I just started looking for spaces. I self-finance everything so that part of it was not difficult and that is generally the most difficult part of the restaurant business. I reached out to people, I did lots of research, and I started a doughnut company. I didn’t really expect it to be where it is today, but that’s part of this. If you set expectations you either hit them or you fail them, so it’s a lot easier to just keep going and not worry about it.

On learning the business side of things…
I laugh about it because I remember that David Rosenberg is an extremely savvy businessman but he hadn’t been in the restaurant business at that point. I remember his comptroller and I going over the budget, which I’d never done before. One of the line items was a pool because it has been in one of his previous real estate projects. I was so proud of myself that I actually noticed that one of the line items was wrong.

But it was really just practice and nothing else than just having the tenacity and being truly accurate that got me to where I am. I’m just going to figure it out one way or another. I’m going to ask many questions and I’m just going to go for it. It’s very entrepreneurial. I’m going to learn it one way or another and I didn’t take one economics or business or math class in college. You have to learn as you go and you have to continue to learn as you go. There are a lot of resources on the internet. You also surround yourself with smarter people, so I have very smart lawyers, very smart accountants, very smart managers, and my job is to manage them but not to be better than them.

On collaboration…
Collaboration is everything. The only thing that I do by myself is that I own the business by myself. That enables me to make big, big decisions really quickly, and I think that that alleviates a lot of the stress that classic businesses have because they have to figure out budget issues, have to figure out money stuff, have to worry about locations and growth and I don’t have to worry about that. But when it comes to the day-to-day running of my business, I absolutely collaborate with all of my senior management on everything. It is not run as a monarchy by any means. It’s very collaborative and I rely on my people to make smart decisions. I have very smart people who work with me, really, really smart, but not only classically smart. I hardly look at people’s resumes. I don’t care where you went to school, I don’t care if you have a history or if you’ve done not such great things in your past. If you’re hardworking and you care then we’re good.

On famous customers…
We’ve had probably everyone walk through our door that you can think of and we don’t really talk about it. The only time we ever talk about if someone comes in our door is if they talk about it first. So, for example, Adele, John Mayer, or Bill Clinton—those people have all talked about the fact that they have relationships with us, but we don’t talk about it without them bringing it up first. We have very cool people, but the most important people are the ones who work there. It’s not the guests who walk in the door, it’s the 250 people who work for the company and their families who are the most important people to me.

On advice for a Beaver student…
Every student should work in the food business in some capacity in their life. It teaches you how to be thoughtful, empathetic, and understanding of all humans. I’ve had former Beaver students work as hosts and work as back servers. It truly sets you in life to be much more understanding of everyone because typically when you go to a private school your world is small and you don’t necessarily work in the service industry much. But, once you have an understanding of the service industry, you can do anything. As a career, it’s not an easy career, but it works well for me on many levels. I think you need to work in it in order to understand if it’s for you and you have to start dishwashing and bussing tables. Thinking that you can open up a restaurant with no experience is not a great plan.

“But, once you have an understanding of the service industry, you can do anything.”

– Rebecca Roth Gullo ’95