The word “barriers” is one Kate Jaspon often references. Six years ago, right before the pandemic, a Deloitte Center for Financial Services study found only six of the 107 largest financial institutions in the U.S. were run by female CEOs. More recent data told a well-traveled story as well—while the percentage of men and women entering the finance field was roughly equal, men climbed the ladder quicker. At entry level, women held about 52 percent of finance jobs. That dwindled to 18 percent for C-suite positions globally.
All of this, though, isn’t to say Jaspon, the CFO of nearly 37,000-unit Inspire Brands, believes there’s a wall standing between women and progress. In fact, if she could go back and give herself some advice, it would be to see right through it.
“I think for women particularly, most of the opportunities that come to you in your career are big life events, right? Having a child. For me now, aging parents. Whatever it is. And I think women feel like they have to decide between this and that,” Jaspon says. “I’m going to have a family or I’m going to get married. I can’t move. I can’t take that promotion. What if I have to leave the office at 5?”
“What I say to people is, if the job is there and you can do it, or somebody is offering you the job, don’t create barriers for yourself,” she continues. “There are a lot of women before you. This is very different from when our parents grew up. The world is different now. I think companies and men have been great allies in removing those obstacles. So don’t let life events limit you taking a risk or opportunity.”
Jaspon is the daughter of a small business owner (her father owned an electric company and worked on the megaproject “Big Dig” in Boston). He didn’t go to college and imparted on her, as much as anything, when the phone rings at midnight, you get up and take the call.
Jaspon attended Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts—about 30 minutes from her hometown—and one of the country’s most selective universities, ranked No. 1 in entrepreneurship last year by U.S. News & World Report. It fit her family tree. But what Jaspon realized when she got there was, she might not be the risk taker some of her peers were. She enjoyed business and professors drilled down a specific point: if you could understand the cash flow and P&L of a business, you could do any role. So Jaspon loaded up on finance and accounting classes and left behind a vision she had from high school to become a computer programmer, aided by the realization Microsoft had blown away the pack. She also didn’t want to sit in front of a screen the rest of her life.
Jaspon didn’t want to reside in spreadsheets and numbers, either, which took her to KPMG as an auditor. And this circles back to her opening advice.
Jaspon clocked nine years with the company and thought she’d become a partner. There were no female partners at the time and Jaspon says it was “difficult to be what I couldn’t see.” She got married in 2005. The Enron scandal was fresh. The finance world had changed. Jaspon thought she wanted to have children right away and KPMG asked Jaspon to move to New York.
LOOK BACK: The Story of Inspire Brands and the Making of a Restaurant Group Unlike Any Other
These insecurities set doubt in her path. Then, Jaspon received a call from her first client at KPMG, a chain as ubiquitous in Massachusetts as the Red Sox—Dunkin’ Brands. She joined the coffee company in December 2005 as assistant controller and was later promoted to VP, finance and treasury and corporate controller. In 2017, she became CFO of the U.S.’ sixth-largest restaurant brand. But we’ll return to the timeline momentarily.
Dunkin’, as noted, is one of those culturally intimate jobs that’s like telling people in Oklahoma you work for Sonic Drive-In. Or In-N-Out in California. She went to high school with some of the Dunkin’ franchisees she began working with—second- and third-generation leaders who grew up baking donuts and embracing the family business.
In what would become a recurring theme throughout Jaspon’s career, things got hectic quickly. Carlyle, Bain Capital, and Thomas H. Lee each acquired a 33 percent stake in Dunkin’ Brands the following March. The group paid $2.425 billion in cash. In 2011, the company raised $423 million in an IPO and went public. Jaspon helped lead Dunkin’ Brands through the transaction and follow-on equity offerings, securitization, and numerous other debt transactions, as well as the 2006 divestiture of Togo’s.
MORE: Kate Jaspon’s Advice for Women in Restaurant Leadership
Jaspon says it was a “fun and exciting” time as she got to touch so many transactions. The business was the opposite of static and Jaspon learned through it. Paul Carbone, who spent nine years as Dunkin’s CFO and, this past March, was named CEO of Panera Brands, along with other mentors, encouraged Jaspon to explore life outside of accounting. “You’ve got to get back to understanding the P&L and cash flow,” she recalls. “Let’s get you out in the field. Let’s get you working with lenders.”
This is where Jaspon’s leadership style truly began to form. She developed relationships with franchisees and became the CFO whose cell phone number they programmed in. Whether it was equipment, the financial crisis, real estate, Dunkin’s 2018 launch of espresso, every year, Jaspon says, something different mattered. And they trusted her. She worked on things like interchange fees on credit cards and interest rates with lenders. Franchisees appreciated the fact Jaspon was brought up in a small business and didn’t need a crash course on why success for an operators’ bottom line was a win for corporate.
“It was never franchisor versus franchisee,” she says. “It was if the franchisee wins, we win together.”
Jaspon knew if operators saw Dunkin’ HQ as a transparent, reliable partner, and if they were making money, they’d invest back. They’d remodel and embrace directives. “I was at all their conventions,” Jaspon says. “I went to all their brand advisory committee meetings. I didn’t let them go around the rules. But they knew they could pick up the phone. And a lot of them have huge accountants who lead their networks, or CFOs. I’d go out to dinner with them. We’d bring them all into the office so we could share best practices. It wasn’t a competition.”
Again, this was something Jaspon learned from her father. And it held through two pivotal moments on the horizon.
Another sale, more chaos, and the path to Atlanta
When asked if she’s a prodigal math cruncher or somebody who can get on stage and start tossing out financial equations, Jaspon laughs. “I am very happy there is a calculator on this phone,” she says.
“I think what I have always been good at is relationships,” Jaspon adds. “I know enough about all the areas in finance, tech, whatever it might be, to be dangerous. But I’ve been really good at hiring really smart people that complement me so that I can go build the relationships and then bring it back.”
Her view of what makes a great CFO is somebody who has a vision for the company and can help guide decisions, and a leader whose constituents feel they can relate to and not speak through red tape. “It’s not always glamorous,” she says of the restaurant industry. “And the fact that I understood, I think, went a long way.”
Jaspon believes she could have become a franchisee. That’s how deep her feelings for this industry go. Her contribution to sharing experiences and making connections, she says, caught the eye of Inspire CEO Paul Brown.
Picture this. It’s close to September 2020. COVID-19 has endured and shut cafes and redirected restaurant operations going on seven months. That’s when Jaspon and Dunkin’ Americas president (now Inspire chief brand officer) Scott Murphy first heard about a potential sale to Roark Capital-backed Inspire Brands, which at the time owned Arby’s, Buffalo Wild Wings (the brand that’s 2018 sale, along with Rusty Taco, sparked the portfolio), and Jimmy John’s. As proxy would later outline, the two sides—Dunkin’s CEO was Dave Hoffmann—went back and forth for a while, but given COVID’s backdrop, Dunkin’ leadership had to continue running as “normal” while conversations ensued.
The news leaked on Halloween. And Jaspon says they “had like 20 minutes” before it went live to contact licensees and employees. Then, the deal closed in less 45 days.
In addition to taking place during the pandemic, there was only one acquisition in restaurant history larger than the roughly $11.3 billion Inspire paid—when 3G Capital LP, Burger King Worldwide Inc., acquired Tim Hortons for $12.64 billion in August 2014. Panera Bread was next at $7.5 billion, a price paid by JAB Holdings in 2017.
To say it was a whirlwind would be like telling somebody it’s drizzling during a hurricane. Months earlier, Jaspon was the CFO of a company, like essentially every other executive, trying to manage through a playbook-less crisis without any money. She was working out of her house, lobbying Washington, D.C., and seeing what might happen if you erected Plexiglas in a coffee shop.
Jaspon and Dunkin’ leadership made the call to defer all payments from franchisees, take salary reductions, continue to pay debt, landlords, and suppliers, and spent day in and day out, she says, letting franchisees and employees know everything would work out. “Even if behind the scenes we were worried,” Jaspon says. “We didn’t know what was going to happen. But that was the year that being a franchisor shined.”
Operators had fires each day. Could they run just a drive-thru? What latest regulation was coming down? That two-way line of communication Jaspon referenced earlier came back into focus. “You really learned, really quickly, the relationship you had and the importance of that,” she says. “I also think the lender and the supplier community made a big decision that year on who stood beside them and worked with them. I’m really proud of the decisions we made.”
A serendipitous one was the aforementioned move to invest in espresso equipment. Hoffmann, a 20-year McDonald’s executive, became CEO in 2018 and decided Dunkin’ Brands would invest alongside operators. The company revealed a $100 million plan that summer, with 65 percent earmarked to an “on-the-go beverage-led strategy.” Dunkin’ reengineered its espresso recipe, first introduced in 2003, to bring forth one of the company’s most significant product initiatives in 68 years. “That was outside my comfort zone going to the board and asking for that investment,” Jaspon says. “Looking back, it was probably one of the best things we ever did. We were launched and ready to go when Starbucks and a lot of our peers closed during COVID. Folks who saw us as a donut store on the West Coast were forced to go to us for espresso and coffee and things, and we had just reloaded all of the equipment. So it really put us on the map in places where we were viewed as a donut store.”
Before COVID, getting to Wall Street and ringing the bell was the watershed moment of her career, Jaspon says. This 2020 deadlock, however, is when she grew. Keeping operators calm through the chaos and then, suddenly, trying to explain an industry-shaking sale to a relatively new group in Inspire tested the mettle of her acumen and communication. Some franchisees were excited. Some, the opposite. The same was true of employees.
Jaspon herself wasn’t even sure if she had a job. Quietly, she and Inspire picked an end date, inclusive of staying on for a year or so to help with the integration and delisting of Dunkin’. She was going back and forth. A week in Atlanta. One in Boston.
Jaspon had spent years at Dunkin’ and had the resume, but Inspire’s CFO post was helmed by David Pipes, a four-decade vet who spent nearly half of his career with Arby’s and Inspire. He began in 2003 with Arby’s franchisee RTM, holding leadership positions in finance and accounting and then playing a key role in Arby’s 2005 acquisition of RTM, as well as subsequent merger with Wendy’s International three years later, which resulted in the formation of the Wendy’s/Arby’s Group. He remained with Arby’s when Roark acquired the brand in 2011.
Pipes, though, decided to retire. In some ways, this mirrored the moment when Jaspon stepped into the CFO role at Dunkin’ years earlier.
Carbone resigned in April 2017 to head to Talbots. Jaspon, then VP, finance and treasurer, was appointed to serve as interim CFO, which switched to permanent in June.
Jaspon says she was surprised by Carbone’s departure. But she felt capable, just as she did now with Inspire. “I had awesome leaders and sponsors at Dunkin’ who made sure I was ready. I was an accountant, then I took treasury and tax and investor relations,” she says. “I think any time you’re the front person to the investor community that can be a little daunting. But I thought it was great.”
Returning to an earlier observation, Jaspon says becoming a female CFO at Dunkin’ was, as you’d imagine, not exactly a crowded club industy-wide. However, Kate Lavelle, now a member of Wingstop’s board of directors, was Dunkin’ Brands CFO from 2004–2010 as Jaspon came up. Lavelle has remained a sponsor and mentor.
Jaspon also found support through the Women’s Foodservice Forum (she’s now the board chair, where she could build relationships with other executives and ask for advice, even if they weren’t necessarily CFOs).
In reality, she says, the biggest challenge when she emerged as CFO of Dunkin’ wasn’t her gender—it was her age. She was the youngest member on leadership by 20 years.
Jaspon says that’s why she was initially tagged with an interim distinction. She’d hear, “don’t forget you’re very green” as she worked to bolster her confidence. “My advice to women is to take the seat,” Jaspon says. “Don’t be scared. Take the risk assignment. ‘Do it,’ I would have told myself back then.”
During her controller days, Jaspon figured she’d go straight to CFO. But that’s not how it unfolded. Her boss came in one day and let her know he promoted somebody to her job. She was now the VP of finance. “I said, ‘what if I don’t want that job,’” she remembers. “And he said, ‘too bad. I already gave away your old job.’”
“Sometimes you need a kick in the butt, for lack of better words. If I had not done that, a., they would have brought somebody else in who have blocked me. But b., I would not have learned the skills that I needed to [become CFO],” Jaspon says. “So I try sometimes to ‘volun-tell’ people, ‘this is where you should go.’ It is really easy to get stuck in what’s comfortable and what you love.”
When Pipes retired, Jaspon faced a dilemma. She had twins (born in 2009) and had never lived anywhere but Boston. Did she want to uproot her now-seventh grade children, husband, support group, and go from a 150-or-so employee company to one with five different offices around the world? Did she want to learn wing pricing at BWW? Or how Sonic handles drive-in?
Lavelle offered advice. Jaspon’s husband, who worked in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry, told her, “Let’s do this. Stay with what you love.”
So Jaspon, who had worked with Inspire chief growth officer Christian Charnaux on the deal (handling the Dunkin’ side), took three weeks and moved down to Atlanta with a job offer, six months after the deal.
“They had a search. They were working with [Pipes],” she says. “And then, here I was. It worked out for me. A lot of my career has been being ready and being in the right place at the right time.”
Growth away from home
Like taking on any new career position, Jaspon says leaving her hometown helped her grow by getting outside her comfort zone. She traveled at Dunkin, naturally, but her relationships and ties were all in Boston. Inspire, from its multiple brand presidents to overall scope, revealed fresh opportunities. And Jaspon dove into a franchisee system webbing out through different formats, concepts, service approaches, and a matrix shared-services model that was more akin to hotels and hospitality (where Brown and Charnaux hailed from) than your traditional restaurant system.
That was, in practice, the vision of Inspire. Brown and leadership observed a sector massively fragmented and ripe for a multi-brand play—the ability to leverage collective strength for the betterment of each individual brand.
These days, Jaspon describes some of Inspire’s whitespace as figuring out how to “MacGyver” the company to make anything possible for franchisees. One plot of land? Why not open multiple brands across different dayparts (say a Dunkin’ and Buffalo Wild Wings GO)? Can you target non-trad, like an airport, and try three locations with a joint-backed office?
That flexibility unfurled runway and a bold, new frontier for Jaspon. What she brought instantly was her prowess in relationship building. Jaspon listens to franchisees. Asks why they pick one brand or another. What works and what’s still a challenge. “I obviously know unit economics matter, but franchisee relationships matter,” she says. “Non-competes matter. Upfront investment costs matter. If we can help them get lending matters. All of that. And I think the more that we’re out, whether it’s Christian, Scott, myself, Paul, the more that we’re out meeting the franchisees and listening to them, the more we can pivot quickly to make our brands easier to use. And it’s easier to do that in a large scale.”
Jaspon says developing Inspire’s matrix model hasn’t been easy. It has been intensely rewarding. But there’s much still to do. Each brand brought in recognizable and clear equities. Drive-thru at Arby’s. Delivery at Jimmy John’s. The ability to backend those individual strengths with technology and innovation that threads across, from data to app systems, is something Inspire is just glancing the surface of. “And the talent has been the most surprising to me—the talent we’ve been able to bring in,” she says. “… A talent breeds A talent.”
To this day, Jaspon, two decades into her restaurant career, still believes she can become a better CFO by learning more about people. Her job has become high level and she’s balancing judiciary responsibilities as much as being in the field. Yet that value of talking to operators and understanding their concerns and helping them navigate through, remains why she thinks the larger model works.
“I love this industry,” Jaspon says. “People either love working with franchisees or don’t. I love working with them. I think our franchisees are so passionate about what they do and their brands, their people. And I think that’s great. I think that drives our business model.”
A lot of operators can write checks, she continues. But the franchise industry is unique in the reality partners are also representatives of a larger brand. “If they’re doing well, they’re going to stay with us, they’re going to develop, they’re going to take care of the employees, they’re going to invest in the employees,” Jaspon says. “It’s circular. If people don’t get that or if you form a competition between the franchisee and the franchisor, it’s a problem.”
The promise of the future
With inflation and tariffs and whatever else might be on deck, Jaspon has her hands full. She says Inspire pays attention to the same macro stressors as everybody—taxes, regulations, and so forth. But Jaspon feels real estate, less talked about, is as critical a lever as any at this point. As Brown often says, “they’re not making more land.”
Navigating that and working on format innovation is one of Inspire’s unlocks headed through 2025 and beyond; how it can use land intelligently via multiple brands and designs. She says Inspire doesn’t want to become “Big Brother” and monitor every store. Rather, it’s working to identify positive and negative trends and solve those in tandem. It wants to gather information and help franchisees. While brand presidents and CMOs drive the top line, Jaspon targets the middle of the P&L and cost of capital and financing and returns. Inspire, which holds a much larger corporate footprint than most groups of this size (about 93 of the company is franchised), offers tools to guide through issues like pricing, as well as a government affairs and tax team to stay ahead of news. That’s the promise of tightly integrated scale. And it’s tackling these hurdles itself, too, given Inspire’s massive company footprint.
Jaspon thinks automation is going to change the scope of operations overall, especially in finance. Technology is stripping mundane tasks and enabling companies to focus on becoming better employers. “How do I use AI to try to learn, I get this invoice every month, this is how I code it, and then you use the human intelligence to check it on the back end,” Jaspon says. “Running reports and doing things that people used to be able to do, we can program to system that we’re doing the same thing over and over again.”
As alluring as the future appears, Jaspon turns back to her past once more. If there’s something about her experience she wants emerging leaders to understand, it’s that a career is a marathon, not a sprint. “I feel like people are constantly searching,” she says. “A lot of my moves, if you look at them, were lateral. I went from controller to VP of finance to treasurer. I had the same title with very similar salary. But I broadened my skillset so I was ready. Now, everybody wants to know, I’ve been here for years, I want to jump and I want to jump. Maybe go sideways or try something different to build your skillset out. Specifically for women, you don’t need to have 100 percent of the qualifications to ask for the job. Once you get that seat at the table, take it.”
