Jess Reicher’s biggest challenge as a woman in the restaurant industry is that she’s a processor. She’s quiet.
When people get to know her, it becomes clear she’s an inspirational leader. But oftentimes at the seat of the table, Reicher is more reserved because she prefers to listen and then respond. As she advanced to Arby’s brand president for Flynn Group, the world’s largest franchisee organization, she realized those character traits had to evolve.
“You can’t do that when you have a seat at the table—so getting ahead of the information, arming myself with all the information that I need so that I can have a strong point of view when I get there and be able to be a lead contributor was instrumental,” Reicher says.
Rasheeda Clark, brand president of Wendy’s for Flynn Group, doubted herself several times. She compared herself to male peers—something that frustrates her in hindsight. Clark felt she had to minimize her own successes “to not rock the boat of my counterparts.” That began to change with mentorship, allyship, and taking ownership of her own development.
Clark also expanded her network outside of her immediate work group.
“For me, that’s when I believe I started to really lean into being authentically myself and being comfortable in my own leadership and embracing what makes me unique,” Clark says. “And I think it’s so important to be able to be authentic because you create space for others. You have to have the diversification and the leadership within the room. And that’s not so much about our gender or the color of our skin. It really is just in our approaches and how we solve problems and how we show up for one another. And then it just creates more room for others that come after you.”
Reicher and Clark, after years in restaurants, have come away with several lessons as women in the industry. A significant one is that life is far from linear.
Neither were born into restaurants, but the fast-paced, team-oriented nature of it has a way of taking hold and never letting go.
That’s the case for Reicher, who had a biology degree and thought she would attend medical school. While attending classes, she worked in restaurants and had a boss who challenged her to lead shifts and participate in some management. It was at this moment she discovered her love for building teams.
Reicher also loved school but struggled with how to apply her degree. With medicine, she was curious because it was a potential way to make a difference in people’s lives, but she didn’t love that insurance companies seemed to control what you could do for patients. The academic route was more about research than people. Neither option completely aligned with her value set.
“I had that boss that pushed me into thinking differently and said, look, the restaurant industry is an industry that is untapped and you can do anything that you want to,” Reicher says. “And with your love of people, imagine the impact that you can have on people’s lives. And when I saw that translating through experience, it pulled my heartstrings. I always said biology was the head and restaurants were the heart.”
Reicher took a break from school, and the restaurant superiors in her life, “pounced on that and said, ‘Hey, let’s take this to the next level.’” She spent much of her early career with Red Robin, rising to area director and traveling around the U.S. fixing troubled locations.
Every time it seemed like Reicher would hit a place where she wanted to go back to school, her boss would give her another challenge to solve. Repeatedly seeing results from her efforts—changing people’s lives as she had wanted—simplified her full jump into restaurants.
“That’s really where I built this gene of, you get the right people in place, you get really great plans, and that’s the magic that creates success,” Reicher says.
When Reicher’s boss from Red Robin moved to Fuddruckers, he recruited her to join him. Here, she rose fast within the executive ranks, taking knowledge from her early career and putting it to action. After moving up to senior vice president of operations at Fuddruckers, she became the director of operations for Pizza Hut’s international fleet before transitioning to Taco Bell in another senior operations role.
This is where she was first introduced to Flynn Group, which also franchises Taco Bell. Reicher leaped to Nando’s PERi-PERi as COO for four years before looping back to the franchisee and Arby’s in June 2020.
Meanwhile, Clark came up through collegiate sports and even spent time playing in the WNBA. Through basketball, she recognized her love of leading teams but also understood the necessity of gathering ground-level experience. Clark entered roles where she learned how to be resilient within the corporate structure and what purpose-driven leadership looked like. She kicked off her career at a Target warehouse, a traditional operating environment where she picked up knowledge on process, accountability, and operations.
She then moved to Frito-Lay where her focus was team management and delivering results at scale, and followed that up with PepsiCo, where she had an opportunity to “spread my wings” and discover how to lead dynamic teams, cross-functional work groups, and heavy strategic execution. Next, Clark landed at Advanced Auto Parts, which taught her the balance of long-term vision and day-to-day achievement.
The executive has now been with Flynn Group for three years.
“I spent the majority of my career working in an environment as an athlete—where teamwork and collaboration lead and where you have this competitive fire and sense of urgency and resiliency,” Clark says. “And game after game, it’s like you put up a ‘W,’ you’re feeling great, but then you’re right back to the drawing board to build your strategy for the next competitor. If you suffer a setback, you learn how to overcome it. Setbacks, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get right back at it.”
While being an athlete offered “highly transferable” skills, it wasn’t always easy, Clark says.
“You’ve grown up with sports your entire life, and it’s like letting go of your first love when you decide you’re going to hang up the laces,” she says. “You really have to have this exploratory period where you try to identify what is going to make you happiest … My career hasn’t been linear, and the reason for it is you’re trying to find that same level of excitement that you experienced as an athlete in your world today. So I do think it’s important to have a network of folks, and Jess and I always say this, have someone that you can be bluntly honest with, very vulnerable with, to help you identify where you are going to best serve others as well as yourself.”
The duo is still striving for more on behalf of Flynn Group.
The franchisee group is the largest operator of Arby’s restaurants worldwide. Reicher oversees more than 360 restaurants and 7,500 team members in 10 states.
According to the executive, Arby’s is focused on evolving what makes it special and unique, trying to unlock value, and determining how it can create innovation and offers that resonate with customers. At Flynn Group specifically, she continues to lean into people.
Reicher says she is proud of the work her team has done in building excitement and stability so that her contingent of restaurants can grow meaningfully.
At the same time, Arby’s is bracing for wage and commodity inflation. The brand’s response is to create a value proposition that goes beyond price point and elevates the experience a customer receives through every channel.
“I do think that we have a unique advantage, especially with Flynn Group, because the culture of being premier is not just a tagline,” Reicher says. “It lives each and every day within our brands. And so what that means is, how do we make sure that we have the people in each of our brands that are going to make a difference and are going to strive every day, every week, every year, to be better and better and better, especially when it means building that connection with our teams and our consumers?”
Clark leads over 300 Wendy’s restaurants for Flynn Group. The franchisee became an operator of the brand in 2021 and has acquired more than 100 locations since then.
Clark feels it’s her responsibility to empower others to reach their potential, and a major piece of that is being her true self. She says 2024 was the best year yet for Flynn Wendy’s, and as she stares down 2025, she believes continued success hinges on culture. That means getting out from behind the laptop and being shoulder-to-shoulder with GMs inside restaurants. Clark wants to see the business through their eyes—that’s the best way to develop their leadership skills and frontline training.
Additionally, Wendy’s is busy integrating technology but dealing with a multigenerational workforce who may have a difficult time catching up to speed.
“Guests can come through dine-in, drive-thru, pickup on first party, third party. Having dynamic teams and leadership agility combined becomes the linchpin for us to be able to unlock premier guest experiences,” Clark says. “ … We’re bringing tablets to restaurants, we’re asking folks to understand more about the DoorDash merchant portal. And some of our leaders at restaurants, some of them don’t even have iPhones. Some of them still have flip phones. So just think about that. So I think that’s one of the challenges. Continuing to lean in with your L&D teams to ensure that we can stay dynamic and agile enough to be able to serve the landscape within our own restaurants.”
Clark and Reicher each had mentors who helped fulfill their career destiny. For Clark, it was Derek Lewis, the former president of North America for PepsiCo, David Orr, a former senior director of sales and management for PepsiCo, and Ron Bellamy, COO of Flynn Group. For Reicher, it was Roger Byers, who had the most influence in her career at Red Robin, Matthew Licciardello, who recruited her to Fuddruckers, Tony Lowings, her boss while working at Yum!’s international division, Brad Pettinger, COO of Flynn Group, and Bellamy as well.
It’s not lost on Reicher or Clark that all of their mentors are men. As Clark points out, it’s “reflective of the landscape of who occupies a lot of those positions across the industries and organizations I’ve worked for.”
However, the brand presidents have advice for women to rise as far as they have—don’t wait for permission to lead, approach your career with a sense of urgency, take risks, and believe in your journey.
“You can do more than you think you can,” Reicher says. “Take on the challenges. Sometimes there’s that challenge out there that nobody else wants to do. Do it so that you can broaden your scope and what you know. It just makes you a better leader.”
