MarketWatch recently spoke with Damola Adamolekun, one of the youngest chief executives in corporate America.
As head of the Asian fusion restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s, the 34-year-old Adamolekun is one of the youngest chief executives in the corporate world. He’s also one of a small number of Black CEOs in the country.
At Paulson, Adamolekun led the acquisition of P.F. Chang’s, a privately held chain, founded in 1993, that he considered something of a diamond in the rough. The deal closed in 2019 — for a reported $700 million — with Paulson partnering with TriArtisan Capital Advisors on the purchase. By 2020, Adamolekun took over as CEO of the restaurant company, which is headquartered in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Adamolekun: It’s certainly a unique story when you put it all together, right? But I think the key thing is each individual step in that journey led to the next step. So you can even take it from the very beginning: My parents deciding to bring us to America from Nigeria allowed anything else to be possible. Going to Brown allowed me to get to Goldman. Succeeding at Goldman and being one of the top analysts is why I got recruited to TPG.
And then we innovate selectively. We’ll do a limited-time offering roughly once a year over the holiday period. We’ll introduce things like the Wagyu steak that we did last year, the Cantonese-style lobster, the sticky toffee pudding. They’re high impact and really exciting.MarketWatch: You recently opened in New York City’s Union Square neighborhood. It takes a lot of guts to bring a chain Asian restaurant to a city with no fewer than three Chinatowns.
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