Daniel Schwartz had spent a decade working his way up the corporate ladder on Wall Street when he decided to test his skills in a different trade: cooking burgers and cleaning toilets at a Burger King restaurant in Miami.
“It was a disaster,” Schwartz said of his time working a Burger King drive-thru. “For the life of me, I could not make a good-looking ice-cream cone.”
But getting better at making ice-cream cones wasn’t really the point. The investment-banking analyst turned private-equity whiz kid had just been named CEO of the fast-food chain, the second-biggest burger company in the world.
Schwartz, a self-described millennial, had never worked in a restaurant before, let alone run a company. At 32, he was one of the youngest major restaurant CEOs in history.
