CURRENT ROLE: president and chief executive, PhaseNext Hospitality 
UNITS: one Buffalo Wild Wings and one Smashburger
ANNUAL SALES: about $5 million
HOMETOWN: Houston
RESIDENCE: Dallas
BIRTH DATE: April 11, 1955
EDUCATION: bachelor's degree in psychology and education, St. Mary's University, San Antonio
PERSONAL: single
HOBBIES: travel

It’s a good thing hard work has never bothered Roz Mallet, because when the already-busy chief executive of PhaseNext Hospitality ascends to the chairwoman’s role of the National Restaurant Association in January, she’ll have the workload of a lifetime.


In 2008 the veteran chain executive left her interim-CEO position at Caribou Coffee to launch her multiconcept franchisee company, which currently includes a Buffalo Wild Wings unit and a Smashburger unit, fully aware that she’d shoulder the responsibilities of the NRA’s most prominent position in the near future. 


“It’s very different doing things on my own at that level than doing them as a CEO of a large company,” said Mallet, referring to Dallas-based PhaseNext. “But I have a lot of experience in operations, too, so I like the challenge.”


Mallet will also be challenged as NRA chairwoman, said the group’s chief executive, Dawn Sweeney.


“Our chairs do about three years of work in 12 months, but I know Roz can keep that pace,” Sweeney said.


Her experience as both a chain executive and now a small-business owner make Mallet ideal for the NRA role, colleagues say. Her innate ability to lead groups toward collaboration is a rare gift that will help her in that position, said Wallace Doolin, founder and chief executive of Black Box Intelligence. 


“Roz could write the book on collaboration skills,” he said.


Doolin met Mallet in 1983 and asked her to join him at Applebee’s, then just a two-unit concept. He said her focus has always been on solutions, not on herself.


In her three-plus decades in the industry, Mallet has displayed an intuitive understanding of the relationship between operations and a company’s workforce, a skill that made her a highly sought-after human resources expert, Doolin said.


“Back when she came up through HR, the question typically was, ‘How are we doing on people?’ But she looked beyond that,” Doolin said. “She knew you had to improve both [human resources and operations] to improve the whole business.”


Mallet realized her knack for the restaurant business during the summer break following her freshman year in college. Her brother encouraged her to take a job at an amusement park restaurant he worked at in Houston, and on the day she arrived, the crew was in the weeds.


“My brother said, ‘Can you take over the cash register and start breaking that line down?’” Mallet recalled. “Later, the manager walked in and said, ‘I hope to God you’re Ron Mallet’s sister.’”


Mallet was made supervisor before the summer ended.


Nearing graduation, Mallet, an education major, was managing an El Chico restaurant in Houston. The company recognized her talent and offered her a restaurant manager’s job in Memphis, Tenn. Torn between wanting to teach and her burgeoning love for restaurants, she said she “considered the facts: Memphis for $12,000 a year or $9,000 a year teaching. That made the choice simple.”


When Mallet’s boss, Richard Rivera, left El Chico for a post at W.R. Grace’s Del Taco chain, he wanted Mallet to join him in an HR role, but his contract prohibited him from approaching her. He asked Doolin, his former Steak & Ale colleague, who also was coming to W.R. Grace, to call her.


Once aboard, Mallet developed HR materials for the company’s Applebee’s concept and watched it grow from two to 63 stores. W.R. Grace took Applebee’s public in 1991 and asked Mallet to move to its Overland Park, Kan., headquarters. She declined and quit to work as a consultant for Executive Recruiting, a Dallas-based firm owned by Doolin and his wife, Joni Thomas Doolin.


Ironically, her first client was Applebee’s, placing her back in Kansas, where the chain’s chief operating officer, Lloyd Hill, convinced her to return to the surging brand four years later to oversee human resources.


Soon after, Doolin called again, luring Mallet this time to Carlson Companies, where he was then chief executive of T.G.I. Friday’s. Mallet would become Carlson’s senior vice president of HR, and in 2000, 18 months after she had arrived, the company was among Fortune magazine’s top 100 places to work.


Three years later, the peripatetic Doolin led Mallet to Le Madeleine as its chief operating officer. Amid a grueling turnaround, Mallet also endeavored to learn how other companies ran by seeking seats on their boards. One such company was Caribou Coffee, a Minneapolis-based chain that today has 554 units. At that time, Caribou was struggling and needed a strategic plan for recovery.


Mallet became Caribou’s president and interim chief executive a year later, but she was never asked to become the permanent CEO. She ran the company for three quarters before leaving “to think about what to do next,” she said.


In reality, she was well down that road, according to Amy O’Neill, a Caribou veteran who said the pair had had many “What do you think about this?” discussions regarding other industry opportunities.


In 2010 O’Neill left Caribou to become Mallet’s business partner and PhaseNext’s chief operating officer.


“Because we’d already had all those background conversations long before, our business plan came together quickly,” O’Neill said. “We had a clear understanding of what we could do.”


Fritzi Woods, chief executive of the Women’s Foodservice Forum, said Mallet’s wide-ranging abilities will make her a superior NRA chair next year.


“She will be a tremendous voice for the industry because she knows so well all the issues we’re dealing with — health care to people issues to menu labeling,” Woods said.


Mallet, who joined the NRA board in 2004, said she intends to effect broad change in the role.


“I’m not political by nature, but I’m interested enough in what affects our businesses and what helps us create more jobs,” she said. “We need to watch every piece of legislation that costs restaurants money. ... Lots of people think big businesses need to be charged more for this or that, but what they don’t understand is that our industry is made up mostly of lots of small businesses that don’t have the resources everyone assumes we have. It’s my hope to help our leaders see that next year.”