David Kim Reborn As Media-Happy Success Guru

The entrepreneur who runs a food empire that includes Baja Fresh, La Salsa, Sweet Factory, Cinnabon and other companies was a total unknown until an episode of CBS’s Undercover Boss aired this April. Now David Kim has shucked off his mild-mannered shell and emerged as America’s newest success guru.

There’s a good reason Kim didn’t court publicity earlier. For the past 20 years he has been investing in a long series of businesses, work that most would deem a bit dry, with little of the kind of sweat-of-the-brow human drama that made his episode of Undercover Boss so memorable.

After finishing college in 1990 David Kim began working in the insurance industry. Before long the entrepreneurial itch struck. Kim started flipping houses. He then started and sold a small video rental chain. In 1994 he opened a company to enter the restaurant business.

“When I started a restaurant company, it wasn’t easy,” Kim recalls. “I had to build everything from nothing. The first franchise I bought was a Denny’s and I did it with credit cards.”

Kim’s company bought several distressed national restaurant brands and also created his own concept. It ultimately grew into an operations with 1,000 employees and annual revenues of $30 million.

Kim didn’t confine himself to restaurants. He also invested in a slew of other industries, including flower retailing, distribution, aviation, medical and insurance. It wasn’t until 2002 that Kim’s efforts became linked with brands recognizable to today’s consumers when he acquired Sweet Factory. He turned the struggling chain around and expanded it to 115 locations. In 2004 he bought the Cinnabon chain of 88 stores and grew it into 147 outlets.

In 2006 Kim formed a private equity firm to buy up and shape up distressed restaurant chains. The firm’s first targets were La Salsa and Baja Fresh, which he bought from Wendy’s International for $31 million. Just four years earlier Wendy’s had bought Baja Fresh for $275 million and expanded it to over 300 locations. Its strategy was flawed, leading to a steady decline in same-store sales. Kim’s group trimmed about four dozen Baja Fresh locations and moved the headquarters from Thousand Oaks to Cypress, California.

And in what may be seen as a canny publicity move, Kim signed on to do an episode of the CBS hit Undercover Boss. To disguise himself he donned an improbable goatee and applied for a series of jobs. The show follows his encounters with a cashier, a store manager and a regional operations manager. Kim showed himself to be endearingly clumsy in making a burrito and glacial at the cash register.

The face-to-face encounters with the struggles and aspirations of Baja Fresh employees proved moving for Kim and he was brought to tears. In the climactic scene — which probably pulled some tears from the audience — Kim gave the hardworking manager of a Las Vegas store a Baja Fresh franchise priced at $50,000. He also gave away thousands of dollars to each of the other employees with whom he had contact as well as a commitment to personally mentor the lucky new franchisee. The episode made Kim an instant TV-land celebrity and brought fresh attention to the Baja Fresh chain and its laudable no-can-openers motto.

Since then Kim has published Ignite!: The 12 Values that Fuel Billionaire Success. Kim isn’t a billionaire, at least yet, but the book’s title adds to the fresh aura of success around Kim and the Baja Fresh chain. He has also signed on with a speakers bureau to deliver talks with titles like “The 7 Values that Fuel Billionaire Success”, “The Art of the Turnaround” and “No Excuses in America!” And Kim is said to be in talks to do more TV projects.

David Kim was born in South Korea. He lived in a number of foreign countries as a boy because his father was a diplomat with a series of ambassadorships. In the early 80s, when David was 12, the family immigrated to the U.S. David was in the 7th grade when he started his first business. For seven years he sold toys in a flea market parking lot.

Today Kim is active in a number of causes and charities, including: Faster Cures , Liberty In North Korea, and World Vision. He lives with his family in Anaheim, California.