There is a Burger King location, not far from the chain’s Miami headquarters, where executives go for a sense of the competitive dynamics in the fast-food business. It’s easy to see why. McDonald’s and Wendy’s and several other competitors can be seen through the restaurant’s front windows.
“We come here to see the street fight,” said José Cil, CEO of the chain’s parent company, Restaurant Brands International.
Which explains why he is so familiar with the workers. Cil greets the employees at the counter the moment he arrives, taking time to talk with them and ask questions before he heads in for a video shoot. Cil is a Miami native who has worked with Burger King in various forms for more than two decades and grew up eating Whoppers. He knows this location as much as anybody.
Then again, Cil does this everywhere. He has visited thousands of restaurants over his career and has made it a habit of getting to know people. Stand with him chatting at company headquarters and he will wave to everyone coming in off the nearby elevator.
That’s certainly not unusual in a CEO. Many of them make it that far in part by cultivating relationships.
Yet this is who Jose Cil is. While attending law school at the University of Pennsylvania, homeless people near the school all knew him by first name. It’s why he remembers names of students at his old high school, where he still serves as a mentor, or the employees at a Burger King in Europe. It’s why he maintains strong friendships with numerous classmates.
It’s also why he shifted careers 20 years ago, away from what appeared to be a successful future in law.
Cil’s personable nature explains his rise to the top at Burger King and then Restaurant Brands International. Along the way, the 2021 Restaurant Business Restaurant Leader of the Year invigorated Burger King’s Europe business, overhauled the corporate culture and helped change the trajectory of Popeyes. RBI is now acquiring its fourth brand, Firehouse Subs, in part because of Cil’s ability to quickly establish relationships.
“People feel very comfortable around him,” said Father Guillermo Garcia-Tuñón, or “Father Willie,” president of Belen Jesuit Preparatory School in Miami and a childhood friend of Cil’s from the same school. “He reads his audience really, really well.”
Both of Cil’s parents were Cuban immigrants. His father, José de Jesus Cil, immigrated when he was 18. His mother’s family came to the country by ferry boat in 1960 when she was 14.
Cil’s grandfather was imprisoned by the Castro regime—but not because he was political. “He had a big mouth,” Cil’s mother, Marta Aleida Hernandez, said.
They were part of the burgeoning Cuban community in Miami, an environment that played a huge role in Cil’s upbringing.
Cil’s father was in the restaurant business, working for a now-defunct hot dog chain called Lum’s. Cil would spend time in the restaurants as his father did inspections, playing Pac Man and Space Invaders and getting to know the servers and the managers.
His mother was an administrator in the local school system, taught English as a Second Language classes at night and at local universities on Saturdays. “I had a full-time job and whatever other job I could get,” Cil’s mother said.
Cil’s parents divorced when he was 11. Hernandez worked those jobs to send Cil to Belen, a Jesuit school that originated in Cuba and moved to Miami after the Castro regime took control.
Its students were children of Cuban immigrants like Cil, people like friends Father Willie and Eddie Garcia, people whose parents worked hard to establish a new life in the U.S.
“I didn’t see anything else,” Cil said. “I had a number of friends that had similar backgrounds. Their parents were Cuban. They came to Miami. They left everything behind. And all they did was work and work and work, and really try to establish a great standard of living and a right environment for their children.”
On Sundays the family, including Hernandez and Cil’s two sisters, would go to the Burger King near their house—Burger King No. 7, Cil would later learn. But money was tight, so they would not get beverages. They instead drank the generic cola Hernandez would frequently purchase because it was cheaper.
She bought real Coke on the day she was promoted to principal.
At Belen, Cil was a leader. He was a quarterback on the football team. Confident and social, he was the leader among his friends. They’d spend time at Cil’s house after school, after games and on weekends. And Hernandez would call people on their birthdays, congratulate them when they did well and reprimand them when they didn’t. “She was a big influence on all of us,” Garcia said.
He remains close with Garcia-Tuñón and with Garcia, with whom he shares a wine bottling operation out of Napa. Cil also remains close with Belen, where he has been a benefactor and a volunteer.
“He is the one who is our CEO,” Garcia said. “He keeps us all together, and that has been the trajectory of his life the last 40 years.”
Cil once hurt himself playing in a company softball game while he was still in the legal department at Burger King. It was the championship, so he finished the game and then went to the doctor. Broken collarbone.
“You’re playing pool with Jose, Jose is competitive. You’re playing darts with Jose, Jose’s competitive. You’re playing golf with Jose, very competitive,” Garcia said. “He is not gonna go to the PGA, but he’ll grind out there and he’ll make you play for your money.”
He has his quirks, especially when it comes to travel. He quickly removes the tags from his luggage, almost as a joke, once he gets them off the conveyor belt. He will also spray himself from samples of cologne he finds at duty free shops.
And despite growing up in Miami during the heyday of Dan Marino, he has an inexplicable love of the Dallas Cowboys and Hall-of-Fame quarterback Troy Aikman.
Above all, everybody, either at Belen or in the corporate offices of RBI, describes Cil as a family man.
Cil met his wife, Annie, in 1992 while both were summer interns at a Miami law firm. They shared a hometown and the experience of being the children of Cuban immigrants. They spent time with one another but kept it quiet as they started dating because both wanted jobs there.
Their first date was at an Italian restaurant Cil’s father recommended. “An old-person restaurant,” Annie recalled. Yet the attraction was “very natural.” They were engaged a year later, married two years later and had their eldest daughter two years after that.
Annie has been a driving force in Cil’s career. Twenty years ago, Cil decided he no longer wanted to be a partner at a law firm after realizing he was in danger of missing time with his family. On a drive home from a church retreat, he decided to leave the law firm.
Two days later, it was Annie who noticed the ad for an in-house attorney at Burger King. She encouraged Cil to apply, even though he did not have the patent and trademark experience the company wanted.
She would also give up her own promising legal career to care for their children, Nicole and Jochi, as Cil’s career began to take off. She would be the one who would care for the kids as they moved overseas. She’d be the one at home as Cil traveled all over the world for his career, to Europe and Asia and Canada.
Annie “has been a huge, huge factor in his success,” Hernandez said. “Annie has been very supportive. She has kept the family together when it was really tough. They moved with the young kids to Europe, not once but twice. In Switzerland, in Zurich, they spoke German. And the weather was brutal. He was traveling all the time and Annie was home with the kids.”
The opening for Cil to take those European positions came in 2003. He had been in the legal department at the time. But Jim Hyatt, then the chain’s chief global operations officer, recognized Cil had interests and ambitions beyond the legal department and offered him something of a “sabbatical,” to see if he’d be interested in operations.
“I found him extremely curious,” Hyatt said. “He wanted to know more than the position he was playing legally. He has this passion about being involved.”
It would be a major shift, and Cil spoke with friends and family, all of whom urged him to take the position. But then Cil called his father.
“Are you crazy?” he said.
He knew well the life Cil was getting himself into. “If you’re in the restaurant business, you’re going to be on all the time. If there’s something going on in the restaurant, you need to deal with it, there’s no one else to deal with it. It’s a full-time, all-the-time commitment,” Cil quoted his father saying.
Cil’s response? “That’s what I’m excited about—being part of a team, accomplishing something really big.”
“In that case,” his father said, “then it’s the best business in the world.”
Cil spent five months in training, learning how to work the restaurants, making fries and Whoppers and running the drive-thru and then taking over as shift manager. “He screwed up services in a couple of places and we had to go clean that up,” Hyatt said. “But overall he did OK.”
That, as Hyatt said, would “turn José loose on the whole width of the Burger King business.” He moved into operations full time, managing a food-safety program the company implemented after an infamous “Dirty Dining” investigation by ABC News.
Cil moved through operations positions. At one point he was offered an opportunity for a promotion, a VP position, back in the legal department. In Burger King culture this was a big deal. “If you can get a VP job, even if it’s VP of toilets, take it, because that’s a big step at the company,” Cil said. He turned it down, though, happy with his decision to move to operations.
Cil would integrate that mentality to his family. They visit Burger King frequently. He sometimes asks them to time the drive-thru. “When we would travel, the first place he would look for is a Burger King,” daughter Nicole said. “So, we would go to all these different Burger Kings and have the food there and, yeah, he loves Burger King.”
Cil would leave the brand, however, in 2010 to go work for Walmart. It was a time of major change at Burger King, with managers being moved in and out of the company. He decided to take a position as a regional general manager for the retail giant in South Florida.
But, that year, Burger King was sold to 3G Capital. The chain’s then-CEO, John Chidsey, told the buyers to find a way to get Cil back in the fold. Just 10 months later, Cil was recruited to come back to Burger King.
That decision involved some tough conversations, given that Cil would be asked to return to Europe for a second time. He helped to turn around the European business a few years earlier, but this second trip would prove more pivotal for the company and for Cil’s career.
“It was a business that had stagnated for a few years,” said Daniel Schwartz, Cil’s predecessor as CEO of RBI and its current chairman. “He turned it into the single biggest growth engine, growth driver, for Burger King.”
Cil’s job was to recruit master franchisees to operate entire markets for the company, such as France, Spain and Russia. They would form joint venture partnerships, with Burger King taking an investment in the market. The master franchisee would then recruit other operators to open stores in those markets.
That move would put the chain’s growth on a rocket. In 2010, the company had about 4,500 locations outside the U.S. Today, that number is 11,500.
“I think before we got there, there would be a celebration if we would build 50 restaurants a year,” said Leo Leon, who worked with Cil in Europe and who today is a Burger King franchisee. “By the time we left, we’re building 600 to 700 restaurants a year.”
That growth helped spur much of the company’s success in those years, leading to its return to the public markets in 2012 and then the acquisition of Tim Hortons in 2014 that formed RBI.
It’s a model RBI is using to grow its other brands in international markets, including Tim Hortons and Popeyes and, eventually, Firehouse.
Cil would take over as president of Burger King in 2014, after the Tim Hortons’ move. He was named CEO of RBI when Schwartz was named chairman, two years after the Popeyes acquisition. The Burger King man was now head of a multi-brand operator.
RBI’s top executives all sit in a group of cubicles off the elevators at the company’s Miami offices and next to a conference room, a stark symbol of the changes 3G brought to Burger King more than a decade earlier when it eliminated offices and corporate planes and hundreds of jobs.
Cil has shifted the culture while adhering to the company’s foundational elements. He is constantly talking with people and takes time to get to know them. “Jose’s phone lights up like a Christmas tree,” Chief Operating Officer Josh Kobza said.
He is a “consensus builder,” who doesn’t lead by dictating the way things get done but by building agreement among disparate parties. Jeff Housman, chief people officer, called Cil’s style “humble.”
Cil is a good listener, interested in the details. But when a decision is made, he doesn’t look back. “He doesn’t second-guess himself,” said Jill Granat, RBI’s chief legal officer and the one Cil called more than 20 years earlier when he wanted that first Burger King job.
He has also instilled a shift in the company’s values. “We at Burger King and then RBI have always focused on what people do, goals, measuring our goals, whether we’ve achieved our goals,” Granat said. “Somewhere along the way, we lost a little bit of how we got there. Jose has brought the ‘how’ back to how we do things.”
The changes, Housman said, have helped RBI earn a “Great Places to Work” designation, based on the company’s improvement in engagement scores.
But operating all these global brands is not easy. RBI has three chains, each with restaurants around the world. Those are different brands and different cultures and different presences in their respective markets.
Getting them all pointed in the right direction can be a challenge. When Cil started in early 2019, Popeyes had been stagnant for a couple of years. By the end of the year, the chain started selling a chicken sandwich that would prove to be the most popular new product introduction in industry history.
But then Tim Hortons had been struggling. RBI overhauled its management and shifted its marketing strategy and began working on quality—efforts that appear to be working despite a pandemic that has been particularly problematic in its home country of Canada.
Now Burger King is a problem in the U.S. The brand has fallen behind its top competitors, leading the company to change management there to focus more on operations over marketing. Cil has said the brand has focused too much on short-term wins over long-term success. Burger King this year has made massive changes to its management, much like Tim Hortons two years earlier.
“I think he’s been really pushing the team right now,” Leon said. “I know that’s going to continue now. He’s going to push to make decisions for the long term, and if we’re not ready for something, then don’t do it.”
While watching these brands struggle can be difficult, particularly for the ultra-competitive Cil, he has a history of getting things done. And the challenges are not keeping him from pushing the company forward. In November, Cil stood next to Firehouse CEO Don Fox, in front of a Firehouse logo, announcing a $1 billion deal. It would be his first acquisition as CEO, and one completed because Fox, like Cil, was a Burger King man once.
“We really hit it off,” Fox said. In the end, with Cil, it all goes back to relationships.