During my 44 years as CEO of Whole Foods Market, I learned that the role of a leader, especially a founder, doesn’t stay fixed. As the company grew and evolved, from one store in 1978 to over 540 stores when I retired in 2022, my role as CEO evolved too.
In the early days, I wore just about every hat imaginable: cashier, bagger, dishwasher, stocker, team leader – you name it. One area I naturally gravitated toward was real estate. I had a knack for it and genuinely enjoyed it. I love the strategy behind it, and believe great real estate is one of the most important factors for a brick-and-mortar business’s success. This proved true for us.
This started with our very first Whole Foods Market location. I found a site that seemed very promising – it was just a half mile from our original store, Safer Way, at Lamar Boulevard and 10th Street in Austin, Texas. It was centrally located, close to downtown, and easily accessible from nearby neighborhoods. Lamar was a major thoroughfare, with great visibility and lots of foot traffic. The space was also three times the size of Safer Way, which was huge by our standards. I thought it was an ideal first location for our natural food supermarket prototype, and the board agreed.
People often ask me how long it took for the first Whole Foods to become profitable. I typically answer (only half-joking), “About 2 o’clock in the afternoon on the first day.” Within six months, we were doing over $200,000 a week in sales (equivalent to $764,000 in 2024) and had become the highest-volume natural foods store in the country. It was the right place, the right time, and the right type of store.
But as Whole Foods expanded over the years, the business started asking something different of me. What the business needed from me with just a few stores was very different than what it needed at 50 or 500 locations. I couldn’t be the person visiting every potential site or negotiating every lease anymore. Not because I wasn’t good at it or didn’t enjoy it, but because the business needed me to serve in a different way.
It needed a CEO who could inspire, build a culture, make purpose-driven strategic decisions, and perhaps most challenging for me, serve as the public face of the brand.
I often use parenting as a metaphor to explain this shift. As a child grows, your role as a parent changes. You don’t love them any less, you just show up differently based on what they need at each stage of growth. The same is true in leadership. As your business evolves, you must evolve. You must continually ask yourself:
What does the business need from me most right now?
Not what I’ve always done.
Not what I enjoy doing most.
Not what I’m best at.
What it needs most from me now. That answer will keep changing, and CEOs need to be willing to change with it.
That’s why the best leaders I know are deeply self-aware. They regularly take time to reflect and ask themselves: How do I need to learn, grow, and change to better serve the business? Where can I add the most value? And where might I be holding us back?
Being a conscious leader means surrendering your ego to the good of the organization. It means being willing to grow and change, even when it’s challenging or uncomfortable. It means putting your business’s higher purpose ahead of your own preferences.
When you do that, something amazing happens: Your business evolves. And so do you.