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Empathy Unlocks the Future
The opportunity that awaited me in St. Louis wasn’t easy to find. Literally. Tucked into the corner of a suburban strip mall, with minimal signage, the small bakery café couldn’t have been further from Au Bon Pain’s high-visibility locations in places like Rockefeller Center and the World Trade Center.
I’d awoken before dawn to meet Mark Borland, our chief operating officer, and visit this place, and I was starting to wonder if I should have just stayed in bed. After several wrong turns, we finally arrived.
What had initially intrigued me about this little Midwestern bread company selling sandwiches, baked goods, and pastries was that it generated sales on par with the average Au Bon Pain store while paying a fraction ...
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