Is there a moment in your life that forced you to look at things differently?

The first thing that comes to mind is my outlook on my career. I was having breakfast with a mentor of mine and at the time, I was struggling with work and what I wanted to do. I grew up saying I would never work in our family’s catering business (Footers Catering). I saw how passionate my father was about what he did and I wanted to pursue something that I was truly passionate about.

I went to school to study business and sports marketing, did internships in the sports world and after a turn of events, I ended up working for my father shortly after graduating from college.

I remember that morning saying to Bob; “I think I really missed my calling, I should have been a college basketball coach.” He asked “Why?” And I launched into my response; “Well basketball is a great sport, plus I love competition, the strategy and preparing a game plan. I think it would be cool to be able to recruit people to be part of a team, and then you get the opportunity to help them grow and at that age, they are more receptive to improvement and coaching. I love the challenge of getting a group of people to come together to play as a team. And the coaches even wear nice suits, and I kind of like dressing up.” After that, Bob replied; “Anthony, you have an opportunity to do all of that right now at Footers, just replace basketball with catering.”

It was at that moment that I realized my passion for helping people grow and for business was a perfect fit for the position I was in. From that day forward I had a different outlook and approach coming to work. 15 years later, I feel incredibly fortunate to still be in a spot where I love what I do for work and all it took was a little shift in mindset to figure that out.