Pinky Cole became irate five years ago when she lost her job. Her ego was hurt because she had never been dismissed before.
She claims that unexpectedly, the devastating blow eventually gave way to relief and assurance as being dismissed gave her the motivation to convert her side project into a full-time position.
The best thing that could have occurred to me was getting fired since it forced me to fully commit to my business. Cole, 35, the creator and CEO of Slutty Vegan, an Atlanta-based vegan burger company,
Cole disclosed Slutty Vegan’s value to Forbes in the previous year. There are 11 sites spread across Georgia, New York, and Texas, and they serve provocative burgers, hot dogs, and fries with names like “One Night Stand” and “Sneaky Link.” Famous people like Spike Lee and Viola Davis gushed over Cole’s cuisine.
It’s made great progress. Cole served as a casting director for “Iyanla: Fix My Life,” an OWN Network treatment program, in 2018. She had been working there for nearly two years and claimed to have loved her work.
In addition, she had built Slutty Vegan over the course of four months as a side business, serving vegan burgers out of a communal commercial kitchen. Cole told Make It last year that she was dismissed in part because she was concentrating too much on her new project.
It didn’t make the ordeal any simpler to accept. Cole currently states, “The day that I got fired, Snoop Dogg ate from our restaurant,” but once her wrath subsided, she searched for a bright spot and discovered one staring her in the face. Cole remembers thinking maybe there was long-term promise for Slutty Vegan. 2019 saw the opening of her first physical site.
“And then everyone was talking about my business, and it started to go even more viral,” Cole adds.
Tips for avoiding “making the same mistakes again”
Cole calls herself “an expert in failure,” a reference to her firing as well as her first restaurant venture, a New York-based Jamaican diner that burned down in 2016.
Cole stated at the Fast Company Innovation Festival 2023 this month, “One, it taught me to make sure you have fire insurance — I didn’t have it — and two, hard times don’t always last.” “The end of the tunnel is in sight.”
She claims that she is still studying how to be a CEO at Slutty Vegan, where she has also failed. For instance, Cole resolved a lawsuit last month with former workers at her Brooklyn, New York, site for unpaid wages. This is not a circumstance that many managers would choose to find themselves in.
She believes she would rather find ways to learn from her failures so she won’t “ever make the same mistakes again” than allow them to impede her progress. Cole claims that the burned-down restaurant taught her the value of working with “a proper accountant” to handle business taxes, which resulted in a $17,000 wage garnishment.
During the first stages of Slutty Vegan, Cole attempted to handle all aspects of the business: operating the physical store, serving meals from the food truck, and handling the finances for both. That experience taught her a valuable lesson: Don’t overextend yourself.
Cole advises anyone experiencing a devastating emotional blow to the belly, such as being fired, to just “take the first step” toward getting back on their feet. Tomorrow is not the time to make plans for the next ten years of your life. All that needs to be planned is what lies ahead.
