Taste for success: LaSalsa Holding's president and CEO Charles Boppell finds the way to profits is through customers' taste buds.

Charles (Chuck) Boppell sailed to Hawaii in 1986 with his son and four crewmen.

He loves sailing because it "slows you down," he says. "You're at the mercy of what's going on around you. You're not in control any more."

"It's so different from working," he adds.

Indeed, food service is a fast-paced career, and Boppell has spent 30 years in it. And as president and CEO of West L.A.-based La Salsa Holding Co., his career hasn't slowed down a bit. La Salsa Holding is the parent of 47 La Salsa Mexican food outlets.

But Boppell says he likes the fast pace. He spent a short time between jobs in the real estate field but found it, "too slow," he says. "The pace of life (in real estate) is almost the opposite end of the spectrum from food service."

La Salsa is a quick-service chain that sells fresh, healthy Mexican food. Its outlets are located in several Western states, with the bulk of them in Southern California. It had 1994 sales of $29 million.

Boppell says he also likes the food service business because it involves a lot of decisions and a lot of results. "If you make a change for the better, you immediately see a reaction with the customers," he says. And if a change is made for the worse, the customers react to that too, he says.

But Larry Higby, who used to work with Boppell at Taco Bell, says Boppell also "loves food, all kinds of food. He's fascinated with food - how it's served, how it's prepared and where it comes from." Higby is currently group vice president of downtown L.A.-based Unocal Corp.

At 5 feet, 6 inches tall and 175 pounds, Boppell admits that, being in the food business, he has had to struggle with his weight. "It's up now," he says.

Boppell specializes in turning unprofitable fast-food chains into profitable ones. He can quickly determine what parts of a particular operation are not running smoothly, and turn them around, Higby says.

Back in 1977 Boppell spent 15 months as Pizza Hut Inc.'s Western division vice president turning around 280 Pizza Hut outlets. All but five were losing money when he was first handed the job, Boppell says.

To turn a chain around, he says, he pinpoints the three or four things that need to be done to make it successful and then focuses on doing those things. "There will be 100 things that need to be done. You can never do all of those things," he says.

To turn around the Pizza Hut outlets, Boppell and his team improved the pizza by adding more ingredients where employees had begun to skimp, remodeled the stores and retrained every employee.

Most of the outlets were made profitable, and Boppell was named senior vice president of the company. In that position, he was responsible for all of Pizza Hut's 2,900 company-owned restaurants.

Pizza Hut and Taco Bell are both owned by PepsiCo Inc., and Boppell became senior vice president of operations at Taco Bell in 1982. Eventually, he became president of that chain.

At that time, Taco Bell was profitable, but the traffic count at the individual restaurants was falling. Under Boppell's guidance, service at the eateries was speeded up, the menu was broadened, and drive-through and inside dining areas were added at many of the outlets, he says.

The outlets were soon reporting double-digit increases in traffic count, he says.

Next, Boppell left for a short stint at Omaha, Neb.-based Godfather's Pizza, a chain of 900 restaurants, but quit that company in 1985 and decided to take some time off from the restaurant business. That was when he got involved in real estate and found it wasn't for him, he says. He also bought a Toyota dealership in Ventura County, which he still owns.

Around that time, some friends recruited him to turn around their company, American Restaurants, which owns franchised Wendy's eateries, primarily in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

He helped turn many of those outlets around, then helped the company sell them and use the proceeds to buy another restaurant chain, Ventura-based Hudson's Grill. But that chain didn't fly, and Boppell checked out of that venture in August 1993 and began making plans to go off sailing for awhile in Mexico.

But he never made it across the border because the owners of La Salsa came knocking on his door. At the time, the chain was losing money because it was spreading itself too thin, Boppell says.

It had begun steering away from its core Mexican food menu by selling rotisserie chicken. Also, instead of sticking to its traditional fast-food eateries, it had started opening drive-through outlets and full-service restaurants, he says.

Under Boppell's guidance, La Salsa transformed many of the non-traditional outlets back to conventional ones with counter service and inside tables. The others he either sold off or franchised, he says.

It also reduced much of its overhead by lowering labor costs and renegotiating contracts for many of its supplies, he says. By September 1994 the company was back in the black, he adds.

Boppell says he's a workaholic. Prior to his Hawaiian sailing adventure, he seldom took more than a week's vacation in any given year because trying to turn around each chain was a very intense process, and he felt he couldn't leave in the middle. Then, just at the time each chain was turned around and he felt comfortable leaving it, he got a new job, he says.

Boppell says he wants to help La Salsa open 450 more outlets during the next five years in the Western states. But restaurant chains can only grow as fast as they can hire well-trained workers to run the restaurants.

"People is the first thing that gets restaurant businesses in trouble," he says. If customers aren't treated right at a restaurant, they won't come back, no matter how well-known the chain is, he says.

Boppell says he wants La Salsa "to be the leader in the Mexican quick-service niche through the highest quality food and people."

Then the profits will follow, he says.

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Charles (Chuck) Boppell

Native of: Santa Cruz 

Resident of: Santa Monica 

Age: 53

Education: B.A. in business and economics, Whitworth College, Spokane, Wash.

Spouse: Karlyn Boppell