Kathleen Held’s career trajectory, and ultimately her place within the foodservice consulting world, is unique.

Kathleen Held For starters, she’s not a foodservice design consultant in the traditional sense. She came to her role as CEO & president of Cini-Little International Inc., five years ago armed not with design credentials and years of hands-on project experience. Rather, she’s a marketing-driven leader who the consulting firm’s founders recognized has the vision, passion, skills and strategic thinking required to move the company into the future.

Held now leads her team, which includes some 45 design consultants, focused on developing business, building culture and connections, acquiring and nurturing talent, shepherding client relationships and advancing both the visibility and professionalism of foodservice consulting. She’s an active member of Foodservice Consultants Society International (FCSI) The Americas and serves as president of the FCSI Educational Foundation. Through the foundation, she helped drive the creation of a new professional studies program and foodservice certificate for design at Western Kentucky University. It’s the first certificate of its kind and a long-time goal of Cini-Little’s former principal and chairman of the board William Eaton, who spearheaded the creation of the FCSI Educational Foundation in 1995. Also through the foundation, Held drove the creation of FEED (Foodservice Essentials for Effective Design), an interactive workshop launched in 2024. It brings together various project partners — architects, designers, engineers, operators, manufacturers — to learn, collaborate and better understand the entire life cycle of a foodservice design project. 

A frequent speaker and guest lecturer, Held is also a Certified Professional Services Marketer and a member of the Society for Marketing Professional Services, where she has held positions at the national, regional and local levels. Throughout her career at Cini-Little, she’s studied, grown and created her own distinct path to becoming a top achiever in the world of foodservice design consulting. It’s a path Held has been on for more than three decades but, in a sense, she’s really just getting started.

Blazing Her Own Trail

Family ties initially led Held into the foodservice facility design arena, and specifically to Cini-Little. “My mom worked for the company back when it was Cini-Grissom, when I was in elementary school,” she recalls. “She had worked at an equipment dealership and at Marriott before John Cini recruited her. So I grew up with Cini-Little and the foodservice industry.”

While attending Frostburg State University, studying history and art history while earning a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, Held began filling in at Cini-Little doing administrative work in various departments and covering for vacationing staff members during her school breaks. In 1994, Held joined the firm as marketing coordinator.

“The early ’90s was a high period at the company. There were close to 100 staff members around the world. There was a big presence at headquarters, but it always felt like family,” she says. “I can’t say my dream as a college student was to work at a foodservice consulting firm, but I knew that what I saw and felt here was something I wanted to be a part of.”

In her marketing capacity, Held developed the firm’s first website, collaborated with designers to create project case studies and ultimately centralized all marketing functions under one umbrella. She recalls being cautioned when she joined the company that there was no future for her there, so she designed and built her own career ladder, advancing over the years from marketing coordinator to marketing manager, marketing director, vice president of marketing and business development, and chief marketing officer. In May of 2020, she was named CEO. 

“I always like a good challenge, so I guess being told early on that there was no trajectory for me motivated me to prove otherwise,” Held laughs. “Ultimately, I always did the job I wanted, not necessarily the job I had. I took on initiatives, such as social media, that the firm was hesitant about getting into. My approach was to do what I felt was right and ask for forgiveness later, after demonstrating that it was the right move. The founders and former principals, with whom I worked closely over the years, embraced that approach and me. Bill Eaton, Ron Kooser, John Cini, Jim Little, Dick Eisenbarth — they all mentored me, taught me so much and felt I had a lot to offer.”

By the time Held was named vice president of marketing and business development, she knew she eventually wanted to lead the company as its CEO. She also knew that was exactly the role she was being groomed for. Ultimately, however, stepping onto that stage was daunting. For starters, May of 2020 was early days in a global pandemic that would dramatically impact the foodservice industry and its supply chain partners. But highly daunting, too, was Cini-Little’s long-held reputation as one of the industry’s most successful, pioneering firms, one built and led by skilled and innovative design consultants known for high-level execution of complex, high-profile projects. 

“It was very intimidating. I’m not a foodservice designer. I’m not at all like those who came before me. Everything I knew about what the company does I learned from marketing it and being the face for business development. I could write detailed proposals and bring in work and I had confidence instilled in me that I knew enough. But I had to fight the feeling of imposter syndrome — and sometimes still do,” Held admits. “I needed to become comfortable with the fact that it was OK to be me and to run the company the way I felt it should be run.”

As CEO, Held has introduced changes including organizational restructuring, new approaches to training and utilizing design technologies. Outside of the firm’s Germantown, Md., headquarters, she’s eliminated brick-and-mortar offices and brought on new hires working remotely. “We now have more geographically dispersed presence and can be closer to where our clients are,” she notes. “As consultants, we basically sell knowledge and time, so learning how to be more productive is key to being more profitable. Eliminating brick-and-mortar spaces allowed us to pick up some amazing talent and we’ve managed to develop an even stronger culture, one that still feels like family.”

In addition to leading, Held is intently focused on learning. Beyond her Cini-Little colleagues and mentors, she credits fellow FCSI members as being hugely impactful in her professional and personal development. And she’s become a keen student of foodservice facility design. Currently, she’s enrolled in the same certificate course that she helped to introduce to Western Kentucky University’s curriculum. 

“When I took over as CEO, I told the team that I’d be asking them to make a lot of changes that were likely uncomfortable but necessary to move the company forward,” Held says. “I asked them to learn a lot of new things, and I asked the same of myself.”

Her first five years as leader, Held says, have flown by and her focus has now shifted from pandemic- and transition-induced triage to longer-term strategic planning and shaping the future of the company. “We no longer have our eyes in the rearview mirror of this amazing legacy company,” she notes, “but rather on the windshield in front of us.”

What is a lesson learned you have never forgotten?

You catch more flies with sugar than vinegar. It applies to so many things and guides my approach to leadership.

What would your team say is your superpower?

Empathy. I try to put myself in their shoes and weigh every decision by thinking through very analytically how it will affect everyone.

Where or to whom do you turn for inspiration?

To my mom; to the CEO groups I belong to; to Dick Eisenbarth, who recently retired from Cini-Little and helped prepare me for this role; and to fellow FCSI members, who have become not only my peers but some of my closest friends.