From Waitress to CEO: How Julia Stewart Rose to the Top — and Eventually Bought Applebee’s

Julia Stewart’s career in the restaurant industry reads almost like a Hollywood screenplay: a teenage waitress works her way through corporate America, is passed over for the job she believes she was promised, walks away — and years later returns as the CEO of the company buying her former employer.

Long before she was one of the most powerful women in the restaurant business, Stewart was a 16-year-old waitress at IHOP. The experience gave her an early education in customer service and restaurant operations that would remain with her throughout her career. She has described restaurants as an environment where feedback is immediate: customers quickly tell employees what works and what does not.

Stewart eventually moved into restaurant marketing, holding positions with major brands including Carl’s Jr. and Burger King. She later made an important career decision: instead of remaining exclusively in marketing, she moved into operations.

That decision eventually took her through Taco Bell and ultimately to Applebee’s.

In October 1998, Stewart became president of Applebee’s domestic division. She has since said she was led to believe that if she produced the necessary results, she would eventually become CEO.

She delivered results.

According to Stewart's later account, she helped turn around the business and doubled the company's stock price. But when she approached Applebee's chairman about the CEO position, she says the answer was devastatingly direct: she wasn't getting the job.

Stewart left.

The decision would ultimately produce one of the most remarkable corporate comeback stories in the restaurant industry.

In December 2001, IHOP hired Stewart as president and chief operating officer. This time, the succession plan was put in writing: Stewart was scheduled to become chief executive by mid-2002.

She became CEO in May 2002.

The company Stewart inherited needed work. IHOP was an iconic American restaurant, but its brand had become dated. Stewart helped modernize restaurants, improve service and refresh the menu. The company also pushed heavily toward a franchise-based business model.

The turnaround worked.

By 2007, more than 99 percent of IHOP's 1,319 restaurants were franchise-operated, and the company began looking for an acquisition that could provide its next stage of growth.

Then came an extraordinary opportunity.

Applebee's was for sale.

The company that had denied Stewart its top position was considerably larger than IHOP. Applebee's had roughly 2,000 restaurants, compared with approximately 1,400 IHOP locations at the time. Buying it would mean the smaller company swallowing the larger one.

Stewart and her board went for it.

In July 2007, IHOP announced an agreement to acquire Applebee's for $25.50 per share in cash. The transaction was completed that November at a total value of approximately $2.1 billion, creating what the company described as the world's largest full-service restaurant company, with more than 3,250 locations.

Stewart was now in charge of both brands.

The symbolism was impossible to miss.

The teenage IHOP waitress who had risen through the restaurant industry, been denied Applebee's CEO position and walked away was now chairman and CEO of the corporation that owned Applebee's.

Stewart has insisted the acquisition wasn't about revenge. Strategically, Applebee's presented an opportunity to apply many of the same franchising and turnaround techniques that had worked at IHOP.

Her tenure was not without difficulties. Applebee's struggled with changing consumer tastes, and by 2016 its same-store sales were declining. Stewart resigned as chairman and CEO of DineEquity in 2017 after roughly 16 years leading IHOP and its successor company.

She wasn't finished.

Stewart later moved into entrepreneurship, founding wellness company Alurx and applying lessons from more than four decades in corporate leadership to a new industry.

Yet her restaurant career remains the defining story.

Julia Stewart didn't simply climb from waitress to CEO. She suffered one of the most painful disappointments an ambitious executive can experience, left the company that rejected her, rebuilt her career somewhere else — and eventually returned in perhaps the most unlikely way imaginable.

She bought the company that wouldn't make her CEO.