Ole Miss Alumni Review: From Jets To Subs

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This story was reprinted with permission of the Ole Miss Alumni Review. Winter 2014 Edition

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Former FedEx VP forges second career after retirement

By Tom Speed
After retiring from an illustrious career at FedEx in 2003, Edith Kelly-Green wasn’t looking for a new profession. However, all the right ingredients came together to make one business opportunity too good to pass up.
After beginning her FedEx career in its accounting department and working her way
up to vice president and chief sourcing officer, she only managed to stay retired about a year before the opportunity to purchase a Lenny’s Sub Shop franchise presented itself. Kelly-Green’s daughter, Jayna Michelle Kelly, was a fan of the restaurant and frequented a Memphis location while she was a student at Rhodes College.
When her daughter urged her to invest in the company, and she thought of her son, James Kelly, who would soon graduate with an MBA from Florida A&M University with an eye towards entrepreneurship, Kelly-Green saw a chance to establish a family business that would provide an ongoing opportunity for her children.
“I got into Lenny’s based on my daughter’s recommendation,” she says, “but also to create a family legacy, a family business that would give my family members the opportunity to own their own business.”
Kelly-Green bought her first store in January 2005. Not content to make an idle commitment, she delved deeply into the business and quickly expanded to 10 stores in the Memphis area. The KGR Group — the collective company name for all of her restaurants — became the largest franchisee of the Memphis-based chain. She knew from the beginning that she wanted a large enough stake in the chain to be included in all major decisions.

“When decisions are made that impact the franchisee, we wanted to be consulted,” she explains. “And if you own ten stores out of 160 at the time, it’s a little hard to make major decisions without getting at least some input from the largest franchisee.” 
When Kelly-Green was deciding whether to invest in Lenny’s, she found it helpful that she happened to know the restaurant chain’s founder.
Lenny Moore founded Lenny’s in Bartlett, Tenn., in 1998.
Lenny’s was originally designed as a single, standalone store focusing on the fresh sub sandwiches and authentic Philly cheesesteaks that Moore had grown up on and emulated with his first sandwich shop in Wildwood, N.J., back in 1979. With the success of that first store in Bartlett, Moore began expanding with additional stores and selling franchises. One of them was in Oxford
“I knew the person who owned the business, and I just felt comfortable,” Kelly-Green says. “And there was a store in Oxford, which was my hometown.”
From almost retiring to being back in the business world at full tilt, Kelly-Green’s transition was unlikely but not shocking.
“It’s no surprise that she would be successful at anything she tries,” says Jan Farrington, Ole Miss Alumni Association past president, who has worked with Kelly-Green as a member of the Ole Miss Women’s Council for Philanthropy and other alumni-related duties. “She just has that ability and know-how to get things done.”
Number Crunching 
Kelly-Green’s comfort level working with numbers and her accounting background helped her develop the business from day one. Her prior experience, both in the field of public accounting and in a variety of positions with FedEx, allowed her to see the inner workings of how a business operates.
“Accounting is a great background for anyone who wants to be in business,” she says. “I compare an accounting career to Delta Airlines. No matter what Delta flight you get, you’re going to go through Atlanta. In the business environment, everything eventually comes through the accounting department. It’s a good way to see what’s going on at a company.”
As a public accountant with Deloitte Touche in Memphis, Kelly-Green worked as an auditor, which allowed her to see the commonalities and differences between different types of businesses. Later at FedEx, she worked a variety of jobs that have paid dividends down the line.
“I saw how several different companies operated,” Kelly Green says. “I spent a couple of years in the accounting department at FedEx. I then moved to finance, publishing services and internal audit. So I saw many different parts of the company. But it was my accounting background that helped me get a really good, quick grasp of each operation.”
She didn’t always have that knowledge. Growing up in Oxford, Kelly-Green was urged to go to college by her grandmother who had a sixth-grade education. She decided to go to Ole Miss because it was local and affordable. At first, she intended to study political science.
“When I started at Ole Miss, I could barely spell accounting,” she jokes. “When I graduated from high school, I didn’t know what accounting was. I don’t really know how I got into accounting. There were a couple of classmates ahead of me who majored in accounting, people I knew from Oxford, so perhaps that was it. But otherwise, I really can’t tell you how I got into it. I guess it was an act of God.”The most challenging aspect of her new career is “getting and keeping good employees,” Kelly-Green says. “Training employees and teaching them the importance of good customer service is much more difficult than it was ten years ago.”
One aspect of that change is Lenny’s employees are younger than the workforce she was accustomed to at FedEx, but Kelly Green has taken that situation as a challenge to provide more opportunities.
“I’ve learned a lot more about different kinds of people. When I was at FedEx, most of the people on my team were proffessional employees, people who had degrees, people who were accountants and engineers,” she says. “Most of our employees at Lenny’s are much younger, even teenagers, and they don’t have college degrees or much work experience.”
Kelly-Green offers internal advancement, encouraging her employees not to settle for permanent minimum-wage positions in her company.
“Many of these employees are working in minimum-wage positions and don’t have any idea that they can do better,” she says. “That’s one thing we try to do in our company: create opportunities for our employees to do better things. We want them to believe that they can manage a store, own one or several stores, or become an area manager providing leadership to many locations. They can even do something else that is not Lenny’s related if that’s what they want to do. Lenny’s does not have to be their final lifestyle.
“We also prefer promoting our own people. If interest is expressed in moving into a general manager’s role, for example, we move very quickly to get that employee into a training regimen so that he/she is prepared when the next general manager’s position opens up.”
Kelly-Green’s restaurants currently employ about 125 people.
Ongoing Service
Her commitment to helping others extends to her service at her alma mater. Kelly-Green has been an active alumna since graduation, serving on the Alumni Association board of directors and executive committee. She was inducted into the Alumni Hall of Fame in 1999.
Perhaps her most active role has been as founding co-chair of the Ole Miss Women’s Council for Philanthropy, a group dedicated to providing scholarships for young men and women to attend Ole Miss.

The council was founded in 2000, at which point Kelly-Green endowed a scholarship in honor of her grandmother. She has since endowed another for her mother-in-law. She also has provided for two other scholarships as a part of her estate planning.
From the outset, the Women’s Council sought to distinguish itself by providing more than just scholarships. It was a serious job that needed a serious leader.
“There really could not have been a better choice as the first chairman than Edith,” Farrington says. “She set this perfect tone for the council in a lot of ways. She had, of course, had great success at FedEx and had proven herself as a very astute businesswoman.”
Farrington says Kelly-Green used her experience and expertise to lead the council in a mission that required a lot of hard work and commitment from its members.
The council’s endowment has grown to more than $8 million. Recipients receive scholarships of up to $8,000 for four years. About 25 scholars are benefiting from the fund currently. The students are carefully chosen for their leadership potential, and the council’s scholars boast an 87.5 percent graduation rate compared to the university’s 58.6 percent, according to the OMWC website.
A key feature of the Women’s Council is providing not just scholarships but also personal and career mentoring.
“There are a lot of scholarship programs,” Farrington says. “They’re all seemingly the same. But to make ours distinctive and different … it quickly became the desire of the council that we mentor all of our scholars. A lot of what Edith did from the very beginning was to make us realize that we could do something different.”
By continuing to serve young people at Ole Miss, Kelly-Green is providing opportunities just as she is doing for her young employees at Lenny’s Sub Shops. The business is increasingly becoming a family affair as she begins to take a back seat and hand over the reins.
Her son, James, has entered the business as director of operations, though he didn’t come aboard immediately. 
“I wanted James to get some hands-on experience, so he worked for a year and a half at ServiceMaster before he came into our business,” she says.
Her daughter, Jayna, the one who started this whole second career when she told her mom about her favorite lunch spot, transferred from Rhodes to Ole Miss. She then completed medical school at the University of Tennessee. She’s now completing her residency in Memphis.
“I don’t think she’s going to be making too many sub sandwiches anytime soon,” Kelly-Green says. 

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By Tom Speed
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