EBONY CEO Eden Bridgeman explains how her franchise background and her father’s leadership lessons are helping her take an 80-year-old cultural institution into the future of media.
Eden Bridgeman began her working life with shifts at Wendy’s and Chili’s—jobs that taught her key lessons on a career path that put her in the driver’s seat of one of the most iconic brands in media history.
Bridgeman went on from working behind the counter to becoming the CMO of Manna, Inc., a restaurant franchise operator. And in 2021, after her father, the late Ulysses “Junior” Bridgeman, bought EBONY and JET at a bankruptcy auction in 2020, she took the reins of EBONY.
This fall, EBONY unveiled its 2026 Power 100 list, a class that stretches from Jay-Z and Byron Allen to iShowSpeed and a STEM kid creator, all celebrated at a gala at the Hollywood Palladium under the theme “The Stories We Shape.” One of the categories, the Junior Bridgeman Business Vanguard, is named in her father’s honor.
Following the event, Bridgeman shared her thoughts on leadership that serves your team, finding success in the attention economy and defining power that truly makes an impact.
As a teenager, you worked at Wendy’s and Chili’s. What is one specific habit or rule from those shifts that you still use as a CEO? One thing I learned very early is that the customer experiences the whole business, not your department. If something was wrong with an order, the customer did not care whether the mistake happened at the register, in the kitchen, or somewhere else.
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