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Thirty-four years ago, Juan Carlos “JC” Caviedes walked away from a comfortable job in Chile’s mining sector and picked up a mop in a fast food restaurant. His friends thought he’d lost it. They saw him cleaning a bathroom and wondered why anyone would trade a respected position for hourly work.
“My friends saw me with a mop and thought I had gone crazy,” Caviedes recalls, laughing. “I told them, ‘I’m in management training, don’t worry. I just want to know how all of this works and fits together.’”
That bathroom floor became the starting line for a career that would eventually take him across Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and Japan. The executive never forgot that first day, or that idea that if you plan to lead people, you should know what their work feels like from experience.
Building Others, Not Just a Résumé
Caviedes has held roles in operations, franchising, equipment, IT, training, and field service and led teams in more than thirty countries. Yet when he talks about his career, he focuses on the people who came up alongside him.
“J.C. is a seasoned global executive with over thirty years of leadership experience,” says Rony Slim, former executive vice president of global commercial management at the Dallas Group of America Inc. “He has been an invaluable mentor and a strong advocate for operational improvements across the markets he has served. I’m grateful for his leadership, guidance, and lasting impact.”
Former deputies now oversee country operations in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. One former right-hand in Chile became chief operating officer for a major regional franchise group. For Caviedes, those outcomes matter more than any single accomplishment in his career.
“I want to leave behind people who will do much better than me,” he says. “You don’t just learn from your bosses; you learn from everyone around you.”
The executive nudged ambitious team members back into classrooms, encouraged them to finish degrees, and sent them into executive programs at places like Harvard. In his forties, Caviedes put himself through an MBA, not so much in pursuit of a promotion, but because of his endless curiosity.
“You have to grow something new inside you all the time—new learnings, new perspectives,” he says. “Stay fresh.”
What He Learned at Home
Caviedes says his first leadership lessons began when he was a child. He grew up in a home shaped by hard work and sacrifice. It wasn’t necessarily warm and gooey. Money was tight and his parents’ work hours were long. Every day, the future leader saw people who would show up for each other and would do their absolute best to keep a family functioning.
That had a lasting effect on how he sees both work and family. Caviedes talks often about the importance of letting people become their own person, even when the path they choose is different from what a parent might have imagined. That outlook shaped the way he raised his own children and the way he mentored younger colleagues, with patience, expectations, and latitude to allow people to find their own way.
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Curiosity and the Right to Fail
If you ask Caviedes what he wants younger leaders to carry forward from his story, he lands on one word: questions. Curiosity took him from a single restaurant in Chile to executive roles in Chicago, across Latin America, and eventually Tokyo.
He believes that failure is both inevitable and useful. A mistake is information. It’s something you experience, learn from, and leave behind.
He urges emerging leaders to understand how the whole business fits together, how marketing promises translate into customer expectations, how technology supports or undermines operations, how a single shift’s performance echoes into financial results. When you see the entire system, you’re better equipped to lead people through change.
“As I think about the next step, I’m proud of the numbers, but I’m even more proud of the leaders who came out of the teams I’ve worked with,” he says. “For me, the sky is the limit. And it’s the limit for everyone. If you stay curious, work hard, and remember you own your career.”
And while the sky is always the limit, Caviedes has taken the moment to ponder what that sky might look like from a different perspective: retirement. Having moved back to the US, the executive is ready for whatever the future may bring, this time with Miami as his base of operations.
As his newest chapter continues to unfold, there’s no doubt Caviedes will find a whole host of new opportunities, formal or otherwise, to apply his curious mind. There are boats to fix, trips with his wife, and the realization that, having done it all, there’s still so much time to enjoy his life.
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