The Billionaire Panera Founder Imagines His Death When Planning Future

• Ron Shaich uses ‘premortems’ to motivate a meaningful life and guide his work.
• Shaich, Panera’s founder, sold the chain for $7.5 billion in 2017.
• His investment fund, Act III, backs brands like Cava and Tatte Bakery.

Panera’s former CEO, Ron Shaich, isn’t afraid of death — he’s inspired by it.

Over the years he’s realized that the time to review whether or not your life was meaningful was “not in the ninth inning with two outs,” he told the Wall Street Journal, referring to the final phase of a baseball game. “It was in the seventh inning, the fifth inning, and third inning.”

During the final week of every year, he conducts what he calls a “premortem:” a ritual that helps him reframe death as motivation to live a more meaningful life. “I ask myself: What am I going to do now to ensure that when I reach that ultimate destination, I’ve done what I need to do?” he wrote in his 2023 book, “Know What Matters.”

He starts by envisioning all the key areas in his life.

“I’d pull out a yellow legal pad and I’d start to divide that yellow legal pad into the areas of my life that I cared about,” Shaich once told Business Insider. “And to me, that’s my relationship with my body and my health, my core relationships — my wife, my family, my kids — my relationship with my work, what I wanted out of my work, and what gave me joy, and then my relationship with my own spirituality. And then based on that, I literally would say, ‘What is it I want to have accomplished in each of these spheres of my life?'”

Shaich, who reached billionaire status this past July, has built a career off some of the most successful food chains in the country. He launched Panera in 1999 and sold it in 2017 to the European investment fund, JAB, for $7.5 billion.

Through his over billion-dollar fund, Act III, he’s invested in chains like Mediterranean fast-casual brand Cava, Tatte bakery, and organic cafe Life Alive.

He told the Journal that his philosophy of life and death also guides his work. He asks his companies to conduct premortems, envisioning goals for the coming three to five years and planning the path to achieve them.

“It’s been the key to all of our successes,” he said.