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Outback parent picks new CEO

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By MICHAEL SASSO

msasso@tampatrib.com

Published: November 4, 2009

TAMPA - Elizabeth "Liz" Smith, a former executive of Avon Products, will become the next chief executive officer of Outback Steakhouse's parent company, and instantly becomes one of the Tampa Bay area's leading businesswomen.

Tampa-based OSI Restaurant Partners, which owns Outback, Carrabba's Italian Grill, Bonefish Grill and other brands, announced Tuesday that Smith will take over as CEO on Nov. 16. She replaces current CEO Bill Allen, who has led the restaurant company since March 2005. Allen will keep a role at OSI by becoming chairman of its board, the company said in a release.

Neither Smith nor Allen were available to comment Tuesday. However, the company said, Allen made his own decision to retire and was not asked to leave by OSI's board.

Smith, 46, is an outsider at a company that for years was dominated by men who had founded the company or joined it in its infancy. Since 2005, many of the executives who had been with Outback since the beginning have left.

Founders Chris Sullivan and Bob Basham founded Outback in 1988 and ran the company until handing it over to Allen in 2005. Sullivan and Basham stepped away from day-to-day management, but still have a large ownership stake in the company and sit on its board.

Other longtime Outback executives who have left in recent years include former Chief Financial Officer Bob Merritt, who left in 2005, and Chief Operating Officer Paul Avery, who left this summer.

Smith is known for her success at turning around troubled companies, and her skill might have enticed the private equity investment firms that own OSI, Bain Capital Partners and Catterton Partners, said Bob Gershberg, a restaurant industry recruiter with Dick Wray Executive Search.

"Her name comes up in the business publications on a regular basis as a mover and shaker," Gershberg said.

According to her background on Avon's Web site, Smith joined the beauty products company in 2005 as president of its Global Brand operations, and she later assumed leadership of Avon North America. Before Avon, she was an executive at Kraft Foods Inc. for 14 years.

She left Avon last month. In a September Wall Street Journal article, the newspaper noted that she had been considered the heir apparent to Avon CEO Andrea Jung.

In a statement to the Journal, Smith said, "With Andrea's commitment as a relatively young CEO to lead Avon for the foreseeable future and with her full support, the time is right for me to seek the next step of my career outside of Avon."

Reporter Michael Sasso can be reached at (813) 259-7865.

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