Caterer gets $15k from company president
Janet Moak has some “wild and crazy ideas” for Moe’s catering.
A few months ago, she was able to express those ideas to the president of the company, Paul Damico, but with a catch: She had no idea who he was at the time.
Moak, the catering director for all four Columbia-area Moe’s Southwest Grills, was featured as an employee on the Moe’s episode of the CBS hit show “Undercover Boss,” where senior executives sneak into the lower rungs of their companies to learn the inner workings.
In honor of Moak’s appearance on the show, Moe’s Columbia and local television station WLTX threw a viewing party at 701 Whaley. The event was hosted by WLTX anchors Andrea Mock and Darci Strickland and complete with raffles for Moe’s, gift cards and a grand prize of Moe’s catering for a 20-person event.
Fans of Moe’s Columbia on Facebook were able to win two tickets to the private viewing party by being one of the first 50 people to submit a guess as to what Moak’s first thought was when her boss was revealed.
A.J. LaGroon, a first-year USC law student, won two of the free tickets and said he found his date for the party, third-year public relations student Kylie Murphy, by tweeting that he had an extra ticket. Murphy said she watches “Undercover Boss” sometimes and thought it would be cool to attend a viewing party for the show.
To go undercover, Damico disguised himself as Mark Richards, a failed steakhouse owner participating in a fake reality show where people compete for money to open their own restaurants. He visited Columbia about two and a half months ago, Moak said, to shadow her for a day and learn about being a catering director.
“It was great,” she said. “He was a super hard worker; he was very detail-oriented. ... He was super in-tune to what the job consisted of.”
Moak said she had no idea who Damico really was, even though she had seen him give a speech at a conference two months prior to the filming.
“It was interesting,” she said. “I like to think that I’m pretty much always on top of my game, and to be hoodwinked was pretty shocking.”
Unlike some of the employees who have been on “Undercover Boss,” Moak said she had “no regrets” about their interaction.
“I was very proud of myself,” Moak said. “I wasn’t worried about anything or anything like that. ... I didn’t sit there and play it back in my head like ‘Oh my God, am I going to regret anything?’ No. I was pleased.”
Damico said he was pleased with Moak as well.
“Janet is an overachiever,” Damico said on the show. “She is a ball of energy. She clearly loves the Moe’s brand, she loves catering and she spent a lot of time telling me how she wants to take catering here to a new level.”
Damico rewarded Moak with $15,000 — $10,000 to use during a trip to a worldwide Moe’s conference in January 2014 and $5,000 for a shopping spree. He said her “wild and crazy catering ideas” made her a compelling candidate for the conference, and he called her the “mayor of catering” in the Columbia market.
During Damico’s time in Columbia, he and Moak visited Image Makers, a hair salon on Farrow Road, to drop off chips and marketing materials. One of the owners of the salon, Holley Munnerlyn, is Moak’s hairstylist and friend. She said she was shocked when she found out, about a week ago, that she had been filmed for “Undercover Boss” instead of the reality show she initially thought it was.
“Janet called me and said, ‘You need to sit down for just a minute because what we thought was happening is not happening, and this has turned out to be a much bigger deal than we thought it was going to be,’” Munnerlyn said. “We laughed, and I think I may have screamed, and then we went from there.”
Moak said she was grateful for Munnerlyn’s help in the time since they found out they’d be on national television.
“She’s done my hair more in the past few weeks than I think I’ve had it done in six months,” Moak said.