Five years embedded inside Caribbean Restaurants LLC as the de facto creative director across three franchise brands — Burger King, Firehouse Subs, and Popeyes (Latin American Chicken LLC) — despite formal employment scoped to a single entity. This is the experience that produced the Business Design methodology.
CORPORATE EXPERIENCE · NOT A BUSINESS DESIGN CLIENT ENGAGEMENT
This page documents the corporate experience of Rubén Cepeda as an employee of Caribbean Restaurants LLC, the Puerto Rico franchisee of Burger King and Firehouse Subs — including creative work performed for Popeyes (operated in Puerto Rico by Latin American Chicken LLC). This work was performed as an employee of the franchisee, not under a Business Design engagement with any of the named brands. Brand names appear here for factual employment context only.
The largest Burger King franchisee in the Caribbean. Based in Cataño, Puerto Rico. Operating the island's QSR footprint for three decades.
Caribbean Restaurants LLC is the long-standing franchisee of Burger King in Puerto Rico, the operator of Firehouse Subs on the island, and a major commercial employer. The company has been majority-owned over time by private equity firms — Castle Harlan acquired the business in 2004, with ownership subsequently transitioning to American Securities.
At the scale Caribbean Restaurants operates — approximately 178 Burger King restaurants and roughly 15 Firehouse Subs locations across Puerto Rico — the brand is not a small business. It is a multi-hundred-million-dollar QSR operator and a household fixture on the island. The CEO is Aniceto Solares.
The contract was for a single company. The operational reality spanned three.
Hired as a designer at Caribbean Restaurants LLC in 2019. The original scope of the role, as contractually defined, was visual-asset production — collateral, in-store materials, campaign assets for Burger King.
Within the first operational quarter, the scope expanded informally. Firehouse Subs collateral flowed through the same designer. Then Popeyes — operated by Latin American Chicken LLC, a separate legal entity from Caribbean Restaurants — began flowing work through the same pipeline. Three brands, three companies, one designer, one compensation line.
Over five years the role executed work across all three franchise brand systems: campaign concepts, promotional activations, in-store signage architecture, digital content, training materials, internal operational assets, seasonal collateral, and the full repertoire of what a creative director role produces for a multi-brand QSR operator.
I was hired as a designer for one brand. I was, functionally, a creative director for three. This is not a complaint. It is the diagnostic that produced the firm.
Each brand had its own tone, its own customer, its own operational cadence — and all three flowed through a single production line.
The anchor contract. Caribbean Restaurants operates approximately 178 Burger King restaurants across Puerto Rico. Work produced here included national campaign localization, Puerto Rico–specific promotional activations, in-store asset systems, and training collateral.
Caribbean Restaurants brought Firehouse Subs to Puerto Rico in 2011. Work produced across approximately 15 locations included grand-opening campaign systems, local-market adaptation, promotional flows, and ongoing asset maintenance.
Operated in Puerto Rico by Latin American Chicken LLC — a legally separate entity from Caribbean Restaurants. Creative work flowed through the same production pipeline regardless: campaign assets, local activations, in-store materials, and promotional systems.
Once is an anecdote. Twice is a coincidence. Four times is a pattern that demands a system.
The Caribbean Restaurants experience established the pattern. Hired as a designer, expanded into director-level scope across multiple brands, compensated under the original contract. At the end of the five years, the pattern was clear but not yet a system.
In 2023, consulting began. The first private-sector engagement reproduced the same pattern within six months: scope creep from design into strategy, into operations, into brand governance, with no contractual mechanism to match. Two instances. In a different industry. With a different ownership structure. Same outcome.
The conclusion was not that the employers were uniquely unreasonable. The conclusion was that this is what happens by default when a company hires a designer but actually needs an architect — and when the architect does not define the scope explicitly at intake. The fix had to be structural, not situational.
Business Design is the methodology that turns the implicit director role into the explicit architect engagement. It exists because the pattern should not have to happen a fifth time.
Business Design engagements are scoped, contracted, and delivered as architecture work — not as design work that quietly grows into architecture.
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