It was a perfect opportunity for an
inquisitive and adventurous young woman
who wanted to get to know Mexico and
the Caribbean. The job allowed her to use
the Spanish she had learned from her
grandparents, and spend three to four
months at a time overseas examining
ways government policies could help
decrease consumption or increase
efficiency to save energy.
She loved it.
Then her life’s direction changed again.
After three years of working in the
Caribbean, she faced a new assignment to
the other side of the Atlantic. To Somalia.
For two years.
“I started saying, ‘Wow! I’m 23 years
old. Do I really want to go to Somalia for
two years?’”
At the same time, she was nominated
to run for state assembly by local
Republican leaders.
Only 23, she already had a decade of
experience in Long Island politics. She
started in a teenage Republicans club at
13. She stood out. They groomed her.
Still, running for office—at 23—was not
something she had considered, and she
sat down with the party chairman and told
him, “I don’t think I’m ready to run. I still
live with my mother!” she says. “He assured
me that I wasn’t expected to win. ... They
just wanted me to get some experience.”
They saw her as a politician with
potential. So Garcia C. decided to prepare
herself better, with a J.D.
“I went to law school with every expectation
that I was going to come back and run at
some point and get involved politically.”
In her second summer of law school at
St. John’s University, that changed. She
interned at Willkie Farr & Gallagher. “A
whole new world opened up and I never
looked back.”
She spent five years there as an associate,
got to work on several companies’ public
offerings and realized two things: She never
wanted to be a partner, and “really learning
the business of the client through writing
their disclosure documents was what I
enjoyed the most.”
From then on, she says, “My life is a story
of headhunters.”
Her second day
on the job at
Office Depot, the
company received
a letter from the
SEC saying it had
commenced an
investigation about
a possible violation
of Fair Disclosure
regulations. It was
“very tense,” she
says. “I called my
husband and I
said, ‘You know
what, don’t sell
the house.’”
One headhunter’s call took her to
roofing manufacturer GAF as a corporate
associate working on public securities
filings and international corporate
matters. Five years later, another
headhunter’s call took her to Philip Morris
International as its regional counsel for
Latin America, overseeing a team of
corporate and outside counsel in Mexico,
Central America, the Caribbean and
the Andean Pact. The job called upon
her to use her Spanish language skills,
and appealed to her love for developing
countries and counseling clients. At the
time, it was her dream job.
It meant lots of travel. Her husband,
then an attorney in Manhattan, held down
the home front with au pairs helping with
their preschool daughter, and, in the midst
of all the travel, a newborn son.
After five years, another headhunter
called, with a question: “Do you want to
become a general counsel?”
The company was Domino’s. Brandon
changed her perspective, and her life.
“I love him for what he saw in me that
I didn’t even know existed,” she says. “He
taught me that I wasn’t just a lawyer;
that my opinion in every area was not
only valued, but expected. He told me
many times, ‘I can pay for a lawyer by
the hour. That’s not what I’m looking
for.’ My opinion on our new advertising
campaign, on our new pizza—all of
that was an important part of the
business. And while I always said I loved
counseling businesses, Dave made me
learn the business.”
Including how to make pizza. She spent
four days in a Las Vegas store wearing a
Domino’s uniform and doing every job,
even deliveries.
“Everybody at Domino’s knows how to
make it, bake it and take it,” she says.
The lesson taught her much more
than how to take an order and whip up a
pepperoni pie.
“The delivery person is the corporation’s
face. It’s who the customer sees,” she
says. “He’s the most important person in
the company.”
She helped guide Domino’s through
its IPO in 2004 and, later, a major
