As a kid, Jack Cowin shoveled snow, delivered newspapers and sold Christmas cards for cash. By the time he reached his 20s, it was burgers instead of cards. Fast forward to today: The 82-year-old is a billionaire, thanks to his fast food empire.

Cowin is the founder and chairman of Competitive Foods Australia, the company that operates Burger King as “Hungry Jack’s” in Australia. He is also the largest shareholder of Domino’s Pizza in Australia, and backs a plant-based meat substitute company called v2food.

Before founding Hungry Jack’s, Cowin opened a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Australia in 1969 — his first of many. Then in 2013, he sold off his KFC franchise of 55 stores in a deal worth about $71 million, according to a representative at Competitive Foods Australia.

Today, his business is worth over $3 billion and brings in over $300 million a year, Cowin told CNBC Make It.

Growing up in Canada, Cowin realized early on that he wanted freedom in life. His father was an employee at the Ford Motor Company and was required to travel frequently for work.

“He had a phone call one day, you’re going to Brazil, or you’re going to Mexico, or things like this … When you work for a big corporation, the corporation decides where you’re going to be, [and] what you’re going to do,” Cowin said.

“And as a kid, I wanted to have the freedom to do what I wanted to do. I think I saw that relatively early, because [I saw that] dad’s on the treadmill of here, there and everywhere,” he said. He didn’t want to be at the “whims and beckon call of a corporation.”

So as a child, Cowin spent his time outside of school mowing lawns and delivering newspapers. “I never had to ask for money as a kid,” he said. “I was a sales guy from very early, like 8 or 10 years old.”

By the time college rolled around, Cowin was going from farm to farm selling “trees, shrubs and nursing stock,” he said. He was so successful at it that he was making $8,000 a year while his university professors were making only $5,000 a year, he said.

He graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Western Ontario in 1964, and went on to get a job selling life insurance he said he was very good at.

“I had a reputation of being someone that could sell,” he said.

By the late 1960s, Cowin had begun to settle down in Canada with his wife and his first child when he one day received a phone call from a couple of high school friends.

His friends had landed a job with the American Kentucky Fried Chicken company and were sent to Australia to do some market research about whether they should expand into the country.

“Since my father had been there [for work], and I was the only guy … that knew where Australia was on a map … they phoned me up and said: ‘You should be down here. You should come and see this.’ So without a moment’s notice, I’m on a plane and I fly to Australia,” Cowin said.

Cowin landed in Australia in February 1969, and spent three weeks there helping his friends conduct research — ultimately finding that there was indeed a market for fast food in Australia.

“At that stage of the game, the restaurant business in Australia was fish and chip shops, Chinese restaurants and fancy white tablecloth restaurants,” he said. Meanwhile, McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC and other fast food restaurants were all rising in popularity in North America.

“So at the end of the three weeks, I pay $1,000 as a deposit on a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise [and] if the American company is going to open a store, then I was going to have a 10 store franchise,” he said.

Six months later, he received a phone call saying that the American KFC company agreed to expand into Australia and Cowin had the opportunity to own his first franchise location. But he didn’t have the funds, so he started raising money.

Imagine this “kid comes into your office and says he wants to borrow $10,000, which is probably about $100,000 today or more … he’s got no experience in the business, no interest on your money … how long before you throw him out of your office for wasting your time?”

“The biggest break I’ve had in my life was … I got on my bike and I got 30 Canadians to lend me $10,000 each, so got $300,000,” he said. “Otherwise I’d still be shoveling snow in Canada. I hadn’t had the finances back then.”

By December 1969, Cowin moved his family to Perth, Australia, where he opened his first KFC franchise. “It was like drilling oil and hitting oil on your first wildcat well, because it was a booming success,” he said.

“Then, you open two more, you get into the hamburger business, you get into the pizza business, you get into the food manufacturing business, and today, that business is a $3 billion business and makes $300 million a year.”

Today, Cowin owns 98% of his company while the other 2% is held by some of his original investors and shareholders, he said. “That original $10,000 is $40 million at book value [today]. So everybody’s got their money back, and those that stayed in have done increasingly well,” he said.

When asked what his secret to sales is, he said, “I think the secret is, whatever you do, do it well … The people that lent me the money really backed me as the investment. I was the investment.”

″And an expression [I have is] when you can’t tell the difference between work and play, you’re in the right place … I’ve never really worked a day in my life because I’ve enjoyed it.”

Correction: This story was updated to make it clear that Jack Cowin opened a KFC store in Australia in 1969.

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If there’s one thing Terry Petzold knows about how to stand out in the job market and get hired, it’s that in-demand technical skills can come and go.

Petzold has 25 years of experience in recruiting and is currently a managing partner at Fox Search Group, an executive recruitment firm for tech leaders.

Take the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, for example. “Just two-and-a-half years ago, everyone was saying, ‘We need to hire coders,’” Petzold tells CNBC Make It.

“I was even talking to my own children about, ‘Oh, maybe we need to go the crowd coding route,’” he jokes. “Not six months later, ChatGPT comes out, and now coding is not the future.”

To be sure, having up-to-date digital skills is important for workers across industries and career levels, Petzold says. “If you’re in marketing, or if you’re in a warehouse, you need to understand technology.”

But because companies can train workers on learning developing tech to serve their business, Petzold says leaders are most interested in hiring people with a different set of skills.

“I’ll tell you where the future is,” he says. “It’s not even necessarily in technology space. It’s in soft skills. It’s in emotional intelligence — that is what we’re noticing is the future for talent.”

Emotional intelligence, or EQ, is the ability to manage your own feelings and the feelings of those around you, which can make you better at building relationships and leading in the workplace.

For Petzold, job candidates with great technical skills really succeed when they can demonstrate high EQ.

It’s good to be specialized in an area of expertise, like data, security, infrastructure or enterprise solutions, for instance, “but it’s really those with strong EQ and those soft skills and business skills — those are the future IT leaders,” he says.

By hiring professionals with high EQ, Petzold says companies are really looking for people who can do crucial things like:

• Handle and deliver constructive feedback
• Manage conflict
• Have critical conversations with urgency
• Work cross-functionally by persuading peers and other leaders
• Effectively present ideas to leaders above them

“The general EQ skills we’re noticing really have to do with communication [with] others and the ability to push through challenges and come out unscathed,” Petzold says.

He adds that some companies are getting better at helping leaders develop stronger EQ skills, especially around managing effectively and navigating challenges or conflict.

Good employers can further develop their workers by offering mentorship programs and facilitating networking, Petzold adds, so people can see what good models of leadership and high EQ look like.

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In her nearly 18 years working at Google, from November 2006 to September 2024, Jenny Wood had occasion to hire many people — especially when she reached more senior roles like director in media operations. She also “founded one of the largest career development programs in the company’s history,” she says.

These days, Wood offers career advice in her newsletter and is releasing a book about achieving your goals, “Wild Courage,” in March 2025.

For those looking for work or simply for more job opportunities in the new year, here are two of her resume green flags.

First, Wood likes short bullets under job titles. Specifically, “I like it when a bullet doesn’t go beyond one line,” she says.

It’s easy to want to cram a lot of information under a job description, but keeping bullets concise “shows such intentionality,” she says. “It shows such discernment, and it shows you’re being brutal, right? You’re cutting what doesn’t need to be there.” It also shows you’re being considerate of the person reading your resume. Multi-sentence bullets take much longer to read.

Big picture, “it makes you look like an absolute superstar when you have bullets that are one line only,” she says.

Second, Wood loves some personality on a resume.

This could come in various forms. Wood has a muffin and a mic icon in the “passions” section of her resume to represent her love of baking and performance, she says as an example, and she’s seen some great specificity when people mention their hobbies.

She tells the story of a woman she profiles in her book named Carlye. When Carlye applied for a job at Google, the last line on her resume read “that she was in constant pursuit of the perfect oatmeal raisin cookie recipe,” says Wood.

This gave a glimpse of her personality, it showed she was willing to take risks by being quirky and that she was curious and keen to learn. In a sea of other qualified candidates, it made Carlye stand out. After the interview process confirmed she was just as qualified — and fun — as her resume implied, Carlye landed the job.

“In a competitive candidate pool with a lot of people to the right and the left of you who have the same skills, background and experience and pedigree,” says Wood, “personality is a differentiator.”

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Generally speaking, the promise of corporate America goes something like this: You start off as an entry-level worker, work hard and eventually get promoted a few times until you become a senior-level manager. With each title change comes more money, shinier benefits and more influence — presumably enough to make all the effort worthwhile.

But in recent years, the allure of rising through the ranks at work has lost its pull: Not only are promotions harder to come by, but at the same time, people are vocally turning them down.

The market to find a new job stalled in recent years, as did opportunities for people to get ahead. Among 68 million white-collar workers, just 1.3% were promoted in the first three months of 2024, according to Bloomberg reporting citing ADP data. That’s the lowest rate for any first quarter in the last five years, and concerning given that January is one of the biggest months for promotions.

It’s enough to impact people’s happiness at work. Some 38% of workers say they’re not satisfied with their opportunities to be promoted at work, compared with just 26% of workers who are satisfied, according to an October survey of more than 5,200 people from Pew Research Center.

But even if offered the chance to move up, a significant share of workers would say “no thanks”: 42% of U.S. workers say they’d turn down a promotion because they’re happy with their current job, according to data from Randstad, the HR firm.

So why aren’t people happily accepting the chance to move up? Experts and workers say there are a few factors at play:

A lot of people already feel like they’re working at the level above what their official job title is. But, they’re not getting paid for it.

Most workers, 76%, say they already do more than what’s expected of them at work, according to Pew data.

Meanwhile, 29% say they’re unhappy with their salary, according to Pew, with many citing concerns that their pay hasn’t kept pace with the cost of living, they don’t earn enough to pay their bills, and they’re being paid less than a colleague who does similar work.

That’s exactly what led Sherrika Sanders, 44, of Atlanta to initially decline a promotion with her company several years ago.

At the time, Sanders was offered a promotion from accounting manager to assistant controller. The problem? She was already doing the work of the higher role, and she knew from market rates that she was being underpaid for it.

“Nine times out of 10, before you get a promotion within the same company, you’ve already started doing the work,” Sanders says.

From her perspective, the salary bump that came with the new promotion didn’t justify the additional work she’d be expected to do.

She had a conversation with the company’s vice president and laid out of her case — including pulling out a “kudos folder” of her noted accomplishments and praise, plus how she’d exceeded project deadlines and benchmarks.

The possibility of declining the offer made a difference, Sanders says, and she accepted the new offer: “The VP] changed it that day and sent the updated salary over to payroll.”

Many companies have undergone rapid transformations since 2020, including dealing with mass turnover and hiring sprees, adjusting to remote and hybrid work, restructuring teams, adding responsibilities to jobs and facing budget cuts. All of that means a tougher job for managers leading through it all.

A majority, 73%, of workers say their company has experienced disruptive change in the last year, which correlates with high levels of burnout, according to a recent report from Gallup.

The last two years of cost-cutting means that “middle-managers and front-line managers have been disproportionately affected,” says Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor. Laying off middle managers leaves more work for the ones who remain, with higher expectations with fewer resources to boot.

The compounding stress of managing could have a trickle-down effect on younger workers: 52% of Gen Z workers recently said they don’t want to become managers, according to a study from Robert Walters, a recruiting firm.

Budget cuts and team restructuring could mean that the new role your boss wants to promote you to doesn’t look anything like what you actually want to be doing.

One of the reasons why executives turn down a promotion is when “it doesn’t align with their career,” says Debra Boggs, founder and CEO of D&S Executive Career Management, an executive search firm. “If you’re offered an opportunity that takes you too far into left field away from your functional expertise or where you’re trying to head in your career goals, it can really derail you for your next goal. It’s really hard to get back to where you left off.”

Sanders, the accounting professional, turned down a promotion for this reason, too.

In the summer of 2017, she was overseeing accounting for U.S. and Canada operations for a telecommunications company, when she was offered an expanded role that would supervise a larger team.

However, taking the opportunity would pull her away from work she was more passionate about: transforming accounting processes and empowering her smaller team.

So, she politely declined the offer but showed that she was committed to growing in her current role. She focused on improving her expertise in accounting, investing in training for her team and even took on new speaking and teaching opportunities.

Sanders, who now runs her own consulting firm for accounting professionals and teams, says the experience taught her that career growth isn’t just about moving “up.” Rather, she could make an impact moving forward in a direction that better aligned with her interests and strengths.

It’s important to remember that not everyone aspires to climbing the career ladder or becoming a manager.

“Many people will try it and decide it’s not for them,” says Zhao of Glassdoor. “Or there are people who also just never try because they know it’s not really something they’re interested in.”

In those cases, it can be helpful to be vocal about your career goals with your manager, says Sherri Carpineto, 48, a career coach and senior director of operations for a health-care company who lives in Boston.

“Maybe you want to take on more work or a different project and continue to challenge yourself,” she says. “But it’s OK to do your work and go home and earn a paycheck every day. Not everyone is looking to move up the ladder.”

Your decision to not move up the ladder now doesn’t have to last forever, she adds.

Carpineto once stayed with a company for 15 years with incremental pay raises and promotions, even though she had offers for higher titles and pay outside the company.

“I did it because I had young kids. I had a mom that was very ill at the time,” she says. “And so I was very happy to stay where I was, manage a team, continue to take on some responsibility, but not leave the company or try to become a VP.”

At the end of the day, she says, “turning down a promotion now because you’re a caretaker, or you’re moving across country, you’re getting married, or you’re just not ready to do that, doesn’t mean that you can’t decide to do that later.”

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Forget a Kitchen-Aid mixer. Snoop Dogg surprised his daughter, Cori Broadus, with a $1 million gift ahead of her upcoming wedding, the rapper said during a recent appearance on “The Jennifer Hudson Show.”

Snoop Dogg explained how he would take advantage of the gift if the roles were reversed. “If it was me, my wedding would have been $100 [thousand], and $900 [thousand] would have went in my pocket,” he said.

Although a seven-figure wedding gift isn’t in the cards for most of us, Snoop Dogg’s suggestion for handling a financial windfall — spending 10% on fun and saving 90% for the future — checks out, financial experts say. 

“Snoop Dogg’s comment highlights the importance of prioritizing long-term financial stability over immediate gratification, which is solid advice,” says Maria Castillo Dominguez, a certified financial planner and founder of Valoria Wealth Management. 

That goes for anyone who comes into any unexpected sum of money, she says, no matter the size of the windfall. 

If you receive money unexpectedly, it can be tempting to envision yourself spending on a whole new lifestyle. In reality, you’d be better off putting money toward your long established goals, experts say.

So before you do anything with your money, experts advise that you first give yourself a moment.

“Take a pause before making any decisions,” says Catherine Valega, a CFP and founder of Green Bee Advisory. “Don’t do anything rash,” such as buying your “long-lost cousin a new car when they come out of the woodwork to ask for it,” if word gets around that you’ve come into extra cash.

Once you’ve composed yourself, Dominguez suggests asking yourself a simple question: What have I been wanting to do if I had more money? For many, it’s buying a home, paying off your mortgage, starting an emergency fund or getting out of credit card debt. 

By carefully thinking through your next steps, you can make the most of your extra money.

“Setting clear goals and even consulting a financial planner can help ensure the windfall works for you over the long term,” says Dominguez. With the right guidance, a windfall can be an opportunity to generate even more money for yourself and build happiness that lasts. 

A financial planner can take your specific situation and design an individualized plan for your extra cash. 

“Everybody should work with a financial planner,” says Valega. “We know how to prioritize your extra funds.”

Whether it’s in the form of a tax refund, a holiday bonus or an unexpected lottery jackpot, a windfall can provide a huge boost to our bottom line when we least expect it. And the ability to use that money to make a better life for yourself is cause for celebration, says Dominguez.

After you’ve identified your goals, using a portion of your extra money to treat yourself is within reason. Having a plan for your money can help make sure you keep your celebratory spending reasonable, she says. After all, treating yourself shouldn’t infringe on the success of your long-term plans. 

“It’s important to strike a balance,” Dominguez says. “Celebrating life’s milestones is valuable, but aligning spending with overall financial goals ensures sustainability.”

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