Have you ever asked yourself that? What really makes Chick-fil-A great? Some of you might first talk about the wonderful history of the company that Truett Cathy started so many years ago. Others of you might answer by talking about the wonderful products we sell or maybe the necessary job skills that you can acquire here in order to prepare you for a competitive future. I honestly believe that each one of us would probably give a different response to that question. And that’s ok. But let me be a little more specific.

What is it that makes you personally want to work for CFA? Or maybe even more specific than that, what makes you want to work at CFA Renaissance Village? This is a question that I’ve been asking myself for quite a while now. And to be honest, I’m not that impressed with my current answer. I mean, I know why I personally want to work at CFA Renaissance Village. But I really want to know why you come to work every day. My fear is that I feel as though there is a disconnect between what you want from a job and what we are currently providing for you on a day-to-day basis. 

In the recent Gallup article ‘What Millenials Want From Work and Life‘ we see that 87% of millennials feel that professional development or career growth opportunities are very important to them in a job. It goes on to say that millennials ‘look for work that fuels their sense of purpose and makes them feel important.’

Are we as a leadership team hitting the mark on this one for you? Do you feel your sense of purpose to an extent when serving guests? Do you feel like you matter or are important at our restaurant? I sure hope so. But if I’m honest with myself I bet there are some things that we could do to help you feel more connected or more fulfilled at the workplace. And to reassure you, these are things that I’m concerned about for you. I personally want to know how we can get to that point as a team. I promise to work hard to get us there.

So here is where I need your help. Today I’m asking for you feedback. What will it take to make CFA Renaissance Village great for its team members? What would you change? What would you add? And on that note, what should we subtract? The world is your oyster. But I am truly asking because I want to know. Please leave us some feedback. In the comment section of this blog feel free to speak your mind. We really want to know.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Team, let me just say that I’m really stinkin’ proud of all of you. We had another killer weekend with sales and I loved seeing each of you perform at the top of your game when we were honestly a little short-staffed. It was really encouraging personally to see some of you step up into new roles that you may not have been completely comfortable with. Thank you so much for your hard work. It’s seriously paying off! Our guests love you!

So where are we at with out drive-thru goal? As of tonight at 9:30pm we are sitting at number 148! YESSSSS!! (this is how Ms. Cynthia says it…)! We’re nailing it! All engines are at full throttle and we’re moving forward at an amazing pace. 148 out of all the restaurants like us is an amazing score! Having said that, I still want us to keep pushing for those 30 second transaction times. We’ve come a long way and I know you guys can get there!

On another note, as the title states, summer is in fact upon us, and I want all of us to be ready for a few new items on our menu. You should already be familiar with these new items, but I will highlight them below to give you a little help.

Product one: Introducing the new Smokehouse BBQ Bacon Sandwich!

Isn’t she a beauty!? I want you to take a good look at this one and be able to describe it perfectly to a guest. I mean I want your words to force the guest to salivate just like Pavlov’s dog as you describe it. Yes, that’s a gross image, but I mean, come on! Even if you don’t like bacon, you have to admit that this sandwich looks good. And from personal experience, it is good! And if you don’t get the Pavlovian allusion, google it. And you better believe that you’ll be quizzed on this one.

Product Two: Introducing the new Watermelon Mint Lemonade!

I’ve tried this one and it too is pretty incredible. Refreshing? Yes. Mouthwatering? Check. A very simple recipe of natural watermelon and mint flavors mixed with our very own fresh squeezed lemonade. Martha Stewart’s got nothing on this one and Paula Deen just wishes she would have come up with this on her own, but our Chick-fil-A friends beat them to the punch (pun intended). You can also enjoy the Watermelon Mint flavor with our freshly brewed iced tea and frosted lemonade.

Product Three: Seasonal Limited Time offer Peach Milkshake:

Most of you are already familiar with this one as we’ve sold it each summer for a number of years now. I encourage all of you to try it so that you can join in the revelry that our guests have already experienced for years now.

All three of these products are now available to you and our guests. The official launch is actually this coming Monday on the 22nd. All the POS terminals should however be updated as of today.

Please let any leaders know if you have any questions about ingredients or any other information. But have fun selling this stuff. Chick-fil-A has done a bang up job in producing these new products. Now we have another opportunity to provide our guests with more REMARKable products for the entire summer.

 

Ok, so on the last post I goofed and I apologize. But it’s a really good goof! When I was talking about our rankings for our drive thru I actually was dead wrong in reading the data (I went back and updated the previous post if you are so inclined to check). I told you before that we were hovering around number 266 in the chain. Well, as of today we are actually number 160! Wow! Way to go team! We’ve almost reached our goal and we have more than a month and a half to get there. Should we shoot for top 50? Maybe… but for now we’ll keep our feet on the ground a little and simply keep our sights on top 100.

But here I want to take just a few moments and break down our goal a little bit more for you all. Since most of you are in high school (or you’ve already had the pleasure of graduating) I’m sure you’ve had experiences writing longer essays, right? I know, I know, using an illustration about writing an essay is probably not the smartest move… But stay with me. Think back to that first 2,000 word essay that you had to write. It seemed like a pretty daunting task to begin with, I’m sure.

If you’re like me the first time you had to write something of such length you probably didn’t know where to begin. But your teachers helped you through the process by giving you a step-by-step plan. Maybe before turning the final paper in you had a bunch of smaller assignments with different due dates. You first had to gather your sources and turn in a bibliography. And then your second task would be to write an outline and turn that in. And then you probably had to compose an introduction and then a rough draft, right? Well, what was the point of all those little assignments? It was to show you for one that you could do it and develop a solid process for writing future papers. But it was also to show you that to achieve such a lofty goal, you must first break it down into smaller segments. I’m going to call those smaller segments behaviors. And at that I will no longer talk about essays or school…

To reach the top 100 we must start with these kind of small behaviors. No, I’m not going to make you write an outline or a rough draft. I’m not going to ask you to write anything at all. But I am going to give you small behaviors that will ultimately develop into habits that will hopefully push us forward incrementally toward our goal.

In the last post I mentioned that we’re about $1,000 short of reaching the 100 spot. So how do we increase those sales? Well the broad answer is that we need to get more cars through the drive thru, but there are a bunch of smaller behaviors that we must employ in order to make that happen.

The first behavior centers around focus. My challenge for you for the foreseeable future is to treat every transaction as if you only have 30 seconds to complete the order. For you folks in the window this should be your goal. When the car pulls up you should greet the guest with a smile, repeat their order, take the transaction, and then your bagger should come behind you and push the food out the window. I realize that kind of intensity comes more naturally during our peak periods when we’re already trying to go as fast as possible. But why not have this mentality for the entire day?

If we develop the behavior or habit of getting our guests to the window and out in around 30 seconds, just think about how much trust this will build with them as they scoot in and out of our drive thru every day. And think about how they will talk us up to their friends. Pretty soon people will be pouring in because they know that when they enter the Renaissance Village drive thru we mean business. Can you do this 30 second thing for me? I know you can. We’re all in this together. I hope you all have a great week!

Alright, so how many of you would call yourselves competitive? Anyone? How many of you are  the board game kings or queens in your household? When it comes to Monopoly or Go Fish you’re the champ, right?  How many of you agree with the great Ricky Bobby when he says, ‘Second place is first loser.’ Or,

Are you with me? Does this resonate with anyone? I’m sure at least some of you agree with Mr. Bobby on this one (…and I am neither confirming nor denying that I have seen this movie…). There is just a part of you that thrives on competition. You have to win! Right? I am totally with you on this. My wife could tell you. I hate losing! No matter what I’m doing, whether I’m on the golf course or on the soccer field (I was on the soccer field a long time ago…right now it’s the stock market because it doesn’t require as much physical prowess…), I want to win!

Which brings me to my point. Whenever your compete you have to know the score because you want to know who is winning! I’m sure most of you tuned in to those final moments when UNC played the Zags just a few short weeks ago in the Final Four. You probably even subconsciously were checking the time left and the score as the game drew to a close. I knew I was. I didn’t have many finger nails left when that game was over. Or a voice…

But again, my point is that everyone checks the score. It’s vitally important to any competition. Without a scorecard the competition would be well, not very competitive… Imagine going to a UNC verses Duke basketball game when they decide not to keep score. What if Roy was like, ‘We don’t want to offend anyone by picking a winner or a loser. We just want to run up and down the court and see how many times we can pass the ball and dribble and stuff…’ That would be awful! Gross!

Well, it’s the same in our business at Chick-fil-A. Without a scorecard, we’re lost! If we don’t consistently define and measure success, what are we really doing when we show up for work? What’s the point?

Today I want to give you some insight into how we are actually competing as a Drive Thru. And I’m going to be honest. We are among some really stiff competition. For those of you who are keeping up with this blog (and it better be all of you!), one of our goals is to become one of the top 100 Drive Thrus in the entire CFA chain. That’s a type of scorecard right there, right? And yes, that is an incredibly lofty goal.

But what exactly will it take to get there? Will we just magically appear at number 99 or whatever on a chart one day when we’ve met our goal? Not at all! On our journey to the top 100 we need to satisfy a ton of requirements. Here are Chick-fil-A’s metrics on what makes for a successful Drive Thru:

1. Average Drive Thru Sales per day
2. Average Drive Thru Transactions per day
3. Average Order Accuracy %
4. Average Speed of service %
5. Average number of Carry Out orders compared to total transactions %

So, at the end of the day, all of those metrics are compiled, and we get a composite score compared to all the other CFA restaurants in the chain. As of today we are sitting at number 160! Awesome Sauce! That’s actually really really amazing! As of Monday, May 8 that’s only 79 more spots to reach our goal! So how do we get there? Good question. I’ll focus on just one of those metrics right now, and then we can follow up on more in the future. But for now, the number one metric that is preventing us from moving forward is the amount of sales that we have in our drive thru per day. In other words, we need to make more money in the drive thru to really get into this game. For those of you who follow college basketball we’re currently like a University of Florida or Georgetown, or something…, but we really need to be like a UNC or Duke. Or maybe for you car buffs, we’re currently driving like a VW bug, but we really need to be driving something with more horsepower like an Audi R8 or a BMW M3. Got it? Ok, enough of that…

So what does that mean for us for the month of May? Currently our average daily sales in the drive thru is around $9,400 per day. The restaurant sitting at the 100 spot does close to $10,400. So…in order to make it to the top 100 we need to increase those sales by right at $1,000! Can we do it? Yes we can! So, what’s the action step? I’m going to be really specific here. Our action step for the month of May is to really focus on boosting sales in the drive thru on Fridays and Saturdays. That’s it. Just those two days. For those of you who work on those days this is going to require an incredibly intense focus on getting as many cars through the drive thru as possible. We’re going to take it one car at a time. Whether you’re in the window at 6:30am on Friday or 9:59pm on Saturday I am asking you to be all in! 

Each week in the month of May I will give you an update as far as where we are with sales. And for those of you that I see working especially hard in this competition I definitely look forward to rewarding you handsomely. Who is going to shine and set themselves apart this month? I look forward to seeing how competitive we can be as we enter the big leagues. By the end of May I want us to be at the top 150 or better. And then by the end of second quarter (June 30th) we’re going to make it to the top 100 or bust. So here we go! Saddle up and I’ll see you at the finish line!