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!