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!