What Hotels Can Learn from Chick-fil-A's Culture of Excellence - Ryan Magnon, Ithaka Hospitality Partners

Ryan: Chick-fil-A, as you know, and many who are listening to this know, is a remarkable organization. I'm so grateful I had almost 15 years there to work for the Cathy family and serve them in that way. I would say at the root of what they do really well is they create a culture that rallies everyone towards a common cause. And that common cause for them is serving and loving others unconditionally. Hey, we are here in restaurants, but it's about people. Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, used to say, we're not just in the chicken business, we're in the people business. And I used to love that because I remember thinking, he's right. If they had come to me with the powerful culture they had and said, Hey, we sell shoes, I would've been in the shoe sales business. For me, it didn't have to do with chicken. It had to do more with the service element of it and the culture of it. And so that's one thing they do really well is they're very clear about what they do and why they do it. And secondly, they do not compromise. Chick-fil-A does not compromise on their standards. They are emphatic about excellence. They might pursue perfection knowing it's not possible and settle for excellence. But excellence is their goal. And they expect a lot out of everyone that's in the organization. In turn, they give a lot to everyone in the organization. It's a very giving culture, but a high expectation culture. I think when you do that, people will then go, wow, yes, it is hard work, but if you're aligned with creating excellence, then you don't mind the hard work. You wake up every day not feeling like you even work a day in your life. You wake up every day feeling like I am doing something amazing today. And that's a special sauce. I think it rests on leadership. So if another company is studying Chick-fil-A from the outside and saying, Hey, we really want to transform our culture, I would encourage your listeners to think internally and self-evaluate and say, am I as the CEO or COO creating a culture that causes the people that work in our culture to rise up and bust through that brick wall? Are we creating a culture that inspires and fires them up so that they can achieve the mission, not only for the company, but for themselves? Each leader, each team member in an organization, they all have individual goals. Hey, I want to become this one day. Hey, I want to become a leader, or I just want to be a team member and be the best team member ever. They're all these different goals. And so if the organization can inspire people to achieve whatever those goals are and then give them the opportunity to do that, then that will compound and grow. And so those were a couple of early dynamics. I would say another one that Chick-fil-A did really well was, as I mentioned earlier in the podcast about studying the business, they're very intentional about studying their performance. And I think in the previous podcast, we may have talked about the drive-thru consulting journey a little bit, but when myself and I believe five others on this drive-thru team, we were asked to go out and consult to operators around the entire chain, around the entire country, and we all looked at each other and said, Hey, none of us have direct drive-thru experience. Now we've led in numerous ways in the organization, but none of us on the team were drive-thru gurus. And when we said that to the leaders, they said, yeah, we know we don't care. We want you to go out and we want you to learn. And we think the six of you we've selected for this role will do a great job in learning from the best of the best in drive-thru, the average performers and those that might be struggling and learn why. And so they gave us 90 days, maybe 120. It was a long period of time where we were not actively consulting yet because frankly we weren't ready to, and they allowed us to travel the entire country across the entire chain, approximately 2000 something restaurants at the time. We didn't go to all those restaurants, but we did a sample of those restaurants and we came back as a team and we developed our methodology based on what we learned. What's working, what's not working, and how do we craft that consulting methodology? And so we launched that in 2017 and lo and behold, three years later, COVID hit and the company went 99% drive-thru.

Josiah: Wow.

Ryan: And so it was just the right thing at the right time. Very divinely inspired, I think. But it was just really cool to see operators stepping up and improving their operation. And that was something Chick-fil-A did very well. They don't just deploy something and let it run. They deploy it and they say, Hey, I think we have opportunity to make this better. Let's get a few people and let them go help us make that better.

Josiah: That's so great and for people who want to hear a little bit more, a link to that past conversation we had, but I love the behind the scenes there.