GA 284 | Continuous Improvement in the Fast Food Industry with David Reid

It's really that word of mouth, wow. This changed the culture of my team. We're making some real process improvements that are affecting our business. When that message gets out to other operators, then they want to do it too, and they're willing to do it.

Depending on where you live in the world, you may or may not be familiar with the restaurant called Chick Fil A. Now, I live here in Texas and Chick Fil A is a big park of what we do here in Texas. My family is very devoted to the restaurant. We love going there. The food is fantastic, the service is great. And this is why I was really excited for today's interview with a gentleman named David Reed. You see, David is part of the Lean Team or Lean Management office of Chick Fil A. And I interacted with David over LinkedIn and I asked him if he would be willing to come onto the show to tell us about how Chick Fil A is applying Lean to their business. Now, even if you haven't heard of Chick Fil A or you don't have a Chick Fil A in your, in your town or, or in your country for that matter, the things David is going to share will still add value. Since it's important to understand as a Lean thinker how these principles apply in many different industries, whether it's in a factory or it's in a hospital, or in this case, in a restaurant. Show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com look for episode 284. And as always, if you'd like to have a free trial to all Gemba Academy has to offer, go over to our main website, which is gembacademy.com, scroll to the bottom of any page and you'll see a link for the free three day trial. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, David, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Hi, Ron, Thanks a lot. I'm glad to be here today. It's going great.

All right. All right. Well, hey, where are you calling in from?

I am in the Hatch Innovation center on Chick Fil A's campus and it's was kind of hard to find a little bit of a quiet spot, but this is the place where Chick Fil A works on new ideas and we're down in Atlanta, Georgia.

And what did you. What is it called?

The Hatch Innovation Center. It's where we hatch new ideas.

I love it. That's so cool. It is so cool. The Hatch. All right, well, before we get going I just gotta say, we're here in Texas, and let me tell you what, Chick Fil a is number one with my kids and even myself. I mean, if we're gonna go have some sort of fast food or whatever, I mean, Chick Fil A is it. So thank you for all the. All the amazing food you have and the processes, which we're gonna dive deep into. It's a. It's really a pleasure, you know, to go to Chick Fil A. Not just the food is awesome, but. But it's a great experience. So you guys are doing really, really good work. And I'm really excited, David, to explore, you know, how Lean is possibly playing a part in that. I want to say Lean is the whole reason Chick Fil a is great, because I'm sure they were great before Lean, but. But Lean surely is helping, so. So great, great job, and keep up the good work there.

Well, thanks a lot, Ron. I appreciate that very much. And I tell you, it's really our operators who run the business and own. Own the local, and our team members who say, my pleasure. Who go above and beyond Second Mile Service, we call it, who make every real customer experience special. So thank you on behalf of all of us for that.

Okay. Okay. Hey, so I know you've been listening to the show, and, you know, we do like to kind of kick things off with our guest sharing a quote. So do you happen to have one that you like?

I do. One thing we think about a lot here at Chick Fil A is complexity that is on our operators and our team members and how to reduce that and make their job as easy as possible. So I've got actually two quotes, if you don't mind. One is the cost of complexity isn't offset by what you can charge. Complexity creates opportunities for you to fail your customer. And that's by Gerard Arpi, president of American Airlines. He said that in Lean Six Sigma for Service. And I kind of made that mantra, complexity creates opportunities for us to fail our customer. And the second quote, it kind of goes along with it. We work on. My department works on how to make the food. We develop equipment, we develop the processes and systems. And so we have a mantra. We talk about, let's make the right thing to do the easy thing to do. So in other words, we want, you know, our team members to be able to focus on their job and whatever they think is intuitive and, hey, I ought to push this button, and it ought to just work. We want to kind of meet their expectations and make the right thing to do the easy thing to do.

Got it. I love it. I love it. All right, well, we've already let the secret out that you're affiliated with Chick Fil A, which is pretty cool. Now people all over the world listening to this and somebody in Switzerland's like, what's Chick Fil A? I don't know. You know, I don't know. Maybe they know. But to make sure everyone knows what we're talking about when we speak about Chick Fil a, just who is Chick Fil A to begin with?

Yeah. Great. So Chick Fil A is a quick service restaurant in America. Although we're in the process of going international right now, we have about 2,200 locations. Our founder, Truett Cathy, started a restaurant in 19. In 1967, he started franchising this restaurant and putting it into malls. And so at the height of it, we were in about 1800 malls all across America. And kind of our claim to fame is we are, we like to say we didn't invent the chicken, we just invented the chicken sandwich. And so a full chicken breast between two slices of bread with a pickle and pressure cooked with a secret recipe, secret coating is what makes our main product the Chick Fil A sandwich. And in 1986 we started building freestanding units. And now we're up to about 2200 restaurants. And one of our claims to fame, certainly good food. But two other things that we're almost equally known for is our hospitality. So our team members are very much geared towards serving the customer well, meeting needs, going above and beyond expectations, if we can do that. And then also we are, I humbly say, the fastest drive thru there is. 70% of our business comes through the drive thru. And we have worked really hard to save our customers time by streamlining the whole order, taking to food delivery process as much as possible. And so, particularly out in Texas, we have some of our fastest drive throughs that are routinely doing 170 cars an hour. If all the stars align and we have unlimited demand, we've topped 300 cars an hour on occasion. And that is kind of our glass ceiling we're trying to get to. How can we get 300 cars an hour through the drive through, which is about a car every 10 seconds. So that's our goal. And like I say, we're, we're well over halfway there, but still working to improve that.

Well, I can tell you from personal experience, shout out to the Chick Fil A in Keller, Texas on 377. That's the one that my family and I go to. We also. There's also one over off of close to roof Snow Drive. So we'll give a shout out to them. We don't go there quite as often, but both are fantastic. But the one on 377, the one in Keller, my goodness, it is packed. Okay, I'm talking packed, but you are so right in that drive through they've actually moved to a. I'm sure you know all about this, but there's two, two lanes now and, and there's. There is typically a, you know, a few people kind of standing ahead of head of the, you know, the, or the. Whatever you call it, the deal where you can read it and they're taking your order early, getting your name and all the rest of it. But it is incredible. Like you almost don't want to go because you're like, oh, the line's too long. That's crazy. I'm not going to wait that long. But then you realize, no, this is Chick Fil A. It's not going to be that bad. And it really does move fast. So you guys are that, that I don't know what you're doing there in Keller, Texas and maybe you're doing it all around, but they, they're getting it dialed in really, really well.

Well, Ron, thanks a lot and like I said, that's probably credit to your operator and his team as much as anything and I'll actually reach out to him and tell him you gave him a shout out. Yeah, but also we have worked extremely hard on, on the drive thru and I'm an industrial engineer so if you think about it, really what we're doing is we're trying to instead of make every step in the order process in series, we're trying to split it up and do it all in parallel so that while you're ordering your food one, when we, when we let you order it upstream, we're getting that information to the kitchen to make your food much quicker. And also probably in your location. It sounds like they get a lot of demand. We have different options where you can pay before you get to the. So that's already taken care of before you get there. You mentioned we've got double drive through lanes. We really love having an escape lane is what we call it. So if you've just got a number one in the Coke and the car in front of you has four meals on their order, we don't want you to have to wait for that car to get their four meals which may take A little longer to cook. And so we love it when we can actually bring your food back to you and let you leave. And you basically spent zero seconds at the window and you're much happier because you got your food and got to go on. So we're always thinking of how can we break the process up and gear it to better serve the customer.

Yeah, I'm very rarely in that fast lane because I got seven kids, so trust me, we put a beat down on your kitchen every time we roll through.

Absolute understand. Thank you for being. Thank you for your business.

Yeah, well, I use the app as well. You know, people are probably getting sick of me making a Chick Fil A commercial here, but it's really good. Well, but anyhow, obviously super excited about Chick Fil A. But let's talk about. Before we get into the specific Lean journey of Chick Fil A, I want to hear about your background, David, I know you're a nurse engineer, but tell us a little bit about. About how you first got introduced to all this Lean stuff and then kind of let's then transition into Chick Fil A. Yeah, great.

So I'm actually a mechanical engineer by degree. And I think people say about Texas, I wasn't born here, but I got here as soon as I could. That's the way I feel about industrial engineering. I was a mechanical engineer by degree. My first job out of college was Michelin Tire, where they trained me as an industrial engineer. And. And the goal of an industrial engineer at Michelin was to reduce the cost price of the tire. So we were taking cost out of the process by streamlining things by time studies, quick changeovers, process improvement, all of those things. And I loved every bit about it. I hadn't heard of Toyota and Lean at that point. I'm not a young guy, so this was a while back. But actually, just quick side story, I took a detour. So after five years at Michelin, I went to seminary and planted a church and was a pastor for 10 years. And then when I came back into engineering, Lean was the thing. People were talking about it, and I knew it had to do with process improvement. And I'm thinking, well, what is there to know that I didn't already know? And so I really started digging into it. And. And similarly, there were a lot of things that were, okay, they're talking about classical industrial engineering. But at the same time, I think probably what was the most different and that I had not been exposed to was the mindset that lean is for everybody. And actually the frontline Worker who is doing the job is probably the best process improver because he deals with the problems every day. He knows the job as an expert. And so we really ought to, you know, empower the front line to be able to make improvements to the job. And that was not part of my training. It was kind of like, you know, professional paid engineers were, you know, sat in a room and thought about the process and went with a stopwatch and a clipboard and observed and then came back and figured out what to do and then kind of delivered it to everybody. And I think what I have come to appreciate, and really this happened a lot at Chick Fil A, was to see that, you know, we've only got about 25 engineers at Chick Fil A who work on process improvement in our kitchen. And there's 150,000 team members who do the job eight hours a day, you know, six days a week. And what a waste if we don't take advantage of all of their thinking, all of their observation, all of their creativity. And I really kind of fallen in love with it that, you know, you're able to do so much more than if you just have a small number of paid engineers that work on a process.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, well, let's jump into the lean journey of Chick Fil A. How did it get started? Were you the one that helped start it or was it started before you came on board or talk about the origin story?

Yeah. So I think, first of all, if we go all the way back to Truett Cathy, he was an innovator. He was totally focused on the customer. So if you think about the tenets of lean, he was lean before it was a term in America. But then certainly I'd say I've been at Chick Fil a for five years, certainly for several years before I came. There was a systematic process improvement mindset among a department of engineers that said, hey, we. We need to not just buy equipment off the shelf. We are doing higher volumes than other people. We want to serve customers quicker. We need to think of new things that aren't just off the shelf solutions. And so that's really the way it started was. And I'd almost call that industrial engineering more than lean. But how lean really got started at Chick Fil A is, at first, we used to roll out processes and kind of push them on everybody. And as we started digging into what does Chick Fil A need to focus on and need to do in terms of improvement, we really began to understand that, hey, we were kind of doing a Top down approach. And that's not fast enough or scalable enough to tackle the big problems that we have. And so we actually hired a guy who is just totally a champion for how do we get lean to come up through the culture instead of being rolled out from the top down? And I would say we kind of shifted from a mindset of, hey, it's just the engineer who solves things to, we need to teach every team member how to do lean and let them work on their process. And there's some things we've had to really wrestle through because we don't want people messing with food safety and, you know, things that are important to our industry. But yet at the same time, we don't want to miss out on their, their skill sets as well.

Absolutely. So. All right, very good. So let's talk a little bit more than about, you know, everyone's been to, whether it's Chick Fil A, they've been to a, to a restaurant where, you know, you get your food faster than a traditional kind of sit down type restaurant. And so, you know, I've long marveled at the efficiency of, of, of these, of these restaurants, you know, not just including Chick Fil A. There's other ones out there, obviously that are, that are pretty good and at getting food out. So I'm, I'm always fascinated of how, how lean is being applied in these situations because it's, it's pretty good. Right. Right now, like going and getting a. I'm a number one deluxe guy with American cheese. Okay, all right, so, you know, I'll have it in I don't know how many minutes it takes. Not very much. It's fast. So, like, how are you using lean? Is it, is it just the speed at which food is produced or is it in the back office? Is it everything across the entire organization? Just talk about how you're doing it.

Yeah, so we've always done capacity projects, speed projects, things like that. We've done that. I think what's most exciting to me is there are these certain overarching problems that the whole chain has that deserve a dedicated team that knows all the tools you could possibly use. But here's the kind of things that used to be missed. We care a lot about order accuracy, making sure that, you know, the customer gets exactly what he ordered and gets all his condiments with it and, and doesn't have to come back to us because, you know, something wasn't right. But yet that's not in, you know, we don't have enough Engineers to really work on that. And often it's a store specific problem, how they set up and what, you know, efficiencies that can they pick up. And so what we've really decided to do is the way we can move much faster is let's teach our team members lean. Let them decide what problems in their own restaurant they want to work on. And we provide some oversight. We've got specific things they can't do, anything that touches food safety or product quality. And we got a couple of other things that like you can't play in that sandbox. But anything that's not outside those boundaries is fair game. And so reducing the eight waste 5s in their store, reducing travel time through spaghetti diagram analysis and time study and those kinds of things just to get faster, all of those are in scope, improving order accuracy. So there's tons of problems that can make a really significant difference in a restaurant that teams, you know, have the expertise, they're not going to hurt the quality of the food if they do something that's out of bounds. And so we've really kind of focused on, let's teach teams how some, some basic lean principles and then let them go out and solve the own, their own problems that they have in the restaurants.

Gotcha. Gotcha. So let's say the Keller Texas Chick Fil A's got it dialed in and they're doing something particularly well. Some part of their process that they're doing a great job of. Are they able, are they encouraged to, you know, practice yokoten, you know, horizontal sharing, like kind of across stores or what kind of process do you have for that?

Yeah, so this, this is actually a great lean story, a lean example. So when we began to teach teams, yes, absolutely. We want to share best practices and get all the benefit of that idea and get it across the chain. And so actually centrally at the headquarters we were talking about building an app. And maybe this app would, you know, you can put a picture or a video, you can type up what it's about, you can post it, other people can upvote it or downvote it and say how much it's worth. And then kind of we would curate this list and then an operator could pick from the top 20 projects that other people have done and kind of bite off his own commitment level and cost level to do something in his store. And everybody was excited about that idea. We went to it and it wasn't on their roadmap for they could get to it in a few years and all of that and so in that process of, hey, it may take us a couple of years before we could build an app where team members could do this. All of a sudden an operator says, well, hey, 80% of what you guys wanted to do is what a Facebook group is. So why don't we just make a Facebook group and let people post pictures and descriptions and you can like it or you can unlike it and that kind of thing. And so it kind of happened. And almost, you know, one thing about Lean is like, hey, are we okay with that? Is that legal? Is that, you know, putting us at risk in some way? And what we've decided to do is, hey, we police it. And I have a person on my staff who looks at it every month and kind of scours it from a is this food safe? Is this product quality? Okay, is this people safe? You know, somebody will come up with the idea of, let's, let's take out the ceiling tiles and store, you know, cups way up in the ceiling rafters. But then you got to get it with a ladder. And we're like, hey, that's a great idea. We love that you're trying to utilize space better than the restaurant. But that kind of goes against our idea of people safety because we don't want ladders in the restaurant. People fall. We don't need people falling around, you know, open fryers and all of that. And so we kind of then come back and very respectfully say, hey, love what you're thinking about. Here's the reasons why we don't want to do that. And then that becomes part of that record. And people say it. And way often before my team has to get involved, probably another dozen operators have said, hey, it's not a great idea. Ladders aren't a good idea in the restaurant. And they kind of self police themselves. And so we're kind of in this tension point right now of, hey, what if an idea comes up and gets spread out there that we really don't like for, say, a food safety reason? And so far our answer has been, hey, at least this gives us visibility into it. A restaurant might have thought of this on their own and been doing it on their own and nobody would have known it. But now the engineers, the food safety people, the operations people can all do it. And that's one of my jobs, is to escalate something up. If I see something that says, hey, I think food safety needs to weigh in on this. And then they can come back and say, oh, that's fine, or no, that's not fine.

So if I. If you roll into just a general Chick Fil, a restaurant Disney, anywhere in the country and you walk up and just to one of the employees and say, hey, how's your 5s? Or what kind of waste have you identified? Or like, would they know what I'm talking about? Like, what are the chances that they would know?

It's a great question. So here's the answer to that. This is almost a Lean way of rolling it out. We decided rather than have a big program where we rolled out training to the whole chain about this and think about it. To really get some significant Lean training, you gotta pay the customers, I mean, I'm sorry, pay the team members. But they're not serving food that day. So it's a big cost to operators if we were to mandate everybody needs this training. So what we actually did is we created a pull system for our Lean training. And basically we have a one day Lean training that's taught by inc. It's excellent material, it's geared toward the restaurant setting and we literally teach basically a green belt in one day for the operators that want it. And so what happens is if you've heard about Lean, if you've been exposed to it a little bit, you can go and search it on our website and say, oh, they've got a Lean training. You have to pay your own team members. So you're making an investment to bring them off site when, you know, on the clock, but off site. And we come in and give our best argument for why Lean could change their restaurant. We're teaching their team members, it's got a lot of fun to it. They see the benefits of it. We share some great success stories that other restaurants have had. And so by the end of the day, maybe we rented a, you know, a conference room for the day and had 30 team members, maybe five from six different restaurants. And they go out excited and very often they do really get into it. We support them more. If they want to do a Kaizen event or something, we will come out and help them do something like that. And then they get these amazing results. And it's really that word of mouth that wow, this changed the culture of my team. We're making some real process improvements that are, that are affecting our business. When that message gets out to other operators, then they want to do it too and they're willing to do it. And so I would say at this point, out of our 2200 restaurants, I don't know this number exactly, but I would say we've probably touched about 400 to 500 restaurants that have asked for that kind of training. And at now that's. It's still so much work. We can barely keep up with training the ones who are showing interest.

Yeah.

But I think at some point, you know, we will hit a tipping point where we say, hey, this is so such a competitive advantage for Chick Fil a that we need to teach everybody this, just like we teach them to make a Chick Fil A sandwich.

Yeah, I got. There's over 2000 stores now, aren't there?

Locations about 22. Yes, sir. 2200 stores.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Fantastic. You talked earlier in our conversation, David, about the concept of this, of the sandbox. I want to talk a little bit more about that. What is the sandbox and how do you use it?

Yeah. So it really was this idea of how do we let everybody in the restaurant do lean and yet not compromise our product quality, Hurt food safety, hurt people safety. How do we kind of give them a place that they can work in areas of the business and areas that, hey, you just don't know enough as a. As a team member there. There's a lot of food safety. You know, science. You need to know, if you start saying, hey, we could cook chick, you know, we could serve the customer faster if we cut, you know, 25 seconds off the cook time. You don't. You don't know enough to know, hey, we cook as long as we do to get the right amount of moisture, to get to the right internal temperature to make the food safe to eat. All of those things you shouldn't be messing with. And so we kind of came up with the concept of a sandbox. And it really comes from the software world. A sandbox in it world is an environment where. Where you're running a version of the software that hasn't gone live to your customers yet, but you can test and try things without messing up your entire customer base. And so we kind of adopted that terminology and we said, hey, here's a sandbox that teams can work on. If they want to study the eight waste and they want to go after wasted motion in their restaurant, we are totally fine with that. If they want to 5s their restaurant and create efficiencies because everything's in a certain place and people aren't looking for things, go for it. If you want to do a root cause analysis on something in your restaurant, we want to equip you with that tool. Order accuracy, where to store inventory, visual management systems, time and motion studies, all of that, you are totally okay to do that. But if you want to do something that changes the product quality like you say, hey, I found a faster way to mix lemonade, we reserve the right to say, hey, that is changing the recipe of our signature product that we want to taste the same everywhere. And it's got a lot of chemistry and all kinds of things in it that have come up with how we mix it and what, what the ratios are. So you can't play with our recipes. Food safety. If there's things that affect how we hold, transform or touch food, you don't have the authority to go and mess with that. Another one, this was kind of one that came to us out of left field. One idea that went viral on the Facebook page was people started turning a vent shroud on the bottom of the ice drink machine around. And the reason they were doing it is they were saying, hey, if you ever drop a napkin or a straw on the floor in the drive thru, the, the exhaust coming out of this machine blows it all around the floor and it's hard to catch it and get it up. And you know, if you're busy and you leave it on the floor, it, you know, it looks messy to the customers that you got a couple of napkins, you know, and bags floating around on the floor. And hey, we figured out if you turn that shroud around, it blows the air to the back and, and now nothing moves and you can pick it up better. It doesn't draw attention to itself. Well, sounds like a great idea. It went viral. 20 stores are doing it and everybody's saying, yeah, it worked for us too. And then we called the manufacturer and they said, no, no, no, no. That is supposed to eject the heat out of the machine. If you turn it around to the wall, the heat's just going to stay stuck in there and it's going to wear your motors out faster. And so we had to come back and say, hey, great idea, love that you're thinking about ways to fix things. But for that one, it would void our equipment warranty. If you do that, please put it back the way it was. And so product quality, food safety, equipment warranty and people safety are the four things that we have said. These are off limits. We need to make the rules and design the processes for these areas. But anything else, you guys, you know, have free rein to experiment with. And if there's something that's in the gray area, you know, we monitor the website and give feedback. If there's something we're concerned about so.

Let'S give us one example of a really cool improvement that you've seen over the years.

Yeah, so you mentioned our app while ago. So we're really proud of our mobile phone app that lets you order before you get to the restaurant, lets you pay with your app, lets you do all these cool things. And it's been a speed saver. Like, I hope you're taking advantage of it with all your kids. You can order and then go pick your food. And just so you know, we're doing that in the restaurant now. You can order and go sit down at a table and we will bring the food right to your table and you never have to go stand in the line.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah. And that just. Actually just rolled out about two weeks ago. So it's called dine in Mobile Ordering. So that's the great things about the app. Here's one of the things that when we rolled out the app, that was slowing things down. When you pay with your app, or even if you don't pay with it, you can scan and get points and then redeem that for free food later on. Well, it was a new process. Customers weren't used to it. People would forget to do it. And so after the fact, after they ordered their food, they would remember, oh, I've got the app. Well, then they would say, hey, can I still get points even though I forgot to scan the app. And our team members are trained to go the second mile and answer those questions and be patient and meet the needs of the customer. And so our team members, instead of serving the next customer, would have to spend about 30 to 45 seconds saying, hey, yes, you can get points. Here's a website you can go to and take your receipt and enter in this number and you can get credit for it. Even after the fact. Well, that was really slowing things down. And you're thankful if you're the customer that gets told how to get your points. You're not very thankful if you're the customer behind them who is now waiting for somebody to not get their food but to ask a question. And so we actually have. This was a team, a restaurant generated lean idea. There's a little field on the receipt that the local restaurant can put something on there. And typically they put something like, have a nice day, come back soon, something like that. And so somebody had the idea and said, forgot to scan your app, go to this website. And they started putting that. And so now, instead of it taking 30 or 45 seconds to tell the Customer, they can do it. When somebody says, oh, I forgot to scan my app. Can I get points for that? All this team member had to do was say, look at the bottom of your receipt. And it has a website for how you can get points.

Awesome.

And now they're gone in six seconds and the next person's being served. And so when. When that idea came out, I'd say probably within two weeks, every restaurant was doing it. I would be surprised if you went to your two stores and that wasn't the text on the bottom of the receipt.

I'm check next time.

All right? And then actually, it was such a great idea. Corporate said, hey, we need to do this. And so it may be that it's a permanent thing now that corporate did, but certainly for six months, it was something that restaurants were just able to do on their own. And it came as an idea from a local restaurant.

So good. So good. Give a big commercial at the beginning. I get to give another one. You just reminded me. My wife brought all of my kids in. Oh, this is a. I don't know, a month or so ago. And there was some deal going on. I remember it was, you got free something. I don't know if it was a free meal or free ice cream or free something, but you had to come by, like 7:00pm or something like that. And my wife is, you know, got everything going crazy and all that with all these kids and. And, oh, we got to go to Chick Fil A. So we jump in the car and they were like, I don't know, 15 minutes late. They walk in and the lady was like, oh, sorry. Yeah, it ended at seven. And all of a sudden my wife was like, oh, okay. And then all of a sudden, that team member just kind of looked over at. I guess she. My wife said she just glanced over her shoulder, I'm guessing to the. To the supervisor or the leader, whoever it was, and. And somebody gave him a nod. She goes, we're going to go ahead and take care of you. And my wife is like, of course you are. Your Chick Fil a. That's where that was her exact word. So, you know, what a great, great story, you know, and just a great witness to what. What all the things that you've been talking about.

Well, thank you very much. My guess is that was Cow Appreciation Day, which was back in July. And if you dress like a cow, you get free food.

Okay. And might have been.

It might have been that. It might have been. Might have been something else going on. But you know, what you mentioned is an example of what we call surprise and delight, because, you know, they would have been fully within their rights to say, hey, it ended at 7 o', clock, we're not going to do that. But that was just surprise and delight to say, hey, we're going to do that anyway. And actually, most operators empower their team members to make those decisions on the spot so they don't have to go check with a manager or something like that. So thank you very much for that feedback.

Hey, so, last question, David, what are you most excited about? I mean, there's lots of going on and the world's a crazy place these days. So what's going on and what are you most excited about?

Yeah, so there's so many things going on. We, we have been on an amazing sales trajectory. We were five and a half billion when I got here. Five years ago. This year we just crossed 10.6 billion. And we're growing like crazy. There's a lot of pressures on the business, a lot of capacity pressures on the business. The neat thing is there are so many smart people in this company who are all pulling in the same direction. And so our leadership sets these big goals saying, hey, we need to solve capacity problems in the restaurant. And they put resources behind it, they put the best leadership we have on it, and we all pull in the same direction, and we're able to just do things that from any other company I've ever worked for, we just move faster and get better results than any place I've ever seen. So I'm excited that big things are happening. But I'd say even more than that, the company just said, hey, we don't want to just be about growing sales. That's not what motivates any of us at our core. But we would really like to set a goal that we want to be the most caring company in the world. And that has resonated so strongly with all of our operators, team members, staff, that what would it look like to not just be known for good food, hospitality, and quick service, but what if we go beyond that and things that don't even, you know, have to do with the transactions you do with us? But what if we're, you know, the things that we do philanthropically, the things that happen, you know, the little things that happen in the stores every day. What if we were known as the most caring company in the world and people actually, you know, went to us for when they needed help because we, we have that reputation? So I think that's the thing I'm most excited about that, that a company that's succeeded so well in business also has such a passion to just. Just be a positive force for good in the world.

Yeah. So good. So good. David, thank you so much for taking time. I know you guys are busy over at the Hatch. Just had to work that in such a good deal. I know you. I really are really are busy. So I do appreciate you coming on. How can people best connect with you?

Yeah, thanks for asking. I have. You can reach me on LinkedIn. DavidB. Reed. Or actually just started a blog just to kind of write some lean ideas that I have down. That's probably the quickest way lean you info.

And it's U. The letter U. Yeah, the letter U.

Like lean University. So lean u.info got it, got it.

All right, and we're in. David, Read is. Read is R E I D. And we're gonna go ahead and get this all, all David's links into, into the show notes which is going to be. This is episode 284, so gembapodcast.com and look at episode 284. David, thank you again so much for everything that you go and doing. Thank you to all your team members who have treated my family well. So I appreciate that and keep up the great work and hopefully we can meet face to face one day and sit down and have a. Are you number one guy or what are you, David?

Love the number one, but trying to stay fit to lead. So I do grilled nuggets a lot now.

Okay, okay, okay, I got you, I got you, I got you. All right, well, thanks again, David. Stay in touch and yeah, keep up the great work.

All right, Ron, thanks so much. Love what you're doing and great to be with you today.

Okay, bye, bye.

Thank you. Goodbye.

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