Billion-Dollar Brand: The Shocking Story Behind Chick-fil-A's Marketing Maverick with Steve Robinson

How aggressively and thoroughly you listen to customers. Marketing is just purely a way to sell something.

I'm 30 years old. I've got a career that I really like. I don't want to screw that up. I'd be screaming at the top of the mountain, no. People sell and look you in the eye. My mind, I just screwed this up. When I joined the business, they had sales of about $140 million. My last year, Chick Fil A, we did almost $7 billion. People will pay for that. The most important decision we make here are who we invite into the organization. People ask me, well, how'd you do it? Well.

Steve, a huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

Well, thank you. Thank you, James. And do you go by James?

I do some people, a few other things, but James will work for me.

I don't know you well enough to call you anything else, so I'll stick with James.

I love it. Thank you. Hey, we just chatted about before we went on air and we realized that a few years ago you came here to New Zealand and you were on a foreign exchange in the very time that I live.

Yes. Yes. Well, it's more than just a few years. It was 1967, and I was there an entire year. I think it was. It was January through December. I came back to America in January of 1968.

Incredible.

Yeah. And it was my senior year of high school there and here.

Unbelievable.

Yeah. Went to Papa Nui High School and Christchurch.

Amazing. A big shout out to those at Papa Nui Height. That's where Steve went. I love it.

Yeah, it was good. I got a good test there. It was great. I, you know, you had. You had to declare a vocation, and I guess you guys still do that. Yeah, So I majored in draftsmanship. It's all. All before we had computers and CAD systems. So we're drawn with, you know, manual drawing and doing designs and designing equipment and tool and die making the whole. It was great. It was a great experience.

Amazing. I love it. Very small world. Now, tell me what got you into your career? So you obviously did your last year of high school here in New Zealand. What were your next steps after that?

Well, James, it was kind of connected. The family I stayed with down there, his name was Maury Coombs, Maurice Combs. He ran a small business, tool and die maker, and he also rebuilt car engines down there.

And my dad was a private entrepreneur as well. He had a private business. He raised hybrid seed corn, which is a corn you in turn plant to feed to Livestock. And the short of it is, I would travel a lot with my dad here when he was out making sales calls. And it didn't take me long as a teenager to realize nothing happens unless somebody sells something. And I actually became fascinated by the upside potential of selling. And so I just started studying the whole science of selling and marketing, which also, you know, the bigger scheme was brand development. That was the heyday of the Johnson and Johnsons and Procter and Gambles of the world. Coke, Colgate, the major car manufacturer. So it was really in the heyday of brand management. And I just fell in love with the whole concept of building brands, creating great products or services, and then seeing how much of it you could sell. And.

That'S what got me fascinated in a career in marketing. I went to Auburn University. I majored in marketing there.

And as I was wrapping up my senior year, I went to my dean. I said, look, I'd really like to have a broader scope than just sales. I'd like to have a brand communications.

Experience in graduate school. Where should I go? And my dean recommended three schools. And the one I selected was Northwestern up in Evanston, Illinois, north of Chicago. And I went to Medill School of Journalism and Advertising. And I focused on advertising, got my master's there. And so my entire career has been in marketing. My first job was at Texas Instruments in Dallas in the semiconductor group. I was part of a team that introduced the first handheld calculators.

That's incredible.

That's all they did was a calculator. They didn't do any of the stuff these things do. And I was there about a year, and I got phone call one day from the director of marketing for Six Flags Over Texas. He was the brother of a Northwestern classmate, Said, I heard you being. I heard about you being here in Dallas.

I have a background in brand management.

I've joined six likes because I really think they're a strong brand. Brand company, short of that conversation was he had an opening in his marketing department in Texas. And I spent a day interviewing with him and went home. Told Diane that night, you know, this is really. This is really what I want to do. TI was very engineering focused. It was kind of hard to break. Marketing was a whole kind of a foreign, foreign subject to them. So I joined Six Flags out there in Dallas. I'm trying to think of the year it would have been 73, 74, 19. That's 1973-74. And I. I was with Six Flags seven years. My last four years were with the Atlanta Park Where I became director of marketing Fairly young, age 28.

Was having a great career there. Really loved it. We were setting all kinds of attendance records. We were really doing some unique things around brand development and creating exceptional brand experiences in the park instead of just chasing transactions through deals and discounting and stuff like that.

And my phone rings one evening in August of 1980, and it's the COO of Chick Fil A. Now, I don't know how many of your listeners. Viewers are aware of Chick Fil A, but back in.

1980, they had only about a hundred stores. They were all in malls, fairly unknown.

Developed by this gentleman called True Cathy, who had developed the sandwich and a diner in South Atlanta called the Dwarf House. And it was called the Dwarf House because he only had 10 stools and four benches or booths. And he developed the sandwich in order to be able to serve chicken faster.

And that was. That all began in the 60, late 60s and 70s. So by the time Jimmy Collins calls me in the summer of 1980, they have over 100 stores featuring just the chicken sandwich, the Chick Fil A sandwich. Total of only seven menu items. Average store size is only about 4 to 500 square feet in a mall. And average volume is probably in the neighborhood of anywhere from 600 to $750,000 in annual sales.

I'll shorten the conversation. You know, I told you I interviewed Six Flags for a day. Jimmy said, we don't have a marketing department. We need one. We're at a point where we really don't have the resources and the support that our operators need to build their sales. And I'd already met them because we'd attempted to convince them to build a restaurant in the park at Six Flags, and they chose not to do it. But I'd gotten to know their people, and Jimmy was one of the people I got to know. So this phone call is a year and a half after I admitted. And I was really fascinated by the. By the company, the product, the operational concept, an independent operator who runs the restaurants. But Chick Fil A takes all the risks financially. Very unique.

And they're privately owned. And I've worked for two companies that were publicly owned. TI and Six Flags. They were based in Atlanta. They had strong values that I really associate. Aligned myself with. So, James, I figured if I can get a job at Six Flags in a day, maybe I can spend three or four days with these guys. And in my. If nothing else, I'll learn something.

And.

December of 1980, I'm still interviewing with them. Wow. But it is. I'll stop there to say that obviously.

Marketing captured my fancy.

I went from a. I guess you would say the evolution of thinking, of marketing is just purely a way to sell something all the way to a concept, a way to. A way to actually develop product or services that people actually want, create unique brand positionings around that product or service.

Have a proposition that people are willing to pay full price for. And so when I'm in the theme park business, that's. That's a foreign concept. Most of the parks were just focused totally driving daily attendance, discount and coming out the wazoo. And in the fast food business, about all anybody did back in the early 80s was discount coupon price points. And ironically, at least in America, that's the way most of them are still doing it. But the evolution of my career was I got to the point, by the time I joined Chick Fil A, I was ready for something other than a transactional marketing career. I wanted. I was looking for something where I could actually help build a brand. I had a taste of it at Six Flags. But when I got to Chick Fil A.

The opportunity was. It was literally a clean sheet of paper. And I have to tell you this, and then I'll stop, because I know you've only asked me one question. But In December of 1980, I'm five months into still interviewing, and I'm sitting in the office of True Cathy, who is the founder and CEO. And I'm doing James. I'm doing this stealth. I'm 30 years old. I've got a career that I really like. I don't want to screw that up. So I look at Truitt and I said, true.

This is starting to get a little cumbersome. What are you looking for in the ideal market in Canada? Am I not. Am I the guy?

And true was about 60, and he put down his Chick Fil A sandwich. We were having lunch together.

Long pause. And I'm thinking in the back of my mind, okay, I may have just totally screwed this up.

He says, I have absolutely no idea what you're going to do if you come here. All I know is, whatever it is, I don't want to do it. And I thought that was incredibly unusual. He said, but I can tell you this. If we invite you to come to Chick Fil A, it's because we think we can trust you and we have fun together. Because it's my intent that if you join Chick Fil A, you'll never have A. You'll never. You'll never Go anywhere else. Foreign. Foreign concept. Still kind of a foreign concept for a lot of people. Yeah. And. And he said. And I looked at him, I know I had a puzzle look on my face. And he said, you need to understand the most important decisions we make here are who we invite into the organization.

We don't train culture here. We hire it.

And that's. That's the sort of organization, the sort of man I went to work for in 1981, January of 1981.

He was right. He didn't know what marketing entailed. He didn't want to do it. And one of the reasons I stayed almost 35 years was he never called me to his office one time to ask me why I did something. Why did you do that? That doesn't seem like a smart thing to do. When he said, if I can trust you and we have fun together, you're going to get to do the job. And that is, in fact, the kind of career I had. Unbelievable clean sheet of paper. And when I joined the business, they had sales of about $140 million. And my last year at Chick Fil A, we did almost $7 billion. Wow. Yeah.

That's amazing. That's me. That's a household name. Chick Fil A, whether you're from North.

America, it is now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess that's a long answer question, what got you involved in marketing? But. But I gave you that long answer because I was raised by a guy who was an entrepreneur. I spent a year in New Zealand with an entrepreneur, and the guy that actually caught my fancy and gave me a blank slate for a potential career. True. Cathy was an entrepreneur. And entrepreneurs, the good ones, learn how to take their idea, and if they really wanted to grow, they learn how to empower other people to help them do it. And they. And that's the kind of guy he was.

Yeah, he sounds incredible. And what did you do that was so different? Like, what was your marketing lens that you came in with Chick Fil A and you went, this is how I'm going to approach it. That was vastly different from what everyone else had been doing.

Well, my answers aren't. My answer is going to be fairly simple. But what I'm. What happened took three decades. Over three decades.

I would say the major philosophical difference I had about marketing was that marketing was subject to. What kind of brand are you trying to create?

Marketing is not over here in a separate silo from product development or hospitality development or service model.

Marketing is part of the toolbox of creating and then managing a great brand. And so the attitude that I came in with, and it took time to develop it and, but my team thoroughly bought into it and eventually everyone around the organization bought into it, was that every touch, this is the key point. Every touch point with a customer ought to have a, is a brand touch point. Therefore it ought to have a marketing perspective. It ought to have a consumer insight perspective to that touch point, whether it's the pro, any aspect of product, service, communications, physical structure, interaction with customer facing personally or digitally. If there's a customer interface in your business, wherever that's occurring, the marketing brand voice needs to be involved in it, either directly leading it or at least influencing it. And, and the primary platform I discovered to influence any of those customer touch points.

Was how aggressively and thoroughly you listen to customers.

What, what are the systems you use.

To use the voice of the customer to give you insight to? Product development, hospitality development, store design development.

Digital, digital interfacing development.

And so I mean, when I left, for example, our positioning was not about food, it was not about the product. Our primary positioning objective for the Chick Fil a brand was four words where good meets gracious.

One about the same, one about two pickles, one about waffle fries. We had all that. But the, the focal point of the brand by the time I left was every touch point with the customer, whether it's menu items, hospitality, technology, advertising. It needs to be good, it needs to be perceived as good, it needs to connect good meats, it needs to connect with people, ideally personally. You come to a Chick Fil a store, you're going to be waiting on somebody personally, even in a drive through, somebody's going to meet you out there with an iPad and they're going to interact with you, take your order, create, finish the transaction. And you're, you're never going to talk to any metal box.

Well, that, that alone is different than most fast food restaurants. Okay, so.

So good. Every aspect of the experience needs to be good. We need to meet people where they are, need to connect with them, whether it's on our property, in communications, in marketing, digitally meet good meets gracious. People came to expect Chick Fil a to be a gracious experience. Gracious hospitality treated with honor, dignity and respect. Now, I don't know what it's like in New Zealand, but in America most retail interactions are very transactional. People seldom look you in the eye, they seldom give any sort of connection that I recognize that you're even there, much less tell you my pleasure, have a great day.

And it doesn't it doesn't take a lot to stand out in the retail environment.

And particularly in the fast food environment.

If you can actually show people honor, dignity and respect and, and then if you actually extend gracious hospitality.

It'S totally unexpected.

100.

Yeah. So today when I left and still today, if you, if you look at the research at Chick Fil A, what are the top 10 attributes of chick Fil A that you love? The top five or six all relate to people interactions.

It is until the bottom five. I love the waffle fries. Well, I love the frosted lemonade or I love the Chick Fil A sandwich. It's all about the experience I have with people of Chick Fil A in the restaurants, in the drive throughs, in the communities, and even the way they're treated when they interact with them on the Chick Fil A app.

And Steve, what do you think about this era of AI, that artificial intelligence and robotics and ChatGPT? How do you think with Chick Fil A stays with this? Hey, we are people and we're for the people and we connect with our people. How do you think that's going to impact the company? Will that increase the brand value and reputation or is it going to hold it back?

I think it has potential.

To help them be even smarter as they continue to refine the menu, the customer interactions, what people love.

Day part utilizations, menu mix utilization.

I would hope it does not drag them into depersonalizing the experience.

Now granted, I'm not a young pup any longer, but my very greatest concern about AI is how do you maintain the soul and the emotional connection that you only get through a human being?

And how do you build that? How do you build the intuition of soul and emotional empathy into a software?

I don't know how you do that.

Yeah.

So at some point I think, I think there's room for AI to make every potential guest experience bigger, better if it better informs people are making decisions about product and service design. But the risk is if you remove the human element, the soul and the emotional element from the guest interaction, particularly in the retail space.

If you told me that I'm going to drive into a Chick Fil A restaurant and I'm going to do nothing but interact with a screen, either their screen or my screen.

You have just, you have just pulled Chick Fil A back.

Into the mediocrity of most of that industry. Yeah.

Big mistake. And trust me, when we design our service, hospitality.

What we call second mile service, we designed our hospitality model where in the dining Room. We're actually voluntarily cleaning tables and refreshing drinks and carrying orders to the table and having umbrellas available when it's raining outside and carrying large orders to the car. And very specifically designed behaviors. And out in drive through, we've got an iPad. We have real people greeting you, taking your order, answering questions, completing your transaction.

Trust me, there was a lot of pressure within Chick Fil A. Why do. Why did Blankety Blank do we want to do that?

That's making the business even harder. Yes. It's also making the interaction more special.

More personal, more gracious. And the key point is driving Chick Fil A even farther and farther into a space where they're all by themselves in the fast food category because nobody else either can or is willing to do it.

And to your. To your question, I think that is the ultimate.

Valid valedictorian position for a brand is if you can create a space with your product or your service that no one else can recreate. Now, these other guys can try to match the chicken sandwich. Fortunately, they haven't. They can try. They can try to come up with unique waffle fries or french fries. They can do milkshakes, they can do lemonade, but they cannot execute personal service at the level Chick Fil A does. And, and you ask me, well, why?

Because there's an independent operator running every location. They're not managers. They're. They're earning a percentage. And the net profit of every store is their income. They are highly engaged with the success and the growth of that store. So you asked me about how did I want to get into. Why did I want to get in marketing? I wanted to get into marketing where customers got what they wanted and the people who provided it had a chance to make a lot of money.

Yeah, 100%. And it's interesting you say that like I do feel whatever industry we're in, whether it's hospitality, fast food, tech, it doesn't really matter what industry we're in, the more connection there is human to human. I mean, I just think that's a unique selling point right there when we're starting to minimize.

People will pay for that, James. They'll pay a premium for being treated personally. I mean, great. Some of the greatest brands in the world have built around a personal connection. Ritz, Carl and Nordstrom's, Nike. I mean, what happened to Mike? What. What happened with.

Michael Jordan? Suddenly the brain got personalized. Yep. So here comes Bo Jackson, you know, and here comes somebody, a soccer star and a tennis star, personalizing the brand so the the shoe buyer can identify with a person, not just with the functionality and the appearance of a shoe. So BMW, the ultimate performance machine. Well, what's the performance about? It's not just mechanics and how. It's how it personally feels when you're driving it. What do you feel in your hands? What do you feel in your butt? What do you feel in your feet? And so great brands all find a way to actually break through the transactional clutter and create an experience that people identify as personal. The iconic brands.

Are ones that have a personality. Very often they even have a character with personality. For us, it was the cows.

But anyway, yeah, the beauty of iconic brands, if you can ever develop one. And I, I didn't know that that's what ultimately I would be a part of. But as we got farther down this track of trying to be totally different 180, I mean, we literally just in, in the late 90s, we said, you know, I think we're onto something here. With this operator model, we have the chance to create a brand that is totally renegade. 180, different than everybody else in the space. Different food, different guest experience, different marketing, different advertising.

And.

Then what happens in the mid 2000? Here comes this book called Blue Ocean Strategy.

Which I don't know if you heard of it, but it's all about creating businesses.

There you go, sitting on my desk.

It's all about creating a position, even in the midst of a highly competitive environment where you're in, you're in the. You have water to yourself.

You have space to yourself. And the best water is always the water where there's nobody else messing up the waves.

I love it. That's over time. That's what Chick Fil A has become. They are in a space all by themselves.

So is a Nike, so is a BMW. And we can start. People start naming their favorite brands. They're nine out of ten times they're. They're Blue Ocean brands. Yeah. And that's what Chick Fil A became. And people ask me, well, how'd you do it? Well, 35 years of listening and working and trying and testing and making mistakes. But the under the underlying premise was we're not going to be like everybody else in our industry. We're going to leverage the leadership in the individual restaurant.

And we're going to, we're going to treat people personally.

Which almost in any industry, if you can figure out how to do that, you got to, you've got to stand above the crowd. I mean, I'll give you another example. I Get, I get my car serviced and I buy tires here in Atlanta or down in Atlanta.

It's not a chain, it's. We retired, we were breaking tires. And I know the guy that owns the business and I walk in there and he knows me and I know that when I buy something there has service done there. He is going to personally test drive my car before he hands me the keys.

Now how many places do you go to have your car service where you have that level of confidence in that level, level of personal engagements?

That's why I go, yeah, 100%. And this idea of an iconic brand, if someone's wanting to build a mediocre brand versus building an iconic brand, what's the strategic difference that will send them in the mediocre direction versus the iconic direction?

Well, I think the strategic difference I've already alluded to is can a competitor replicate what you're doing?

If they can replicate your product, you're going to be a mediocre brand. If they can replicate your, your retail interaction model, you're going to be a mediocre. You're going to be, you're going to be one. Now you may be good of many, but you, you're only going to be.

The best of a bad lot.

So if you want to be an iconic brand, you've got to take this whole, this whole perspective. Blue Ocean, you can call it that. I call it. Before we heard of Blue Ocean, we called a renegade. We're going to be a renegade brand. What everybody else is doing, we're going to do the opposite. Everybody else is bringing in food in the back door that's already pre breaded and half cooked and they're just throwing it in the fryers, throwing it out, throwing on the grill. We're going to make real food in the back of the restaurant every day. Every piece of food we serve is going to be made fresh.

As renegade. In fast food. You go into a Chick Fil, a restaurant, their kitchens are, are huge.

They're doing 7 to 8 million dollars per store per year.

It's incredible.

But, but they're making the food there. It's not coming in pre prepared in any way. That's renegade. I've already talked to hospitality treating people, figuring out how you can actually skirt, skirt interactions with a box, a voice box, a machine. We're not going to use screens. They go into. Why do you want to go in a restaurant? Instead of being treated and greeted by a person, why do you want to go in a restaurant and step up to a kiosk and order.

Agree.

That's not a restaurant.

You know, the definition of a restaurant is a place of rest.

And too many restaurants or anything but that. Chaos. Yeah, it's chaos. Exactly right. So.

I think I've made my point. The point is mediocrity is somebody else can can attack you and replicate a lot of what you do. But if you can create a blue ocean brand where you're doing things that are very, very unique, very different. Renegade may not be the cheapest, may in fact be pretty expensive. But if you're delivering value the customers really love, they'll pay. They'll pay for it. What. What I. What we learned from our research, James, as a brand continued to grow was was we learned that what we call raving fans.

These were people. Here's. Here was the key question that we used in our research in every restaurant, every quarter.

Based upon your experience at this Chick Fil A restaurant today, how likely would you be to recommend this restaurant to your family or friends? One to ten. Ten being most likely. We found tens were bringing us over 80% of our business.

That came more often. They paid full price and didn't mind it and they, and they told other people about Chick Fil A. Wow. So came. They came more often, they paid full price and they told others about Chick Fil A. When I left Chick Fil A raving fans tens or about 6% of our customer base.

The last time I talked to my successor.

CMO, that number was now over 20%. Wow. And it. And it's the reason their average volume does almost or not almost their average store volumes over $8 million a year.

Incredible.

They're not outspending competition on marketing. They're creating enough raving fans, new raving fans every year that the flywheel is getting bigger and faster.

Yeah.

To use Jim Collins.

I love that monograph of the Flywheel that Jim brought out. It said that to a company has good to great book.

Yes. Well, that Chick Fil A, the Flywheels, it runs, it's. It's running around. That local operator, that local independent contractor is the leader on site. Average Chick Fil A operator today has over 150 employees. They're running a enterprise.

But they're earning half net profit from that restaurant. Half net pre tax profit. That's their income. They're highly motivated to grow it, take care of every customer and attract and keep great talent because of the deal. Well, that's what the things. That's what Chick Fil A, that's the fly is the flywheels they're the hub.

Well, the brand is how you continue to make the flywheel more valuable, bigger. And, and what happens is the flywheel becomes more valuable and bigger. It's faster, it's growing faster, it's creating more ring fans. And raving fans are helping them. Raving fans are helping them market the business.

Yeah.

Average Chick Fil A unit spends probably half of the industry average on marketing. Wow.

And when we talk about brand. So for a second, I imagine if you've got a very strong brand DNA, you understand your brand, your values. If something like AI and these quick fixes come along that make you more disconnected with humans, you're going to go, actually no, that doesn't resonate with our brand DNA.

I would, I'd be, I'd be screaming at the top of the mountain. No, I mean if it helps us make better decisions to.

You know, product improvement or, or our hospitality model or our technology back of the house system to make, make it all faster and more efficient, make the, make the restaurant more efficient.

Yeah, but if it takes human touch out of the business.

I would be pushing back on it big time.

Yeah. And how do you go about, if there's somebody listening right now going, you know what, our idea of our brand is quite, I don't know, it's diluted. We don't understand our brand. Where would you start to build your brand DNA, understanding who you are as a brand?

I would go out and we did this. I would go out and I'd start doing focus groups with customers, heavy users, light users, non users, whatever category you're in, who love. Let's talk in small groups and probably a lot of them.

Let'S talk with people around the table that love us, people that know us but don't use us heavily. They have other brands they like and people don't use us at all. Why don't they use us? And you use a structured moderator questionnaire with a professional moderator facilitator and you attempt to figure out, okay, for the people that really love our case, Chick Fil A or BMW, or for the people who really love our brand, what is it about their brand they love.

What? And you also ask them, is there anything we could do to that you would love it even more.

Then the second group. You want to understand, well, why, what is it you love about that brand? And, and a lot of this conversation by the way, is disguised. You don't reveal your brand until later in the conversation.

So what is it you love about that restaurant or that alternative to product or service. You try to glean, okay, this is what they're doing that are potentially keeping me from attracting more customers. Third group, why aren't these people using my brand at all?

Because they don't never heard of us, something about it they don't like.

Whatever. So my, the answer to my question is if you want to figure out how to make your brand better, you got to talk to customers. And not just with quantitative data, but I think qualitative data is the most impactful way to figure out how to make your brand better.

And do you think. When I look at a brand, I see two sides of it. So I think of a bottle and inside the bottle is the liquid. That's us, that's we're creating, we're serving the customer. This is all of our ip. And then outside is the label and that's what the outside world gets to see. That's the marketing, the advertising and so forth. So is there a difference between those two sides of the brand in terms of the messaging?

It depends on what kind of, if you want a, if you want a very product focused brand, the trap you've got to get into is you'll probably, you'll probably market the functional features of that product.

Okay. You know, you gotta, you got a big V8 and the other guy does. I, I don't. But you got to focus on the, the, the functional attributes of the product.

Versus how that product helps you live better.

How that product makes you feel when you are using it, eating it, experiencing it.

And so for example, for us in the communications category.

With the cow campaign, we didn't show any product. We never showed product. All we tried to do was create awareness because we made somebody laugh and we, we tried to create a personality. If this is Chick Fil A, we wanted to make Chick Fil a brand. Oh, they're, they're fun. They don't take themselves too seriously.

And I got to go in there, I want to know, I want to know if they have as much fun in the restaurant as they do through that advertising. I see. But if I'm just showing them product or product attributes, it's too easy to look like everybody else.

So we avoided anything in the traditional marketing communications area that you could swap the logo and put, put McDonald's or Burger King or Wendy's on it and it would, you wouldn't know the difference. Well, you can't do that. You. I don't have them handy here. I'm sitting in my office, I got cows everywhere in here. You can't do that with a bunch of cows telling eat more chicken. You can't slap Wendy's on that. You can't slap McDonald's on that. It's Chick Fil a. It's ours.

So I think that's the real point about creating an iconic brand. What can you, what can you add to the brand onion? What's. Well, it's product related, communications related, interaction, service or what can you add to the, the, to the brand Onion? A layer. What can you add to the brand that every time you do it, you've added something the other guys can't do?

They can't do the cows they don't have, they can't make fresh food in every restaurant. They can't. Nor are they willing to stand out in the rain and the heat and the cold and actually talk to you and take your order. They are not carrying orders to the tables. They're not cleaning tables, they're not carrying orders to cars. They'll never think about doing it.

That take Chick Fil A out of it. The theme there is what can we do that the other guys will not do in many cases? Because they can't. Yeah, if we can, then we ought to. We ought to do it and we ought to figure out how to make money at it, but we ought to do it now. When we rolled out the hospitality model about all this stuff we do in the restaurants and the drive through and we started catering delivery way ahead of everybody else in our industry.

It took seven years to convince the bean counters that we would actually make more money than doing it like everybody else.

And you significantly made a lot more money, right?

A lot more money. And by the time we got into about year six of the tests where we had about 200, we had about 200 stores, not mall, 200 stores running the hospitality model. And the whole goal was, okay, how are they going to perform versus the rest of the chain who's not running that model? Their average same store sales growth was double everybody else huge. Interestingly, when we rolled it out chain wide and we could put standardized training, messaging technology, everything behind it, that number grew to double digit same store sales growth across the chain.

That's incredible.

That's unheard of in the fast food business. And when I left Chick fil A in 2016, we were in our second year, double digit, same source store sales increase, same store sales increase, not counting new ones. And they had a five year run of double digit same store sales increase. And it was principally because of cow campaign, the hospitality Model the personal interaction with guests and the digital model. Digital interaction system that was totally different. More personal, more easy to use, more efficient.

Than anybody else. So don't hear me rambling. If you want an iconic brand, figure out what you can do that nobody else is willing to do.

And then figure out how you price it to make money. But if you do it and you do it well, people will pay for it.

I love that. Such good advice. And for.

No matter what, I'm. I've been. I'm. I'm in. I don't mind confessing, I've been driving BMWs for 25 years. Yeah. Now why?

A lot of reasons. Mechanically, I trust them. I love the way they feel on the road. They deliver on their brand promise. They deliver on personal interaction. Personal service in their dealerships and their dealership service model is consistent from dealer to dealer. Yeah. Oh, that's all Chick Fil A's tried to do in our restaurants.

So this is applicable across any sector?

Absolutely, absolutely.

And if someone wants to go a bit deeper, Steve, and learn a little bit more, they can grab your book. And I'm going to put a link in the show notes to the book. So tell me a little bit more about the book and what's in there.

Well, I wrote the book. Took me a couple years to write it after I left, after I retired. And James, primary reason at the time I wrote it was I was concerned that Chick Fil A was growing so fast. They're hiring. They were recruiting so many new operators to run restaurants and so many new staff members. How are they going to maintain their, maintain their culture and their focus around their purpose, around their values, around the brand excellence of where good meets gracious. And. And there was no biography of the brand. There was a biography of the founder, but there was no biography of the brand. The brand history.

And the philosophy around. How did Chick Fil A go from a chicken sandwich in a. In a diner and then in a mall to become the iconic brand it is today? And so I had the benefit of being in that jury in the midst of that journey for 35 years. So I asked the CEO Truett's son who'd succeeded him, do you mind if I take a shot at writing a brand biography? And I'm going to tell Truth's biography, the brand biography, and I'm going to have mine in there too. He said, absolutely. So when I set out to write the book, I had it. I intentionally wrote it with Chick Fil A in mind. Their, their own people.

My gosh I mean I left there was about.

Gosh, roughly 2200 people on staff.

There's now almost 4000. Wow. When I left there was around 2100 stores. There's now about over 2, 800 stores. I mean that and sales wise they've, they've grown from when I left. Seven billion. Last year they did 20 billion.

Incredible.

Yeah. They're not missing me, are they?

So. But the point, the point I wrote the book with primarily all this, this new talent coming into the business. How do they maintain the core fundamentals of why we exist, what's really important and what kind of brand are we trying to be? That's, that's the top three things that I unpack the book. Why do we exist? What's the most important things? We're not going to compromise on values. And what kind of brand are we trying to be? Brand? Well, after I wrote it and we got it published, it had legs in the marketplace.

And I haven't, it's not out of date because it's a, it's, it's a built, the built brand is built around the culture of the business.

The brand essence of the business, the operational model that makes it work. And what, what is the role in marketing in building an iconic brand?

This is timeless. What you told me there is timeless. So in 50 years time, the same concept. Yeah. And that's great because I think people can go, oh, but marketing has changed so much. Yeah, maybe some of the gadgets and the flashy things out here have changed, but actually the core concepts, nothing has changed.

That's right. The core, the core concept.

For me, the core concept, the core purpose of marketing is to make an organization customer centric.

Yeah.

Customers king. Now the bigger you get, the harder it is to do that. Which means you have to be diligent, passionate.

Systematic about listening to customers. And you got to scale that up with growth. I mean Chick Fil A's got data. They got customer data on every, every restaurant, every rolled up every month, every quarter, chain wide brand measurements as well. And they got in store measurements on the experience.

The food up to standard, hospitality standard, etc. They're listening to customers and they can, they can look at it macro or they can look at an individual operator in his or her restaurant and say, hey, you're delivering on the brand promise or you're not.

You'Re creating tens equal to or at the same rate as the rest of the chain or you're not. And if you're not, and that goes on for an extended Period of time. The risk is you lose your restaurant.

Because if you don't have a consistent brand, I don't know if you make. I don't care if you're making Nike shoes or running a Chick Fil a restaurant, if you're not consistent, you'll never have a great brand. And I thought I illustrated that with BMW. You must. The car must be consistent and the customer experience at the dealers must be consistent.

So at the core of my career.

Was what I brought into the business. What Truitt had, what he had established was clarity around why they exist. What's really important, what I brought into the business was customer listening first. It's really. No matter what true things about a menu item or, you know, about an advertising message, what's really important was customers think about a potential menu. What do they think about an ad? What do they think? Not only generically eat more chicken. Why do they care about every individual ad? We ultimately put in. Put on. Put on the air. We were, we were showing them to customers before they went on the air. Now, for us, it was really simple. If one, it didn't make them laugh, we're not going to air it. And two, if it didn't make them think, yeah, that's exactly who Chick Fil A is. That. That's consistent with Chick Fil A.

And the product should be cons. The menu should be consistent with Chick Fil A, where good meets gracious.

And I like how simple that is. And you can really judge every aspect of that. We're good meats.

Gracious, that's exactly right. Incredible. So, but you can't focus like that if you don't have great customer insights, no matter how, no matter how large or small you are.

Yeah. Such great input. I think anyone listening today, whether they're from a hospitality background, fast food, they're in tech, they're in whatever industry, these principles apply right across. So I want to say a huge thank you for actually taking the time to jump into them. And I want to ask you one last question before we do wrap up. And if we were to fast forward many years into the future and you knew that it was your last day here on earth, and a very young person came up to you and said, steve, how do I lead my life on purpose? What would you say to them?

Figure out how you can give your life away to others.

How can you invest in others? And you asked me, well, where do you get that? That's what Christ did. I mean, I, I am a, I am a follower of Christ. And when you really study his life here on earth. Now, granted, he's God, but he was also man for 33 years here on earth. His entire life was focused on everybody else.

And, and what kind of. What happened? What kind of followship did he have?

What kind of leader did he become? Now, yes, he was God, but he was also man. And his. His pattern of developing fellowship was to serve. Now, ultimately all the way to the cross, but every aspect of what you see in scripture, it was to serve others. And I'm. I'm not trying to blow smoke. I think the greatest thing anyone can do is figure out in my giftedness and my career passion how can I serve others. So you say, well, what. What did that look like at Chick Fil A? I tried to hire great people just like true did our great people, competent, great chemistry, great character, and let them go. And my job was to equip them with resources they needed money and other talent, their talent and other talent and let them do their thing. And people create an environment where people can thrive and they can discover who they really are. Not just at work for work, but what is their natural giftedness. What. What makes them excited about getting up in the morning. And give them giving an environment where they can discover what's really important in life and how they can serve other people.

Well, thank you so much for sharing.

The greatest leaders serve others.

I agree. Servant leadership is just. Yeah, it's what stands above the rest.

Yeah. Yeah.

100. Well, Steve, thank you so much for taking the time. Excited for.

It's a treat to meet you from my hometown for at least for a year. Awesome.

It was great to come back for a visit.

I do. I do. All right. It was a pleasure.

Hey, thank you so much.

Hey guys.

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