Growth Is Capability You Own, Not Sales You Buy: A Starbucks Example
Starbucks shouldn’t buy Chipotle, because buying another company’s sales is accumulation, and an operation only grows when it owns a capability it didn’t have and has a growth plan to put it to work.
Fund The Fix, Not The Month
Every operator borrows against tomorrow. The danger is borrowing without buying the fix. The funding order runs the leak first, bounded money against minor assets next, and the prime asset last, only for a fix the operation has already proven,...
Where’s The Plan? Part 2
The first signal that a restaurant is drifting never shows up on the report. By the time labor or food cost moves, the drift has been running for weeks through every quirk the cast saw and nobody passed up.
Where’s The Plan? Part 1
A forecast built off last year is a plan to hold last year. Read against one, the GM investing in growth looks like drift and the GM quietly losing the business passes every check. The fix is a growth plan...
Every Body You Throw At A Broken Shift Makes It That Much More Broken
Every body you throw at a broken shift makes it that much more broken. The shift didn't break for lack of hands. It broke because the production model was never designed for the volume, and a broken design leaves only...
He Will Wait For Anything He Understands
The drive-thru Customer will wait for anything he understands and forgive almost nothing he doesn't. The industry's main study times every second of the wait and never records whether anyone explained it.
Margin Is Built, Not Found
Margin is built, not found. It comes from processes that declare their own leaks where they happen and a price the Guest has a reason to pay that he cannot get anywhere else.
The Night Your Guest Started Keeping Score
Your Guest does not leave when the relationship runs out. He starts appraising you the moment he realizes the operation is withdrawing more than it deposits. That is Disearned Trust.
Every Input That Moves Your Margin Has An Owner
You can run a perfect read on a margin problem and hold nothing that changes it. Diagnosis and authority are separate assets. Nine inputs move unit margin, every operation has all nine, and the only variable is whose name is...
The Job That Has No Department
A vendor's ownership map of Burger King measured how often restaurant operators have a named operations executive: 11% at six to twenty units, 34% at twenty-one to fifty, 78% at fifty-one and up. They read it as a sales-motion change....
