At fourteen years of age, I started working my first official professional job at Chick-Fil-a. The Chick-Fil-a restaurant where I worked at was located in Magnolia, Texas in which I accumulated a total of six years of employment before transitioning and beginning my Texas A&M education. During my experience with the company, my positions advanced from being a team member at fourteen years old, too team leader (manager) at the age of sixteen and when I started Lone Star Community College I was promoted to the nighttime supervisor at the age of eighteen. Throughout my time with the company, I was also blessed to have opportunities in taking part in grand openings for new Chick-Fil-a restaurant locations in the states of New York, North Carolina, and I was also hired to work major marketing events in Houston, Texas like the Rodeos, and the Final Four College Basketball game.
The years I spent being employed with Chick-Fil-a taught me many valuable lessons in life about how to interact with customers in a professional manner, managing other team members, the importance of the entire restaurant working together as a team, and developing creative and innovative game plans for keeping the restaurant members motivated for working at Chick-Fil-a everyday. Furthermore, I will be discussing in specific detail about the interesting and creative ways on how and why Chick-Fil-a operates has one of the most successful fast-food companies in the United States, and my personal times of implementing new changes while working with the company.
First off, discussing about Chick-Fil-a’s history and culture is very important because it sets the heart and foundation for the entire company. The first restaurant opened in the year of 1946 located in Hapeville, Georgia by the originally founders Truett Cathy and his brother Ben Cathy. The restaurant was named the, “Dwarf Grill” and immediately became an instant hit, everyone in Georgia wanted to try the most famous “Original Chicken Sandwich”! Business was booming for the Cathy brothers and future plans started to develop moving forward for more locations.
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The Cathy brothers wanted to make sure that no matter how large the company would grow, the engraved Christian values will always be demonstrated throughout the entire company and at every single Chick-Fil-a restaurant location. Over the years, the mission the founders originally started was successfully being exemplified at every single Chick-Fil-a restaurant around the country with Chick-Fil-a’s core purpose,” To glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us and to have a positive influence on all who come in contact with Chick-fil-A.” and the core purpose was surely being fulfilled. Chick-Fil-a restaurants were in almost every single state in the U.S. by the year of 2000 and Americans were very fascinated by the company’s amazing customer service and great quality chicken products!
Chick-Fil-a wanted to also make it known to the entire world that they will always be closed on Sunday and that God will always come first before the business. Currently today, the company has over 2,300 restaurant locations around the country and every single year there’s approximately one hundred new locations being constructed. Other major fast food companies have way more store locations than Chick-fil-a like for instance, McDonalds, Jack in the Box, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken…etc. The major difference is that Chick-Fil-a restaurants produce more sales than their competitor restaurants by a huge significant amount.
According to an article posted by Readers Digest, “To be in the fast-food chain making the most money per store, you’ll have to eat mor chikin. That’s right: Chick-fil-A stores are the highest earners in the industry. With only about 2,225 stores around the country making a $9 billion total, each one rakes in $4.1 million in a year. That’s a lot of chicken! And that’s even more impressive when you consider the fact that the chain is closed on Sundays.”! Before the building and construction of a Chick-Fil-a restaurant begins, the board members of the company determine the city’s population and calculate any other factors that can contribute to building a new location.
The main purpose is making sure a new Chick-Fil-a location will not steal business from any other existing Chick-Fil-a restaurants! Not only from a profit stand point, Chick-Fil-a restaurants are different from their competitors by having major roles within their communities, providing scholarship funds to all team members who have invested more than two thousand work hours with the company and for their major saying “My Pleasure”! With the entire company being debt free, it’s very obvious that Chick-Fil-a’s methods and strategies have been demonstrated through the company’s success and deeply engraved Christian values.
Through my personal experience working at a Chick-Fil-a restaurant for six years and having multiple roles, I have most certainly been pushed beyond my area of expertise of being creative. When I was promoted from manager to night time supervisor, I had big shoes to fulfill when replacing the old night time supervisor that everyone in the restaurant highly loved. I was eighteen years old replacing a twenty-eight year old individual who was far more older than me and by far more experienced! Things were getting far more advanced with more responsibilities and being in charge of people who were older than me. Underneath my position were the team managers, team trainers, and team members and my duty was to be in charge of leading the night time staff.
During the first couple of months of my new position, my new responsibilities consisted of scheduling the staff, controlling the finances, ordering new products from corporate, developing weekly game plan reports for the managers, and making sure the restaurant was being effectively closed according to my bosses’ standards. But, moving into this new position was not easy, there were many individuals that despised me because of my young age and thinking that I wasn’t unworthy for the new job title. Moving forward I decided to be very creative into fixing the areas the restaurant was extremely lacking in.
In order to develop solutions, I realized the problems must be identified. Looking at the structure of the restaurant, the entire staff was divided into two different teams which was the morning team and night team. They entire staff was having issues about communicating to one another about shift covers, members were lacking in developing connections with other members who worked different times throughout the day, and there were many employees who possessed little knowledge on working in all the service positions in the restaurant like front counter register, drive-thru register, bagging skills, food runner…etc. After concluding all the issues in the areas the store was failing to improve in, I then proceeded to create new innovative strategies that would be the solutions to resolving these problems.
First, I developed a monthly meeting plan where I would take ten minutes to meet with each team member individually once a month and discuss about the individuals work schedule and what times the employee can work during each week in the entire month. The purpose of the meeting was for me and the member to build a further connection, the conversation can result in the employee explaining to me about how many hours they need, what hours they cannot be scheduled …etc. After gathering this information about all employees desired scheduled times, I was able to execute in creating more effective work week schedules for the store.
Second, I installed new game plans that would allow employees to work all the positions throughout the store. For instance, this new system would allow a member to be fluctuated around the restaurant every new shift, if a team member worked a front counter register shift, then there next assigned shift would be at a different completely different position. This process would not only allow members to work at different positions but to give employees a chance to experience different working stations in the restaurant. The more employees we have that know how to work all positions in the store, the more versatile the restaurant will be.
Third, I also developed a new schedule system that would design all team members to have the opportunity to work morning, lunch, and night time shifts. I personally believed it’s extremely important for all members to have different schedules throughout the week. Previously, it mainly use to be the same members working the same exact shifts every week, and this was a huge negative impact because only morning team members were able to switch their shifts with other morning members vice versa for the night time members, this made shift covering almost impossible. When I implemented this change this allowed all team members to switch shifts that were scheduled any times throughout the day.
All relationships had improved throughout the entire restaurant and communication between the morning members and night time members were outstanding! All of these new rules and procedures that I created was to not only allow the members of store to understated that I was the new supervisor in charge, but to help fix areas the restaurant was lacking in. In result, it created a flexible work environment for all members and also improved many relationships in store.
Chick-Fil-a is the most brilliant and innovative company in the fast food industry. How their restaurants are designed, constructed, organized, and operated all tie into the company’s architectural techniques of staying consistently dominant in the fast food industry! In other words, other competitors don’t care as much about their global picture like Chick-Fil-a does. Chick-Fil-a values many other areas that other fast food chains extremely lack in.
For instance, food safety is always a huge concern for the business, there are weekly inspectors that come every other week to analyze and examine any hazards that are presentable inside and outside the restaurant. Having good safety rating scores make customers feel like they’re eating in an actual restaurant instead of a fast food store, and Chick-Fil-a does a phenomenal job of having clean restaurants. Just from working at Chick-Fil-a, anyone in any position has a duty of making sure the restaurant is consistently clean on a day-to-day basis!
Chick-fil-a is big on their marketing and advertising strategies. The company is known for selling the best chicken products in the nation! Their famous slogan is, “Eat More Chicken” because they want the general public not to always eat beef and to protest by saving the lives of cows. In fact, that’s the reason why Chick-Fil-a’s mascot is cow! This marketing technique steals business and customers away from their competitors. With thinking in strategic ways and thinking outside the box, Chick-Fil-a made it easy for customers to distinguish why they are different from other fast food companies.
In conclusion, from being a primary source of working within the company and gaining knowledge from Chick-Fil-a’s history and current direction, the company is on a bright future path to staying successful and continuing to excel in being the most creative fast food company. I personally believe if the company continues to stay with the same mission, they will always be the most successful and profitably fast food Company in the industry! Today, no other fast food restaurant comes even close to competing with Chick-Fil-a’s dominant success.
For the past fifty years Chick-Fil-a has always provided such an amazing environment for local families to enjoy breakfast, lunch and dinner meals. With their customer service always being executed well efficiently, raving fans will continue to go back to eat at Chick-Fil-a because they know they will be treated with care and love at the restaurant! Chick-Fil-a in my heart, will always be dominant in finding ways to be creative and innovative in being one of the best known companies in the fast food industry.
Work Cited
- Douglas R. Satterfield. The Leader Maker. 5 March 2014. .
- Coleman Wood. The Chicken Wire . 5 May 2017. .
- Jeff. Debt-Free Doctor . n.d. .
- Marissa Laliberte. Readers Digest. n.d. .
- Sean Ward. The Chicken Wire . 28 October 2016. .
