Last week, I met with a longtime client. He is a co-owner of a multiple franchised restaurants, and you’d instantly recognize the business name if I was of a mind to tell you. He’s such a good person that I agreed to meet with him in person at his office across town. (It was the first time I’ve worn long pants in more than two months).
On my drive back home, I remembered one of my favorite stories about their business and a constant reminder about how every employee – no matter who they are or what they do is so critical to success, and why being quick on the trigger to fire is better than the opposite (although lawyers and HR ‘professionals’ have been trying to brainwash us the other way for years).
Here’s the story.
In 2010, I was invited to speak to about 200 of their franchise owners at their annual franchisee meeting in Las Vegas.
I showed up early and watched a breakout session. Apparently there was one franchise owner who was renowned for being able to take over a low performing restaurant and turn it around almost immediately. Everyone wanted to know his secret.
He said, “I buy the restaurant, and the first thing I do is fire all of the employees and hire new ones.” It was that simple.
He put in employees who were better at customer service, who were trained how to upsell, who were better with people.
I’ve used that story in one of my books and many times when giving keynotes at conferences.
People are the one thing that takes most consumers from feeling transactional about our product, service, restaurant, to feeling transformed by our service, product, restaurant. People are the difference between going somewhere once and becoming lifelong customers.
As a leader, in this economy, you’re about to have your pick of many people grateful to have this experience and you shouldn’t settle for anything less than fantastic, transformative, passionate and enthusiastic about what you do and whom you do it for.
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