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Hello and welcome to the Tony Robbins podcast.
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It s Mary B to personally welcome you to this episode because this one is about the hospitality industry.
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Hey, did you know that Chick-fil-A was voted America s favorite restaurant in customer satisfaction ahead of chains including Starbucks, Dunkin , Five Guys, Chipotle, Panera, Jimmy John s, Domino s, and all the rest for the eighth straight year.
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It s incredible, I know.
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So what s their secret to raving fans?
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Well, you re about to hear a conversation that was recorded at last year s Business Mastery between Tony and Dan Cathy, the chairman of Chick-fil-A, and he ll explain their recipe for success.
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Now, before we jump into it, I just want you guys to know that this year s Business Mastery is coming up.
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So if you are interested in taking your business to the next level with Tony himself to help you,
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Please come join us.
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We d absolutely love to see you at Business Mastery 2023.
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The dates are August 15th through 20th.
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So come get down to business with us.
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You can come in person here in beautiful Palm Beach, or if you prefer, you can attend right from the comforts of your own home through Zoom.
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For you, our brilliant and beautiful podcast listeners, just go to TonyRobbins.com forward slash business podcast to get your ticket.
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I can t wait to see you there this summer.
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Okay, here s Tony.
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If you just keep on walking beyond what people expect of you, every step that you take beyond what people expect, you build tremendous loyalty.
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But it s also transforming for our life.
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We re now going to bring out a second extraordinary entrepreneur.
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And this entrepreneur grew up in the business indirectly.
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I think at nine years old, he was exposed.
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And he is the chairman of a little company called Chick-fil-A.
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Dan Cathy, ladies and gentlemen, chairman of the board of Chick-fil-A.
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Dan, I mean, your family and what you ve built as a family, I think you re the third largest, is that right, fast food chain in the United States?
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Behind McDonald s and Starbucks, but we may eclipse Starbucks in the next 24 months, so stay tuned.
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Wow, that s amazing.
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And your individual units, as I understand, actually produce almost 50% more than McDonald s does.
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It s more than that, but we won t mention that exact number.
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But our advantage is that we re only operating six days a week.
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I know, we want to talk about that.
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Versus they re seven days a week.
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So we think that s a tremendous competitive advantage.
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Tremendous advantage by giving up a day a week.
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I love it.
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So let s talk a little bit about the history.
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I mean, your father, too, is an extraordinary human being.
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Obviously lived to 93.
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He opened that first location, the Dwarf, it was called the Dwarf?
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Dwarf Grill.
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Dwarf Grill.
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Why d they call it the Dwarf Grill?
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It was like 1946 or 47?
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Well, it was a tiny little place, so he s called it a Dwarf Grill, you know.
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Okay.
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But we were in South Atlanta.
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He bought this little property, but he bought the property with the idea of building a restaurant on it, he and his brother, but didn t know that you had to have it zoned for commercial use.
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Oh.
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So that s important when you re trying to get building permits.
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So he had to go back and kind of figure that out as it went along.
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But we had 10 stools at the counter, had four tables of chairs, had a cigarette machine on one end and a jukebox machine on the other.
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So a jukebox machine is this thing that plays records and so forth.
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Kind of like an MP3 player.
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I have to explain that to people.
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That s awesome.
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But it was at this little family restaurant that my mother was a waitress there at the restaurant.
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It s a family business.
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I mean, talking about mom and pop, it was my pop and my mom that were running this place.
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And I saw my dad s commitment to this little business and commitment to customers.
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He was behind the counter flipping hamburgers and scrambling eggs.
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This is before Chick-fil-A came along in the early 60s.
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So tell us a little bit about the values that you learned and tell us a little about the invention of the chicken sandwich and how that changed to Chick-fil-A.
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Well, one great value lesson, life lesson is that for my mom and dad is that we don t have to be a victim of the circumstances that we grew up in.
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My mom and dad came from very dysfunctional families.
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My mom s father abandoned her and her mother when she was just an infant.
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On my father s side,
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He had to live through the Great Depression, 1928, 1930s, and he was sold real estate and insurance, and he was very, very discouraged because he couldn t provide for his family as the breadwinner of the family.
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And so they moved to the first federally funded housing project in the nation known as the Techwood Home Apartments.
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My grandfather was very discouraged and very embittered.
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In fact, my dad says he can never remember his father ever telling him that he loved him.
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And fortunately for my brother, my sister, that pendulum swung back the other way.
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And they decided as they were married, married for 68 years, that they were gonna have a very different model.
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And I was the beneficiary of some really godly mom and dad.
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I mean, it was a godly Christian home.
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It s beautiful, really beautiful.
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My dad always said the most important decisions that you make in life, and he taught Sunday school for 43 years to young teenage boys, he said the three most important decisions you like, start with the letter M. Who your master in life is going to be, who your mate in life is going to be, and what your mission in life is going to be.
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Beautiful.
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Master, mate, and mission.
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You make those three decisions, right brother?
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You got the rest of it that s going to be made.
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I was so fortunate to be taught that, but to also see it modeled out in the way in which dad operated that little family restaurant and the way they treated the staff.
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It s beautiful.
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Now, what was your second question?
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Second question was how the invention of Chick-fil-A came because he created the first chicken sandwich, boneless chicken sandwich.
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Yes.
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How did that come about?
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We were a diner operation, short order, breakfast, lunch in there, 24 hours a day, six days a week.
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And so the chicken sandwich came along because he wanted to serve chicken.
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But when you serve chicken with bones in it, it takes a lot longer to cook.
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It doesn t really fit in a food service, fast food, quick service restaurant environment.
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But he remembered how his mother used to sometimes debone chicken breast and how she would season it.
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She operated a boarding house and she would season it on Saturday night.
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to be served for lunch on Sunday.
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And when my dad is 25 years old, he operated that little restaurant for about 10 years before he started working on this little formulation.
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And he originally called it a chicken steak sandwich.
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We put it on our menu, the customers loved it, but realized you could not register the name chicken steak sandwich.
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You had to misspell it or do something different.
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And so he had this idea, why don t we call it Chick-fil-A,
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as in filet mignon, and deboned chicken breast are oftentimes referred to as the filet mignon of chicken.
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Ah, interesting.
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So chick, fill, and A was separated because it s grade A, you know, the best quality.
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And we paid an artist $75 to design that little C with the beak.
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It s the best $75 in marketing we ve ever done.
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That s awesome.
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I wish the people in McCann, our agency in New York, would send us $75 invoices, but that s a long way to go.
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But we opened up a little family restaurant.
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It worked really well.
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Dad also began to license other mom and pop restaurants to serve the product in the early 60s.
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But the real growth of our business really started in 1967 as we started opening up in shopping malls.
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Greenbrier Shopping Mall in 1967.
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They were like the shopping mall food courts, is that right?
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Well, they weren t even food courts at the time.
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In fact, there was very little food in the malls because the food was messy and on and on, but developers soon learned if you don t provide for food service in a shopping mall, people are going to leave and they might not come back.
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So food was really kind of a secondary kind of thing in malls, but it became such a big part of
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of the mall operation that began to design food courts back in the 70s and 80s.
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And then it was about 18 years later, if I remember correctly, that
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you opened the first real restaurant, not in a mall, right?
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Yeah, freestanding restaurant.
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The demauling of America was beginning to... Yes, I saw that coming.
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Yeah.
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What lessons did your father instill in terms of the customer?
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I don t know if... I m sorry, I didn t know if it was you or if I remember reading it was your father,
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that when someone says, thank you, for example, you say, my pleasure.
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Yes.
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And you know what, that whole focus of this level of a relationship, you both have that in common, like really creating a relationship with the customer.
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Tell me what some of the values are that he instills in you and the rest of the family around how you serve people.
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One of the most memorable experiences I had as a teenager was going on the roof of our little dwarf house restaurant.
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as my dad had to deal with our night manager who was drinking beer and alcohol during the middle of the night and throwing his beer cans up on the roof of our restaurant.
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Now you ask about customer service, but customer service in front of the counter is a reflection of how you re dealing with people behind the counter.
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If you want to improve external service quality, then you got to up your game on internal service quality.
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We walked up on the top of that roof, and my dad was heartbroken to see beer cans all over the top of that roof where Charlie Sealock, our NAP manager, was heaving those cans up.
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I d known Charlie all my life.
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He was like an uncle to me.
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And I just knew that s going to be it for Charlie Sealock.
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I mean, drinking on the job, I mean, if you had to come up with a reason to terminate somebody, he fully qualified for that.
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But as we re coming down the steps of that ladder, to see my dad in the weeks to come to have conversations with Charlie Sealock, and rather than fire Charlie, he helped him get into an Alcoholics Anonymous program.
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And he had compassion, and he extended grace.
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And as I think about the attributes of leadership, because the question was about customer service, but the genesis of all this
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in my view, is that once we as individuals have experienced forgiveness in our own life, it becomes a lot easier to extend grace toward other people.
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And say, if I can help this person get through this crisis in their life, there s tremendous loyalty
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that can come from that.
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They ll never leave you.
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Once you ve extended grace to somebody like that.
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But it s also the ripple of all the other folks that got, they knew Charlie was drinking on the job as well.
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They knew Dad had every reason to fire him.
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And so these kinds of, the ways of dealing with people behind the counter, with grace and kindness and consistency based on how I think our Heavenly Father has dealt with us and we ve experienced that personal relationship, begins to dramatically affect how
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other people are being treated.
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It ripples throughout the whole organization now.
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So we re more known for our customer service based on some of those principles.
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We also did an extreme service makeover 20 years ago where we wanted to dramatically distinguish ourself with our customers.
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And we built it on a scripture verse, Matthew chapter five, verse 41.
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Jesus said, if one of those stinky Roman soldiers ask you to carry something for one mile and you get to the one mile marker,
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I want you to keep on walking.
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And if you ll just keep on walking beyond what people expect of you, every step that you take beyond what people expect, you build tremendous loyalty.
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But it s also transforming for our life.
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To your own character, to your own view of yourself.
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Because he who refreshes others will themselves be refreshed.
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So I could go on and on about that.
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I wear these crazy little hats sometimes on the side of the hat.
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be a blessing underneath that says, and you will be blessed.
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Cause I think that s really the formula to life.
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That business to me is a spiritual game.
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It s how do I do more for others than anybody else in the industry?
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And that s what every great religion, I m personally Christian as well, but every great religion has some theme like love thy neighbor like thyself.
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It s like it s the essence of what humanity needs, that s what our spirit needs.
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And so when you practice that in your business, your business grows.
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You ve got 130,000 employees, I think, is that what I read?
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It s about twice that, actually, that are wearing this Chick-fil-A name tag.
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You have a quarter of a million employees?
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Yes, but it s a lot of teenagers.
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We print a lot of W-2s.
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You know, we have a very high retention rate, however.
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Our retention rate is 3x better than our competition.
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And because they stay with us, we re able to teach them civility and kindness and graciousness.
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I d like to tell you, any of the folks that are watching today, if you ve got any sons or daughters and you want us to teach them how to be respectful and say, yes ma am and no ma am and it s my pleasure, then you need to send them to Chick-fil-A.
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We re like a junior cotillion for food service.
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Because there s a lot of heathen barbaric teenagers out there that need to hear.
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Heathen barbarian teenagers.
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Well, tell me though.
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It s shocking to customers though to hear, you know, a teenager be respectful.
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They ve never seen that.
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And attentive and connected.
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Oh, yeah, yeah.
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It makes the food taste better.
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Ben Franklin said that handshake of the host affects the taste of the roast.
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And it works with chicken sandwiches too.
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Psst, hey listeners, it s Mary B. You re about to hear Tony ask Dan to explain Chick-fil-A s X Factor, how they managed to trounce their competition even when they had to shut down their dining rooms.
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Two years ago, it was COVID threatening to annihilate businesses big and small.
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Now it s a looming recession, but one thing s for certain, business as usual just doesn t cut it anymore.
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The businesses that will survive the coming economic crises will be those that know how to step up and serve their clients in new and effective ways.
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That s why attending Business Mastery is a must.
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When you join us, Tony Robbins himself and our team of niche business experts will train you in the seven critical forces of business that you need to master if you want to thrive no matter what happens out there.
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So what are you waiting for?
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Come join us this summer, August 15th through 20th, to get the tools and strategies for 30 to 130% growth in your business guaranteed.
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Just for you, our podcast listeners, go to tonyrobbins.com forward slash business podcast to secure your ticket today.
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I ll see you soon.
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I can t wait.
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Now back to Tony and Dan.
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With a quarter of a million employees and you have, are there 2,700 locations or 3,000 now?
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You got some old, it s about 3,000 now.
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3,000.
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Okay, good.
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There was one just opened around the corner for me this last week on Lantana down here.
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And I couldn t believe how fast it was built, but then the very first day there were lines all around.
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So I want to ask you two questions.
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First, tell me how you recruit those people because to have that kind of culture, yes, you got to train it, but well, that s a, that,
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I read that you guys work hard at making sure you get the right kind of person to come join you in the first place.
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And you have a very unique setup in terms of, let s take it one at a time.
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How do you recruit the people?
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And then secondly, you have a different philosophy.
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This is not something like McDonald s where people might buy five of them as an investment.
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You really work to select people and you still own the real estate.
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So tell me two things.
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First, how do you recruit?
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How do you train?
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How do you know somebody s right?
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especially when you have an organization as big as it is, how have you leveraged that?
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What s the process?
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Or what are some of the thoughts or questions?
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And then two, tell us a bit about how you re different in your setup of the leader of that organization, as opposed to most of the franchises.
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Well, I think for all of us, as Peter Drucker said, it s not about the what.
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It s all about the who.
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That s right.
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And when we can make good decisions about the who that represents our values, that s an extension of our own personality, whatever that may be.
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It s so very important.
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When we select our restaurant operators, we typically think of what we call the three C s.
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We think about their competence, their business acumen, their competence and their character.
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and the chemistry, their passion, their enthusiasm.
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And in order to go through that process, we spend a lot of time with people.
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This past year we had 127,000 people that made application to be on our
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corporate staff or to be a restaurant operator.
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And out of that, we selected about 110 to be restaurant operators and another 200 to be on our corporate staff.
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So you have to spend a lot of time with people to get to know that.
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We can cut that down to about 7,000.
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And then the cost per interviewee and going through that.
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So it s really hard to become a part of Chick-fil-A.
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Someone said that it s easier to get a job at the CIA than it is with CFA.
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And we try to live up to that.
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And we check things.
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We check grade point averages and all these other kinds of things.
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Even politicians are finding that it s important to be truthful on your resumes and so forth.
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And we do that.
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Gradually they re learning that.
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But we check that kind of thing.
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And if people are dishonest on simple things like grade point averages and that sort of thing,
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then there s a character issue there, and we ll just go into the next person, because we don t want to bring that into the organization.
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You ask about what we call the relationship we have with our operators, and as we think about what s our hedgehog, Jim Collins asks us, what s the one thing you do better than anybody else?
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Well, we could say it s the chicken sandwich, but we know internally that it s the relationship we have with our restaurant operators of entrepreneurship,
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being business by themselves, but for themselves, but not by themselves.
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And so our deal is the same today as it was when we opened our first mall location in 1967.
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So dad would build the location as we do today.
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We ll buy the land.
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Sometimes we do a ground lease.
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We ll build the location out and then we ll sign an operating agreement for an individual to operate that location.
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And of course, they have to operate it to our operating standards.
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We only require a $10,000 deposit, if you will.
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It s like a deposit on an apartment or something.
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If you leave Chick-fil-A after three years, that s completely refundable back to you.
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That s all they need to start?
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$10,000.
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Now, we re the capital partner.
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I get it.
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So by the time we buy the land, build the building, we ve got about $4 million in that investment to begin with.
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But our average restaurant sales volume is $9.2 million annually in sales.
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Wow.
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Our average operator income is right at $600,000 a year.
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That s net to them.
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Wow.
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About 25% of our operators have a second location.
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So you do the math.
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And if you do that math, you ll understand why we have a 98% retention rate among our restaurant operators.
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Man, that s beautiful.
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That s really awesome.
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The only way you can leave is you can die or retire.
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That s the only way you re going to want to leave Chick-fil-A.
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Well, tell me the, the process that you develop, you know, innovation, you know, Peter Drucker always said business is really two things, innovation and marketing, finding a better way to serve the customer and the marketing, getting them to want to do business with you, your innovation and the way you process people, both emotionally, the connection that s created.
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So it s not some squeaky little box, but also the volume.
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Like I drove by the one the other day, it s on my way here.
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It was closed today because it s Sunday, but literally there were,
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like three lanes of cars wrapped around, but they were going through so fast.
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What did you innovate in that area that s allowed you to process?
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Because, by the way, if you don t know it, Chick-fil-A has been selected, what, eight years in a row as the most loved restaurant by Americans.
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It s pretty wild.
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Give me a hand for that.
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It s pretty extraordinary, right?
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You re delivering this fresh, good food, but you re also doing it at a speed and with a connection.
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So what did you reinvent in that area that made this possible?
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Yes, we do a lot of simulations.
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We do a lot of testing, modeling, and on and on.
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So we take a very engineering approach to how we do innovation, both for our equipment, recipes, and other things that are going on.
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So the drive-through, this is a really good example.
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When COVID hit,
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We were about 60% dine-in, 40% going through the drive-thru.
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Now, today, we re approaching about 90% drive-thru, only 10% of that.
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People have changed that much still.
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10% business coming in that dining room.
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That dining room is a big footprint, you know, and we got a lot invested in that footprint.
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But being able to do the digitization, and all businesses have to be very conscious
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of the curb appeal, which is primarily the website, all the digital interface that goes on.
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We ve invested very heavily in that, thankfully, before we had to.
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And if there s anything I can encourage people that are listening to this program.
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You ve got to stay ahead of the curve.
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You ve got to anticipate where things are headed.
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It s that Wayne Gretzky, anticipate where the fuck is headed.
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My favorite quote on that comes from General Electric, comes from Jack Welch, the legendary CEO.
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And he said this, he said, when the rate of external change exceeds the rate of internal change, disaster is imminent.
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In other words, we can be changing the wallpaper and it got new colors on this and another.
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We re making change, but when the rate of that change is not consistent with how much the external change is going on, that little delta difference played out over time means that you re going to be the next Kodak.
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It means you re going to be the next BlackBerry.
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It means you re going to be the next Sears department store.
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You ve changed stuff, but you re oblivious to how Sam Walton was dramatically changing
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mass merchandising in the area of department stores and so forth.
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So we ve had to really anticipate where this is going.
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For me, I m a champion of change.
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I m a champion of innovation.
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I m a champion, personally, trying to do new things.
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That s why I ve got in training on my name tag.
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I didn t see that.
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I m still training.
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50 years of service in training.
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That s awesome.
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Give him a hand for that.
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That s awesome.
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So I m still in the classroom.
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I m still a trainee and I find that if you re a trainee, generally people
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or more patient with you when you re, I thought that was gonna work at home with my wife Rhonda.
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She said, uh-uh, you don t get away with that here at home.
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One of the conversations I had with Bernie Marcus, who s the co-founder of Home Depot.
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So I m standing at Home Depot with him, and he s telling me about all these displays he s got and so forth.
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He says, you know, I used to start my management meetings on Monday morning talking about all the mistakes I made the previous week.
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I was stunned by that.
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He said, I d start my Monday meetings talking about all the mistakes I ve made the previous week.
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And I never heard Jack Wilkes talk about that.
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A lot of other businesses talking about how to be transparent about mistakes that you re making.
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But it s brilliant because we re all making mistakes.
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And if we could just all learn from our mistakes and we get smarter over time, we get a lot of value for those mistakes if other people can profit from it.
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So, I m just a real proponent for us to be very transparent and very honest about mistakes and shortcomings that we ve got in life, knowing that people know that we re really trying to get better.
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We want to learn.
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We have an insatiable appetite of curiosity.
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And in my view, curiosity is the most essential
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I just finished reading Michael Dell s new book.
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He s got a kind of a second book that he just read.
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I just finished it last weekend.
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And at the very end of it, I mean, I think it s the last sentence, last paragraph, he talks about how essential it is for leaders to have an insatiable sense of curiosity about things.
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It drives us to travel, to ask questions, to interview people, and to be on this quest
2
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to be on a search, and businesses have to stay on that search, stay on that quest.
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And especially if you re a 76-year-old family business that s never had a year of sales less than the previous year, you start being on that quest.
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Pretty wild.
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Never had sales less than the previous year in 76 years.
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That s extraordinary.
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But you got to stay with it and keep it that way.
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That s constant, never-ending improvement.
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And you don t manage from Atlanta.
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I ve talked to several people.
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They said, this guy lives on the road.
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He s like at every opening, he s meeting customers.
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Tell us a little about your philosophy of why you do that.
3
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Yeah, well, I like the hospitality industry.
3
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by its very nature is a very hands-on, engaged, being involved, being involved with the team members, knowing about their issues that have got going on, going to funerals, going to big life events and things that are going on, and just being real and open and transparent and honest and accessible to people.
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And that personality begins to get throughout the whole organization.
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Many businesses and food service, as they get older, the founder s long gone,
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We forgot the founder s mentality.
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We get into a financial accounting, you know, kind of mindset.
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That s just the death of any business.
3
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Anytime the CFO takes over the food service business, sell your stock.
3
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If you re working with those employees, companies, update your resume because the end is near when the accountants take over.
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I don t know if we have any accountants here, but food service hospitality.
3
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You want to keep the accountants at bay, stay closed on Sunday, keep that fresh grease lemonade out there, be personal, stay engaged.
3
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I enjoy camping out with our customers.
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I camped out 150 nights with a sleeping bag and a tent.
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How does a wife feel about that?
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And I m still married.
3
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He s clearly still in training with this marriage.
3
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If I can make it to August, it ll be 50 years.
3
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Wow, congratulations.
3
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That s amazing.
3
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That s beautiful.
3
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Did you know that only 6% of the marriages make it to 50 years?
3
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Only 6%.
3
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But if we can hang in there, tenacity, commitment,
3
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you know, get to the hard parts and own it, own it, own it.
3
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Same principles that make us successful in business make us successful, right?
3
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But it sets up your children, you know, to have success.
3
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At least you ve done your part to model it.
3
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And part of that modeling is all so that you can get the next, second, third generation.
3
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Perhaps it can t be.
3
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John Maxwell, who s one of our
3
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Common Friends, I m sure, says that success is all about succession.
3
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And family businesses, if the ownership is not an option, I mean, if you re going to go from one generation to the next, their ownership responsibilities, they don t have a choice on that.
3
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Now, if they want to work in the business, they have a choice about that.
3
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I love what Steve Harvey said recently.
3
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I ve quoted it many times.
3
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He said, your career is what you re paid for, but your calling is what you re made for.
3
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And so our next generation kids have to deal with, is this a calling in your life?
3
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Do you feel that this is something that God is leading you to do?
3
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Because if you don t feel called to do this, then you just be a shareholder, but don t try to run the business or to influence the business.
3
SPEAKER_02
But we have 12 in generation three.
3
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They re married, most of them.
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They re making babies.
3
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and there s 38 in generation four.
3
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So we re having to stay really forward thinking on how we, the governance of a geometrically growing family that s also dealing with a geometrically growing business and keeping it connected.
3
SPEAKER_02
I want to tell you there s a lot of train wrecks that happen in family businesses.
3
SPEAKER_02
Only a third of the family-owned businesses make it to one generation to the next.
3
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So in my role now as chairman, I m spending as much time dealing with the governance
3
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and the cohesiveness and the mentoring and the grooming of the third and fourth generation as I do in serving of the board of the restaurant business itself.
3
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What s been for you, I like to ask all entrepreneurs, what have been one or two of the most challenging times in the business and how did you turn it around during those times?
3
SPEAKER_02
Back in 1982 was one of the real traumatic experiences of our life as a business.
3
SPEAKER_02
1982, we were dealing with inflation, but much more bigger inflation.
3
SPEAKER_02
And my dad had borrowed $10 million to continue to expand the business and shopping malls were growing rapidly at the time in 1980.
3
SPEAKER_02
And we moved into a brand new corporate office building that had about 100,000 square feet of space in it.
3
SPEAKER_02
interest rates went up over 20%.
3
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We re talking about interest rates now being 5, 6, 7, getting all, you know, flustered because of that.
3
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But inflation was, and it was a real financial crisis that we had going on.
3
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My dad was the only one that could put all the pieces together to understand, you know, what a dramatic crisis that we had that was going on.
3
SPEAKER_02
But we
3
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persevered through that, we got through it.
3
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My dad had my brother and sister and I in our home, he would, this is a real great thing for everybody here, I just encourage all of you, you re all, many of you are mom and dads, and you think, what does my six, seven, or eight year old got to do with our family business?
3
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But that s when you need to let them
3
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honor them by telling them what s going on with the business, the good and the bad.
3
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Including the challenges.
3
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Including the challenges.
3
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It s real.
3
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So they re prepared for the real world.
3
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They see how you work through that.
3
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Those issues in business, that transparency begins to build a business acumen and a business vocabulary in their mind.
3
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My dad would bring home sacks of cash.
3
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We d had no credit cards.
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And we d dump all that cash.
3
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And I was six or seven years old.
3
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I had to turn all the Lincoln faces the same way.
3
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And he d strap all this money together, a whole week s worth of sales, blow it out on mom and dad s bed.
3
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And we d count all that up, he d put straps around, he d deposit on Monday morning.
3
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And little invoices come through, carbon copies.
3
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carbon copies was these invoices that had these little things here.
3
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And so I put that on a clipboard.
3
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I thought it was so cool when my buddies came over, see these invoices, you know, in my bedroom, you know, from Bread Company and so forth.
3
SPEAKER_02
But you be intentional about sharing and building a business acumen, you know, by engaging our families.
3
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And then they have a model, not a model that s phony and fake, that everything goes perfectly all the time.
3
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Nothing s a straight line.
3
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I always say, there s no straight lines in nature.
3
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If there s a straight line, a human drew it, right?
3
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That s not how things grow in real life.
3
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That s beautiful.
3
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A couple more questions.
3
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You came up, your team, I don t know, somebody came up.
3
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I d love to know the history of eat more chicken, where you ve got cows telling everybody to eat more chicken.
3
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Very much like what you ve done here with using the humor, right, to make that happen.
3
SPEAKER_01
But it s been an incredible campaign.
3
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How did that come to be and how has that affected your business?
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, it s pretty strange.
3
SPEAKER_02
I sometimes get letters from school teachers that
3
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talk to me about the disservice to literacy in America by having these cows that are misspelling, you know, things all the time.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s how cows spell it.
3
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So I have a nice little letter that I sent back and I said, you know, thank you for reminding of this.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I m sure if these cows had been in your son s or your classroom, they would have known how to do better.
3
SPEAKER_02
And then we sent out copies of our ads, let the kids circle the misspelled words so we can make, you know, lemonade out of lemons and so forth.
3
SPEAKER_02
But it was developed by an agency in Dallas, Texas, the Richards Group, about 21 years ago.
3
SPEAKER_02
And these cows still don t know how to spell, but it s very refreshing.
3
SPEAKER_02
All these whimsical things that they come up with.
3
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So, Tony, I have to tell you, people ask me how I m going to keep this up.
3
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I tell them, we re going to continue to milk it till the cows come home.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s awesome.
3
SPEAKER_01
How did your, I understand you re an extraordinary wrestler in high school and college and you re in the hall of fame of wrestling from what I understand.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
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So I have my cauliflower ear over here.
3
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I m like talking to the right lady right beside you here.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
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Um, how did that discipline affect you in business?
3
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Did it, did it shape you?
3
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Well, I m so thankful for that.
3
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You know, I think academics are very important in high school and college and so forth, but also the character.
3
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developing things that we get through athletics.
3
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And I was so fortunate.
3
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Outside my dad, in my teenage years, my wrestling coach, Johnny Stallings, had more of an influence on my life than anybody else.
3
SPEAKER_02
In order to get his praise, man, you had to do something really heroic.
3
SPEAKER_02
And I learned a lot of personal discipline about physically taking care of myself that I still do today.
3
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I was running earlier today before I came over here to visit with you.
4
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And so there are four areas in life that I think are essential.
4
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Mentally, stay in a student.
4
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A teachable attitude, that quest, that curiosity.
4
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Emotionally, is to stay well balanced.
4
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A sense of hope and optimism.
4
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The Bible says, I ve got great plans for you, says the Lord.
4
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I know what I ve made you to be.
4
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And that idea of hope and optimism.
4
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Thirdly, take care of yourself physically.
4
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You know, our emotions are very tied to how much sleep that we get and how many Krispy Kreme donuts that we eat.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, all those sorts of things.
4
SPEAKER_01
So be a champion athletically so that you can be a champion, you know, mentally and so forth.
4
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And then fourthly is we ve got to take care of ourselves spiritually.
4
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And we have all faiths that are represented in Chick-fil-A, and we re always respectful of all that.
4
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You know, there needs to be a sense of serenity.
4
SPEAKER_01
There needs to be a sense of humility.
4
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There needs to be a sense of inadequacy in our life.
4
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So that we know there s room to grow.
4
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So we re humble.
4
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Yes.
4
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A sense of inadequacy.
4
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That seems strange to acknowledge that as a leader.
4
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But when we re transparent and we acknowledge that, people that are working with us, we say, well, you know, God promises us if we ll just acknowledge Him in all our ways,
4
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He ll direct our paths.
4
SPEAKER_01
So whether it s closed on Sunday or whatever way any of us can acknowledge our inadequacy and address the spiritual components of our life.
4
SPEAKER_00
How did that seventh day being free happen where you guys made that decision?
4
SPEAKER_00
I m sure you ve had tremendous number of people, fortunately you re not a public company, you re private, pushing on you to change that.
4
SPEAKER_00
but you ve outdone everybody, have seven days.
4
SPEAKER_00
You started at the top of our conversation with that.
4
SPEAKER_00
How much of a role does that play?
4
SPEAKER_00
Why is that important to you and to your employees?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, the genesis of it had nothing to do with any spirituality, per se.
4
SPEAKER_01
My dad grew up in a boarding house with his mom, and on Sunday, he had to wash dirty dishes, shuck corn, shell peas, and so forth in that little boarding house that he operated.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he hated to wash dirty dishes on Sunday.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was okay other days of the week, but Sunday afternoon, and everybody s out having a good time and so forth, and he made a commitment that as a kid, that if he ever got in the restaurant business, he was gonna be closed on Sunday, because he didn t like washing dirty dishes, and he figured nobody else enjoyed doing it either.
4
SPEAKER_01
So when he opened up in 1946 on the 23rd of May, it was on a Tuesday, so he and his brother were there.
4
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That brother and another brother were later tragically killed two years later in an airplane accident.
4
SPEAKER_01
So Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, they start looking at each other.
4
SPEAKER_01
We re gonna open up on Sunday or not.
4
SPEAKER_01
Sunday was not a big trading day, you know, in the 1940s.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so they decided to be closed on that first Sunday, and we ve been closed ever since.
4
SPEAKER_01
That wasn t a big deal until we got into the shopping malls.
4
SPEAKER_01
And even regional shopping malls were closed on Sunday back in the 60s and 70s.
4
SPEAKER_01
But in the 80s, they began to have extended hours for holiday shopping.
4
SPEAKER_01
begin to open up on Sunday.
4
SPEAKER_01
By then, we already had it in our lease that we were gonna be closed on Sunday.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we were challenged by a lot of developers that said, you know, we really want you to open up on Sunday and on and on and on, but we made the commitment.
4
SPEAKER_01
But it s so remarkable that, as we mentioned earlier, our volumes that we do are just extraordinary.
4
SPEAKER_01
But there is a practical application in that when you re closed on Sunday,
4
SPEAKER_01
it makes your food taste better on Monday.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, one, people had to go an entire 24 hours without eating your food, so they had to go on a little bit of scarcity, yeah, like Chula Visor, you know.
4
SPEAKER_01
So food tastes really good on Monday morning.
4
SPEAKER_01
But it gives our people a chance to rest.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, the grind of retail, the grind of 160 cars an hour coming through your drive-thru, I want to tell you, there s a lot of grind and burn and energy that takes to
4
SPEAKER_01
Keep that going on.
4
SPEAKER_01
Typical operators got, you know, over 120 employees per restaurant.
4
SPEAKER_01
In one time, they got 25 that are there.
4
SPEAKER_01
Somebody s not showing up.
4
SPEAKER_01
Somebody s got issues and all kind of things that are going on.
4
SPEAKER_01
So there s just a lot of, requires a tremendous amount of energy to operate at peak.
4
SPEAKER_01
performance, what our customers expect.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so to be able to relax them, Cindy, and not have to worry about somebody not showing up, not having to worry about equipment breaking down, not have to worry about IT, cybersecurity issues going on.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, you re just able just to rest.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can restore.
4
SPEAKER_01
physically and spiritually, hopefully, restoring your marriage, maybe have some fun with your kids.
4
SPEAKER_01
And seeing my dad just stretched out on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon watching a ball game, you know, just rest.
4
SPEAKER_01
Man, he went to sleep really quick on Sunday afternoons.
4
SPEAKER_01
I bet, the way he works.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but on Monday, he was ready to go.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s very cool.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I find it is a tremendous competitive advantage to shut it all down.
4
SPEAKER_01
because man, the energy and the restfulness that we can have on Monday improves Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, that little incremental difference.
4
SPEAKER_01
People ask me, how much money does it cost y all to be closed on Sunday?
4
SPEAKER_01
I said, man, if you really knew, the incremental service that we get and the sales that we get on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, more than makes up, dramatically more makes up the fact that we re closed on Sunday.
4
SPEAKER_01
And our competition hadn t figured that out, but I m telling you,
4
SPEAKER_01
That s the truth that s very measurable.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s brilliant.
4
SPEAKER_00
Let s give it a hand.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s absolutely brilliant.
4
SPEAKER_00
Beautiful and brilliant both.
4
SPEAKER_01
I m not that smart now.
4
SPEAKER_01
You say it s brilliant.
4
SPEAKER_01
That was my dad s decision, but I certainly brought into it and so has my
4
SPEAKER_01
our third generation as well.
4
SPEAKER_01
My brother and sister and I signed a covenant before our mom and dad passed away.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the rest of our lives, we re going to continue to be closed on Sunday, because we didn t want them to be any question about that going forward.
4
SPEAKER_00
I read that the red polo shirts that they wear are made out of plastic bottles.
4
SPEAKER_00
Is that true?
4
SPEAKER_00
Tell us about that.
4
SPEAKER_01
That is.
4
SPEAKER_01
So we do a lot.
4
SPEAKER_01
17 plastic bottles to make one shirt or something like that?
4
SPEAKER_01
All of us have to be very environmentally conscious.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s about nutrition, it s about waste removal, it s about responsible
4
SPEAKER_01
sources of supply, you know, coming up through the whole deal.
4
SPEAKER_01
And yes, I mean, we re doing a lot of solar powered restaurants now.
4
SPEAKER_01
I say a lot.
4
SPEAKER_01
We ve got three that are open up now in California.
4
SPEAKER_01
We re going to do more about that.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I think it s part of just being a responsible citizen of the community and including apparel as well, where we can recycle.
4
SPEAKER_01
We also collect a lot of foam cups and own and own.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it s a
4
SPEAKER_01
Big responsibility.
4
SPEAKER_01
How many bottles are actually saved a year just by... That s a good question.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t know that stat.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s a good one.
4
SPEAKER_01
I know that we re juicing an awful lot of lemons out in California.
4
SPEAKER_00
I read it was millions and millions of bottles because I think it s like, isn t it like 17 or 19 bottles makes one shirt?
4
SPEAKER_00
You ain t know more about that than I do.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
4
SPEAKER_00
What your family has done is extraordinary.
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It s not only given people healthier food and made it faster and quicker, but it s spread kindness, it s spread love, it s spread values that really are invaluable.
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And I think a company, you know, why do you form a company?
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A lot of people form it for their own financial independence, which is beautiful, but I think it s also a chance to engender values.
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You both have done that.
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And I think that s what gives the drive that keeps a generation or two to continue to go there.
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Because if it s just the economics, it gets to a point, as you well know, where the numbers don t really affect you anymore personally.
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It s really what, you know, where is the meaning?
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And you brought meaning to your family through your service, through these restaurants, and to so many of your employees.
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And that s why you re so beloved eight years in a row as a favorite restaurant.
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We all need to live purpose-driven lives.
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And I would just,
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close by saying that our corporate purpose is this, is to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that s entrusted to us and have a positive impact on all who come in contact with Chick-fil-A.
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We should all desire to live purpose-driven lives.
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It makes all the difference in the world.
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You re amazing.
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Thank you.
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You and your family, thank you for all you ve done.
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Let s hear it for Dan!
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The Tony Robbins Podcast is inspired and directed by Tony Robbins and his teachings.
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It s produced by us.
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Team Tony.
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Copyright Robbins Research International.