Find a better course
Davis wasted no time bemoaning the situation at hand when
he accepted the top post of the underperforming restaurant
and food product chain. He knew decisive action was needed
and that he couldn’t turn around the company alone. So he set
out to meet the crew.
“In my first six months on the job, I hit about 100 restaurants,” he
says. “In the first nine months, I visited all of our plants.
“I had to be visible. I talked with managers and asked them
three questions: What do you like about working at Bob
Evans? Where can we improve? And what would you do if you
were me?”
He got some interesting answers.
“I heard everything from new product ideas to how we
should control our development, to wanting to better understand how to track our business, to what kind of Christmas
party we should have,” Davis says. “Everybody has different
points of emphasis. But it created an environment of really listening to the people closest to the action.”
It also helped him lay the groundwork for some sweeping
changes.
First came a change in management compensation.
“You have to be tough-minded about performance and link
your pay to clear metrics that are a stretch for the organization
but are still achievable,” Davis says. “It’s a simple principle:
Things get better; people make more money.”
Davis started by linking officer compensation to specific company
goals and used a cascade process to bring the system to other levels,
including restaurant and plant managers. Individuals eligible for performance-based pay are measured against each metric twice annually — once at a six-month check-in to see how they’re progressing toward each goal, and once to determine if they’ve met each
goal and, thus, qualify for the incentive pay.
“It’s almost like taking the SAT: Here’s the metric; here’s your
score,” Davis says. “That makes it relatively easy to say, ‘Here’s
where I did well, here’s where I didn’t do well and here’s where
I have to do better.’”
Performance metrics are linked directly to the other big change
that Davis instituted in his first few months on the job.
“Within the first 30 days, I said, ‘We don’t have a strategic
architecture,’ so I took that very seriously, and we crafted our
BEST Brand Builders,” Davis says.
The acronym BEST stands for Bob Evans Special Touch, but
essentially, the brand builders are a five-pronged strategy for
rebuilding Bob Evans.
“I’ve worked in large businesses and small businesses and
having clarity of purpose and vision is essential,” Davis says.
“It’s the leader’s job to articulate the vision, but we also have to
say how we’re going to get there. That’s where the Brand
Builders come into play.”
They are:
- Win together as a team.
- Consistently drive sales growth.
- Improve margins with an eye on
customer satisfaction. - Be the BEST at operations
execution. - Increase returns on invested
capital.
“It’s hard to argue that these aren’t things you need to do to
build a business,” Davis says. “They’re very clear measures.
And each of the five Brand Builders are tied to incentive pay. I
think everybody bought in to it. It gave us a road map to follow.”