Study the front lines
With his focus solely on the front lines, it didn’t take Puzder long
to see why Hardee’s was such a drain. Still an unknown to most
employees his first year, he regularly visited the order counter and
was met by a worker who basically started a staring contest.
“I may not have been a restaurant guy,” he says. “But I thought
they ought to say something like, ‘Welcome to Hardee’s; may I help
you?’”
So Puzder and a senior executive wrote a script that said just that
to help alleviate the rude reputation. A week after writing the
script, Puzder visited another Hardee’s and a staring contest
ensued. This time he politely introduced himself and asked the
now red-faced employee an important question.
“I asked her, ‘Do you know who the most important person in
this restaurant is?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, you.’ And I said, ‘No, it’s you
because all the millions of dollars we spend are to bring a person
to stand right here and look at you. And if you smile, Hardee’s
smiles; if you frown, Hardee’s frowns.’ You do that about 20 times,
and it really starts to catch on pretty quick.”
There is often a general indifference to basic business guidelines
at a stalled company, and Puzder quickly realized most Hardee’s
hadn’t touched up on the basic principles in years. He remembers
visiting store after store that had windows that were just too clean.
“There are french fries on the floor, people have food on their
shirts, the tables are dirty, but they’re always cleaning windows,” he says. “My theory was they were cleaning the windows so people could see how bad it was inside and wouldn’t
come in.”
Puzder laughs now, but when he looked into the problem he
found his restaurants all had an antiquated 4-inch thick how-to
cleaning manual covered in dust.
“I went to school for 19 years; I wasn’t going to read that,” he
says. “I had guys running this restaurant, I was lucky if they had
graduated from high school; they’re not going to read it.”
His remedy was a 10-page, 10-point book that simplified cleaning so there would be more accountability to it. And, according
to Puzder, “The last thing on the list was cleaning the damn windows.”
Beyond checking to see where the basic guidelines are outdated or ignored, constant connection with your front lines
can also be a sounding board for consumers and employees.
Puzder met with both daily to introduce himself and plainly
asked what ideas they had to improve the company.
“Sometimes, they’ll say something that will make you say,
‘Wow, I wish I’d have thought of that,’” he says of filtering
through things you hear. “Even then, I’ll run it up the chain of
command to make sure that it isn’t something we’ve already discussed.
“The other thing is if you hear the same thing a lot. You go in
different restaurants and you hear it from different employees
who obviously haven’t spoken to each other. If you see comment cards from consumers that are consistent, then you start
to feel that you’ve got a problem here or that somebody has
come up with a good idea upon which you should execute.”
Though Puzder is careful to address issues through the proper
chain of command, he says some issues — like a dirty restroom
— require instant attention and then a follow-up with supervisors.
With a new focus on running a good restaurant, Hardee’s lost
its reputation for dirty units and rude service, which stopped the
bleeding. The ensuing rise in business bought the time to make
bigger changes, like adjusting the Hardee’s menu to include the
mammoth and unique “Thickburgers.”
In turn, CKE had net income of $31.1 million on $1.53 billion in
total revenue in fiscal 2008, compared to a net loss of $194 million in
2001. As for Hardee’s, the average store unit made $954,000 in 2008
— the average in 2001 had been less than $800,000.
“If you’re going to fix something, you need to fix it where the
rubber meets the road, and that’s where the customer is handing
you his dollar,” he says. “If things are OK there, they are going to
be OK the rest of the way. We were fixing the inherent problems
in the way Hardee’s had been run. If your instinct is to cut back
on general administrative expenses, you won’t fix a company. If
you’re Ford, you have to fix your cars and the way you sell them.
In our industry, you have to fix your service, the way you clean
your restaurants and then your food.
“We were able to distinguish ourselves, and without doing the
first steps in the restaurants to get us back on track, we would
not have succeeded.”
HOW TO REACH: CKE Restaurants Inc., (877) 799-STAR or www.ckr.com