LaRosa’s Inc. offers a generous package of benefits for its managers compared to the rest of the food service industry, but its most powerful recruitment and retention tool may be theway the company develops its people.
“I was the company’s chief people officer for many years, responsible for the human resources and culture side of our business,” says Mike LaRosa, the company’s president and sonof its founder, Buddy LaRosa. “One of the challenges I faced in that role was to improve the management training piece of our process.”
LaRosa’s operates or franchises 59 casual pizzeria restaurants and employs 3,000. The company posted $120 million in revenue in 2005 and is aiming for $250 millionby 2010.
Much of that projected growth is riding on its ability to staff its stores with capable, well-trained management, so several years ago, LaRosa formalized a training program by establishing the LaRosa Center for Learning, an operation that’s funded at the six-figure level. “Some people talk about providing an environment where there’s continual learning made available to their people, but we live it,” says LaRosa. “The cost of turnoveris a hidden cost; you don’t see it on your statements. It’s there, it’s in your labor costs, it’s in dissatisfied customers. The better our people understand their role and whatwe expect of them and they can accomplish that, the more we’re going to have happy guests.”
LaRosa says that the training program he put in place has increased retention rates for LaRosa’s, keeping it, at some stores, at the 30 percent to 35 percent level — farbelow industry averages — and allowed it to successfully meet its competitive challenges.
“We don’t have any control over the external competition that comes and goes; it’s just going to happen,” says LaRosa. “But what we do control is what goes on withinthe four walls of our restaurants. I think our proactive approach to leadership training positioned us to weather the competitive threats that came our way in the pastfive or six years.
“There has to be two or three times the number of choices out there today than there were 10 years ago, so it positioned us to weather the threat. There’s more competition of all types, the whole fast-casual boom that has taken place. We’ve been able to remain dominant in the areas where we compete because we’ve been able toperform in a way that stands out.”