When Steve Carley took over as president and CEO of El Pollo
Loco Inc. seven years ago, he wondered how his employees
could be concentrating on cooking the franchise’s signature
flame-grilled chicken when they were busy trying to cobble
together a working computer system to take customers’ orders.
It was one of many problems that was holding back the potential of the chain.
Not only was the technology woefully obsolete, the franchise
owners were grumpy, and the company had lost its focus.
“We had a whole range of things we had to deal with, starting
with a large amount of discontent with our franchisee organization,” Carley says. “All of our restaurants were run down, old and
tired. We were cannibalizing parts for our POS systems from
other restaurants because our technology was so out of date.”
Despite these challenges, the company was doing well financially. It had posted three consecutive years of more than 7 percent same-store sales growth. So while fixing the problems,
Carley also had to be careful not to screw up what was working
well.