Public Relations

We were fortunate enough to have 3 team members awarded the $1000 scholarship this month from Truett. This is an outstanding achievement and an amazing reward for these team members and their hard work. Additionally, it is a great PR opportunity!

Public Relations is a fantastic marketing tool because it is effective in creating emotional connections with the community…for FREE! Chick-fil-A Inc. provides a press release with each scholarship, but we decided to take it a step further by adding a picture (which really draws the readers’ eyes). In addition to that, this created a buzz with the team members involved because they were going to get their picture in the paper.

Public Relations is a great way to enhance the brand and inform customers of Chick-fil-A’s unique culture.

Sales Increase!

I am proud to announce that this month Chick-fil-A at West Oaks Mall enjoyed a sales increase! This is only the 3rd month in the last 2 years that West Oaks has had an increase in sales! It wasn’t much (less than 1% up), but an increase is an increase!

I can see 3 main contributors to this increase:
1. The Twilight movie…drawing traffic to the movie theater in our food court (sales up over 40% that weekend)
2. 4th of July fell on a Sunday this year (an extra day without limited hours)
3. Back to School Sale in mall on last weekend of the month (sales up over 20% that weekend)

All in all it was an exciting month!

A More Systematic Approach

I have continued to make observations of the restaurant throughout my time here, and about midway through the month I started to notice some consistent negative trends. These were all issues that were easily remedied by creating and implementing basic systems.

Food Prep
We were preparing far too much food each day for our low sales volume. I created a food prep list that is based on sales volume. Therefore, on slower days – like Mondays – we do not prepare as much food in the morning as we would on a busier Saturday.

Chicken Rotation
We were consistently forced to quick thaw chicken when I first arrived. This seemed ridiculous because of our low volume. I created a system to ensure that we always had enough chicken thawed based on our sales volume, without thawing significantly more than we need. Since the implementation of this rotation system, we have not had to quick thaw chicken even once!

Waste Tracking
The team was trained to ring in waste on the register and discount it like a coupon. While this is great for food cost – simply putting waste into the marketing category – it does not give us an accurate picture of our food cost gap or giveaways. Now, team members track waste on paper by marking an easy-to-use waste tracker that is kept in the boards area.

Build-Tos
There were no build-tos created for truck ordering. This caused us to frequently run out of some items and have way too many of other items. An inconsistent inventory can encourage team member theft and can also be extremely frustrating if not enough stock is ordered. The build-tos enable us to manage inventory in a much more effective manner.