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Never stop learning

The art of story telling should be considered as a fundamental part or your formula for ensuring key lessons are retained within the culture of your business.

February 27, 2012 by Don Fox — CEO, Firehouse of America

2012 marks my 38th uninterrupted year in the restaurant business. I feel very fortunate to have spent my entire working life in this industry, and each and every day along the line, I learn a little bit more than I did the day before.

Continuous learning is a very important ingredient for both individual success and the success of the brand. Every organization should foster an environment of progressive learning. Every individual within your brand should embrace the concept of self improvement. There should be a level of personal responsibility and accountability for improving oneself over the course of his/her career. If a team member does not have that aspiration, then they are probably a drag on the organization.

The burden for continuous learning should not rest on the employee alone. The organization itself should facilitate and support the continued development of their people. Encouragement alone is not enough. Continued learning should be enabled and facilitated. This may involve internal options for continued training and education, as well as the utilization of external or third parties. Certainly, assisting your team members with the continuance of their formal education at traditional educational institutions is something that should not be overlooked. But no matter the resource that is used, and no matter the respective degrees to which the burden falls on the individual or organization, each employee should be improving themselves in some fashion on a continuous basis.

Every brand has a collective personality and culture, influenced greatly by its own unique history. Your organization has learned collective lessons over time, and many of the key lessons have become institutionalized (sometimes by design, and at other times simply because of the power and impact that a particular experience or event had on the brand and organization).

In effect, a philosophy of continuous learning should apply to the very brand itself. Story telling becomes one of the greatest forms of passing these lessons from one employee to the next, and from one generation of employees to the next. For the most valuable lessons, the forwarding of this experiential knowledge should not be left to chance. The art of story telling should be considered as a fundamental part or your formula for ensuring key lessons are retained within the culture of your business.

Learning comes in a variety of ways, of course (not just through story telling). Sometimes, learning is simply a matter of soaking in new experiences; as long as you keep your senses alert to the world around you and allow them to feed an open mind, you better yourself through your own life experience, and the experiences of others. Taking time to study and research your trade is a must-do if you want to keep yourself relevant in the quick-changing world and industry we live in.

Change is as certain as the next sunrise, and keeping up with it takes a dedication to continued learning. Fortunately, our industry is rich with resources for expanding your knowledge. Trade publications and websites (like Fastcasual.com) and industry trade shows and conferences are great sources of information and networking opportunities; I never cease to be impressed with the great talent that abounds within our industry. And in the National Restaurant Association, members can find a plethora of resources, no matter how large or small the organization they hail from.

Even after 38 years, I find that the most marvelous examples of learning are those "ah-ha" moments; occasions when something that seemed complex suddenly appears before you in a crystal clear equation (usually accompanied by a resounding smack to the forehead and the utterance "why didn't I ever think of that").

One such "ah-ha" moment occurred very recently within my own brand. For the past several weeks, I have been traveling the country conducting "Town Hall" meetings with our franchisees and general managers. As part of the meeting format, we blended in an educational segment, directed toward the general managers, that focuses on our desire to help our franchisees optimize profitability in the wake of the great increase Firehouse Subs has seen in Average Unit Volume (AUV), going from $604K to $672K in just the past 14 months. At the heart of the presentation was a sample of a rather detailed profit and loss statement, structured in such a way that highlights the concept of a restaurant's contribution margin (i.e., the percentage of each sales dollar that should flow through to the bottom line after the restaurant's fixed expenses were covered).

The presentation was in the form of a lecture, and there was an inherent assumption that the general managers grasped some basic knowledge that, as the "ah-ha" moment soon revealed, some of the audience did not possess. The desired result of the presentation is that they would better understand the dynamic of profit increases in relation to sales increases.

I had experienced perhaps a half dozen of these presentation before the one that unleashed the "ah-ha." What was different? It was a simple follow-up question that I asked the assembled general managers when I next took the stage. You see, in the example, we assumed a contribution margin of 33 percent (after fixed expenses are paid, one third of every dollar flowing though as profit).

The question? "Assuming the 33 percent contribution margin that we just discussed, if you put an $8 per hour sign waver on the street for one hour during lunch, how much incremental sales would he/she have to drive into the restaurant in order to pay back the $8 investment?" You could hear a pin drop. Not one person in the audience could either do the math (or summon up the nerve) to say $24. The "ah-ha" was that we needed to back up our "lesson plan" considerably. We were assuming far too much inherent knowledge on the part of some of our staff.

We have great general managers in our system, as evidenced by our great results. But it was clear that we have a lot of opportunities for continued learning within our organization. That was a great learning experience for me, and I had my financial services team significantly reformat the presentation, including making it interactive so that we could better check for understanding among the general managers.

A footnote: In the spirit of continued learning, I was delighted when the general manager of our franchise restaurant in Winder, Ga., came up to me after one of our other Town Hall meetings and informed me that she has been printing out and reading all of my Fastcasual.com blogs. She was even sharing them with her staff. I learned something else that day: these blogs are definitely worth writing.

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