626: What Chick Fil A Taught Us About Small Business Ownership

On the outskirts of Atlanta, we drove past the waterfall, walked through the front doors, and stepped into a world of positivity and smiles.  Each delivered through a well-rehearsed cocktail of sincere stories that provided a peek into why this “chicken business” is a homebase of hope and life-change for so many.  One small business is a powerful, accessible opportunity for so many teenagers and adults to engage in their community, develop relationships, solve problems, earn income, and develop powerful and usable skills.  A collection of aligned small businesses, if well led and obsessively focused on vision, mission, and values, has the opportunity to scale the hope and life-change beyond one or two locations.   This is the opportunity for Chick-Fil-A.   Indeed, their chicken sandwich is remarkable, use of “my pleasure” noticeable, and waffle fries laced with a special serum of deliciousness - and their support of local small business is a Master’s class of intentional scale.   It is not lost on the Support Center staff that their primary purpose is the support of the almost 500,000 team members among the chicken-diaspora across North America (and soon to be other International markets).   You cannot walk a meaningful distance in their appropriately named Support Center without confronting a well-broadcast corporate purpose, mission, unique set of values, and foundational principles.   Purpose is as pervasive as a number one combo meal on a Saturday after the little league game or dance competition.  Purpose is intentionally over-communicated with three distinctives that were tangible and delivered in a kind, sometimes goofy package of care as defined by competence and warmth.  Truett Cathy took one restaurant and built the systems and the team to scale that one restaurant to nearly three thousand.  That is good news for business owners with one location or three…with two employees or thirty.   What scales up, can also scale down. There are three simple elements on display at Chick-Fil-A central for the exponential spread of culture that require the grit of an entrepreneur and the roll-your-eye goofiness most entrepreneurs struggle to hurdle.  The first of these three simple elements is consistency. One task completed with consistency over a long period of time makes a mark. One task completed without consistency is a fad with little impact. Inherent within consistency is the concept of a fanatical and firm footing, a concrete base with very little movement that can be trafficked relentlessly.  Faith is placed in solid things because reliability, albeit goofy, beats the in-the-moment hipster vibe of trendy unsteadiness.    How can Chick-Fil-A ensure the now famed “my pleasure” is repeated millions of times daily?   Relentless consistency…even when it is goofy. The second element that leads to the exponential spread of culture is amplification. Pandemics spread through amplification; genetic copies spread from carrier to carrier at high speeds with consistency.  Your local municipal water system might be distributed through amplification.  A series of pump stations systematically placed throughout the distribution channels of the pipes that run throughout your city or town.  Each pump offers a boost to the system so that the home furthest from the source has the same pressure as the home closest to the source. Messages too spread through amplification.  A small group of message carriers spread their consistent message to other carriers over and over again. That message requires the third element that leads to the exponential spread of culture…repetition. “Repetition is the mother of all learning”; a refrain my first manager would share with me…repetitively. I’ve heard it said, “if you are not annoying someone with your message, then you know your message is not landing.” We tend to look down on repetition as non-innovative.  Truthfully, our real struggle is with repetition void of meaning, warmth, sincerity, care, empathy, and intentionality. Business owners look around and wonder why the big companies are “lucky” to have great culture.  At the Chick-Fil-A Support Center, consistent, amplified, and repetitive messaging is…well, consistent, amplified, and repetitive. Not requiring a degree, or the “right conditions”, business owners big and small have an opportunity to rinse and repeat.