Multi-Unit Franchisee Magazine Issue II, 2012 | Page 36

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M A N A G E M E N T, C O N T I N U E D
close to operations, but as we’ve grown—we have around 500 employees
now—we’re closer to operations with the executive staff, who then look
after operations with their people.
Have you changed your marketing strategy in response to
the economy? How? Most brands have you pay into a national fund for
marketing and advertising, but on top of that, we’ve spent more on local
store marketing.
Personality: I’m pretty laid back, but I can switch gears quickly. Our philosophy is try to make sure everybody is having fun at work.
How do others describe you? They’d probably cover the range from
laid back to intense.

How do you hire and fire? Hire slowly and fire quickly.
How do you train and retain? Retention comes back to loyalty,
involving employees and team members in the store family. Obviously, competitive wages and benefits are also important, but I think it comes back to
the work environment. We try to make things as pleasant as possible with
relaxing uniforms and flexible scheduling.
How do you deal with problem employees? We have a “three
strikes and you’re out” policy. There are violations that call for immediate
termination, but in most cases we write them up, coach them, and set up
an action plan to rectify the situation. If they don’t get it after a certain
amount of time, we let them move on.

BOTTOM LINE
Annual revenue: We don’t disclose.
2012 goals: 10 percent increase in sales.
Growth meter: How do you measure your growth? We measure
not only in number of units but also in same-store sales.
Vision meter: Where do you want to be in 5 years? 10
years? In 5 years we want to increase expansion throughout Indiana on
both brands. In 10 years, we’d like to be adding five to six stores a year on
both brands and to be adding another two or three restaurant brands to our
company.
How has the most recent economic cycle
affected you, your employees, your customers? Our business tends to follow the unemployment rate, so as the rate remains high, our
guest transactions remain low. Recently, we’ve seen
the rate come down a little, so there’s been a bit of
a bump.

What did you change or do differently in this economy that
you plan to continue doing? We’ll continue to pay attention to value
prospects. We’re giving customers loyalty programs and discount cards, but
you don’t want to discount too much and become known as a discounted
brand. It’s a fine line to walk.
How do you forecast for your business in this economy? In addition to looking at unemployment rates, we forecast every week, looking at
the trends from the previous year.
Where do you find capital for expansion? We’ve been lucky to
stay with local banks in Indiana.

Multi-Unit Franchisee Is s ue II, 2012

Have you used private equity, local banks, national banks,
other institutions? Why/why not? We used local banks because
they’re easier to deal with and the customer service is a notch above national. It’s nice to walk into a local branch where they know who you are
and decisions can be made on the spot.

It’s nice to walk
into a local [bank]
where they know
who you are and
decisions can be
made on the spot.

Are you experiencing economic growth/
recovery in your market? We’re seeing a little
bit. In 2011 in Dunkin’ we saw nice double-digit
comp sales. For Dairy Queen, we were flat in 2011,
because in our neck of the woods we had the worst
weather we’ve seen in 20 years. We’re in the ice cream business, so we are
somewhat weather-dependent.

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Is capital getting easier to access? Why/why not? We’ve not
seen much of a change. Things are consistent for us since we’ve been working with the same local banks for years and we know which projects will be
greenlighted.

What kind of exit strategy do you have in
place? Right now, we’re in growth mode and have
no exit strategy yet. We just plan to build as many
brands and units as we can and to be as profitable
as possible.
What are you doing to take care of your
employees? We have competitive wages and benefits for our executive staff. Depending on growth,
we plan in the future to provide additional assistance
such as college tuition or home care and babysitting
needs.

How are you handling rising employee
costs (payroll, healthcare, etc.)? It’s part of
the game. We try not to pass that on to our customers. Our bottom line is
smaller because we just have to absorb a lot of it.
How do you reward/recognize top-performing employees?
We have bonus programs for controllables and random things like who
had the fastest drive-thru time as a team this week. We have competitions
between stores and give the winners movie tickets or gift cards for dinner,
groceries, or to Target or Walmart.
How is social media affecting your business? It definitely affects
us. We have Facebook pages for our stores and people are checking in. This
will continue to get bigger, especially with our 18-to-34 DQ demographics.
Their heads are always down because they’re on the phone or tweeting.
We’ve done some mobile marketing and will continue to work in this arena.