Franchisee Says Hiring Is The Secret to Success

Posted Sat, 2007/04/28 - 10:21 by Bob Frankman

Hiring candidates must go through multiple interviews, psychological profiling, background checks, and more

Get this. An Arby's franchisee, The Restaurant Co., has five of his 16 restaurants ranked among Arby's top ten highest-volume restaurants. And if that weren't enough, it has a restaurant in Richmond, Virginia with the chain's highest volume, some $3.5 million in annual sales. It shares with the QSR community a two prong strategy that it considers the secret to its success.

First, product integrity must be preserved. “You have to make sure that it [the product] is right every time, down to the processes you have in place and the people you have preparing the product", says Bill Lowe, president of The Restaurant Co.

But the guardians of product integrity are restaurant employees. That's why Lowe attributes much of the company's success to exacting hiring standards, largely unheard of in the quick service restaurant industry. The online journal QSR Web quotes Lowe:

The company has a [employee] turnover rate of slightly above 50 percent, unusually low for the industry.
Before an employee goes to work for The Restaurant Co., they undergo a psychological profile, a drug test and a criminal background check, and that’s after having gone through several interviews.
“We started doing this about 10 years ago,” Lowe said “It was not very popular with our managers because they felt we were limiting the employment pool.”

Several interviews? Psycological profiling? Background checks? So how does the company attract workers willing to go through such standards when Richmond, Virginia has less than a 3 percent unemployment rate?

“In a lot of situations the people we would like to employ are working somewhere else,” Lowe said. “They come into our restaurants as customers, size us up, and if they like what they see they make a decision as to whether this is a good place to work.”
Once the company hires someone, Lowe said, the processes in the restaurant are designed to help them be successful. The company conducts employee satisfaction surveys twice a year to help spot problems.
Restaurant employees also have the authority to solve a customer problem, up to $100.

The quality of employees from a restaurant background have helped the franchisee push for more dinner tickets when the industry is stretching its breakfast offerings. Like many quick service restaurants, dinner traffic was significantly lower than lunch. They were successful in pushing up the numbers.

“If you are really trying to analyze why our average unit volume is so high, dinner has a lot to do with it,” Lowe said. “Our lunch/dinner mix is about 50/50.”