Page 61 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Relationships

tinctly remember him in the early 1970s calling an operator on
Long Island, who had the distinction of having the lowest-vol-
ume store in the northeast. Ray used to call that operator to see
how he was doing and encourage him to hang in there and keep
driving sales. That close personal relationship was very invig-
orating to the receiver. The store did eventually do fine with sales
and is now a top performer.
Crew, too, rallied to serve the customer. You helped your
coworkers so that the product was hot and fresh and came out
on time; you pitched in to keep the counter lines short, the rest-
rooms clean.

A Family of Peers and Presidents
And at a most basic level, we were all peers. There was no for-
mality. Ray Kroc was Ray, never Mr. Kroc. And Fred Turner was
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Fred. As Frank Behan put it: “[It’s a] first-name culture—you
never called them by their last name. You’re equal to me, we’re
both first name guys. This company’s made of 3,000 presidents.
Everybody’s a president.” This means that each franchisee was
viewed as an independent president, as were the hundreds of
vendors, and in many ways, the regional managers of the cor-
poration running the 28 regions and the operating officers from
more than 100 countries worldwide.
As mentioned in John F. Love’s Behind the Arches, “Care is
taken to maintain a family atmosphere by downplaying the cor-
porate hierarchy.” It’s a philosophy that still resonates on the
restaurant floor. As owner/operator Tony Liedtke put it, “When
I introduce people, I’ll say, ‘This is Mary, we work together.’ I
don’t say she is my employee, I don’t say, ‘She works for me.’ We
work together. It shows respect to them.” Building relationships
with employees is a key component to successful store operations.
While we had operations spelled out in manuals, many of our
calls were from the gut and instinct, based on what we knew