Chick-fil-A Chairman Reveals the Secret Recipe for Success!

Intro

If you just keep on walking beyond what people expect of you, every step that you take beyond what people expect, you build tremendous loyalty, but it’s also transforming for our life.

[Music] [Applause] [Music]

We’re now going to bring out a second extraordinary entrepreneur, and this is Dan Chick, an entrepreneur who grew up in the business a little bit like you did indirectly. I think at nine years old, he was exposed, and he is the chairman of a little company called Chick-fil-A.

Dan Catholic, chairman of the board to Chick-fil-A.

Oh yes, have a seat. So Dan, I mean, your family and what you’ve built as a family, I think you’re the third largest, is that right, fast-food chain in the United States, behind McDonald’s and Starbucks, but we may eclipse Starbucks in the next 24 months, so stay, wow, that’s gonna happen, that’s amazing. And your individual units, as I understand, actually produce almost 50 more than McDonald’s does. It’s more than that, but we won’t mention that exactly, but our advantage is that we’re only operating six days a week versus their seven days a week, so we think that’s a tremendous competition. Remember giving up a day a week, I love it.

So let’s talk a little bit about the history of Chick-fil-A. Your father, he is an extraordinary human being, obviously, lived in 93. He opened that first location, the Dwarf Grill. Dwarf Grill, what they call it, the Dwarf Grill. It was like 1946, it was a tiny little place. So he’s called it a Dwarf Grill, you know, but we were in South Atlanta. He bought this little property, but he bought the property without an idea of building a restaurant on it, and his brother didn’t know that she had to have it zoned for commercial use, so that’s important when you’re trying to get building permits. So he had to go back and kind of figure that out as he went along, but we had 10 stools at the counter. He had four tables of chairs, had a cigarette machine on one end and a jukebox machine on the other. So a jukebox machine is this thing that plays records, kind of like an MP3 player, let’s explain that to people. That’s awesome. But it was at this little family restaurant that my mother was a waitress there at the restaurant. It’s a family business. I mean, talking about Mom and Pop, it was my pop and my mom that were running this place, and I saw my dad’s commitment to this little business and a commitment to customers. He was behind the counter flipping hamburgers and scrambling eggs. This is before Chick-fil-A came along in the early ’60s.

So tell us a little bit about the values that you learned and tell us a little about the invention of the chicken sandwich and how that changed Chick-fil-A.

Family Values

One great value lesson, a life lesson is that for my mom and dad is so we don’t have to be a victim of the circumstances that we grew up in. My mom and dad came from very dysfunctional families. My mom’s father abandoned her and her mother when she was just an infant. On my father’s side, he had to live through the Great Depression, 1928, 1930s, and he was in real estate insurance, and he was very, very discouraged because he couldn’t provide for his family as the breadwinner of the family. So they moved to the first federally funded housing project in the nation known as the Techwood Home.

Family Values Continuation

Apartments, my grandfather was very discouraged and very embittered. In fact, my dad says he can never remember his father ever telling him that he loved him. And fortunately for my brother, my sister, that pendulum swung back the other way, and they decided as they were married for 68 years that they were going to have a very different model. And I was the beneficiary of some really Godly mom and dad. I mean, it was a Godly Christian, beautiful, really beautiful.

Yeah, my dad always said the most important decisions that you make in life, and he taught Sunday school for 43 years to young teenage boys. He said the three most important decisions you’re like, start with the letter M. Who your master in life is going to be, who your mate in life is going to be, and what your mission in life is going to be. It’s beautiful. Master, mate, and mission. You make those three decisions right, brother, you got the rest of it. It’s going to be made. So I was so fortunate to be taught that but to also see it modeled out in the way in which Dad operated that little family restaurant and the way they treated the staff. It’s beautiful.

Invention of Chick-fil-A

Now, what was your second question? Second question was the invention of Chick-fil-A. Invention of Chick-fil-A came because he created the first chicken sandwich, a boneless chicken sandwich, yes. So I think I’m about we were a diner operation, short order breakfast lunch, and there 24 hours a day, six days a week. And so the chicken sandwich came along because he wanted to serve chicken. But when you serve chicken with bones in it, it takes a lot longer to cook. It doesn’t really fit in a food service, fast food, quick service restaurant environment. But he remembered how his mother used to sometimes debone chicken breast and how she would season it. She operated a boarding house, and she would season it on Saturday night to be served for lunch on Sunday. And when my dad, in his 25 years old, he operated that little restaurant for about 10 years before he started working on this little formulation. And he originally called it a chicken steak sandwich. We put it on our menu. The customers loved it, but realized you could not register the name chicken steak sandwich. You had to misspell it or do something different. Yeah, and so he had this idea, why don’t we call it Chick-fil-A, as in filet mignon, and deboned chicken breasts are oftentimes referred to as the filet mignon of chicken. Interesting. So Chick-fil-A was separated because it’s grade A, you know, the best quality. And we paid an artist 75 dollars to design that little C with the beak, and it’s the best 75 dollars in marketing. That’s awesome. I wish the people in McCann, our agency in New York, would send a 75 invoices, but that’s long ago. But we began, we opened up in a little family restaurant. It worked really well. Dad also began to license other mom and pop restaurants to serve the product in the early ’60s. But the real growth of our business really started in 1967 as we started opening up in shopping malls, Greenbrier shopping mall in 1960s. We liked the shopping mall food courts, is that right? Well, they weren’t any food courts. They weren’t. In fact, there’s very little food in the malls because the food was messy and owning them. But developers soon learned if you don’t provide for food service in a shopping mall, people are going to leave, and they might not come back, right? So food was really kind of a secondary kind of thing at most, but it became such a big part of the mall operation that began to design food courts back in the ’70s and ’80s. And then it was about 18 years later, if I remember correctly, that you opened the first real restaurant, not in a mall. Yeah.

First Freestanding Restaurant

The demalling of America was beginning to happen. Yeah, I saw that coming. What lessons did your father instill in terms of the customer? I don’t know if it was you or if I remember reading it was your father that when someone says thank you, for example, you say my pleasure, yes. And you know what that whole focus of this level of a relationship you both have that in common, really creating a relationship with the customer. What tell me what some of the values are that he instills in you and the rest of the family around how you serve people.

One of the most memorable experiences I had as a teenager was going on the roof of our little Dwarf House Restaurant as my dad had to deal with our night manager who was drinking beer and alcohol during the middle of the night and throwing his beer cans up on the roof of our restaurant. Now you ask about customer service; the customer service in front of the counter is a reflection of how you’re dealing with people behind the counter. If you want to improve external service quality, then you’ve got to up your game on internal service.

We walked up from the top of that roof, and my dad was heartbroken to see beer cans all over the top of that roof for a Charlie Celock, our night manager, receiving those cans up. I’d known Charlie all my life; he was like an uncle to me, and I just knew that’s going to be it for Charlie Celock. I mean, drinking on the job, I mean, if you had to come up with a reason to terminate somebody, he fully qualified for that. But as we’re coming down the steps of that ladder to see my dad in the weeks to come, have conversations with Charlie, and rather than fire Charlie, he helped him get into an Alcoholics Anonymous program. That’s wonderful, and he had compassion and extended grace.

And as I think about the attributes of leadership because you asked the question about customer service, but the genesis of all this, in my view, is that once we as individuals have experienced forgiveness in our own life, it becomes a lot easier to extend grace toward other people. Yes, and say if I can help this person get through this crisis in their life, there’s tremendous loyalty that can come from that; they’ll never leave you once you’ve extended grace or something like that. But it’s also the ripple effect on all the other folks that knew Charlie was drinking on the job as well; they knew dad had every reason to fire him. And so these kinds of ways of dealing with people behind the counter with grace and kindness and consistency, based on how I think our heavenly father has dealt with us, and we’ve experienced that personal relationship, begins to dramatically affect how other people are being treated; it ripples throughout the whole organization.

Now, we’re more known for our customer service, based on some of those principles. We also did an extreme service makeover 20 years ago, where we wanted to dramatically distinguish ourselves with our customers. And we built it on a scripture verse, Matthew chapter 5, verse 41. Jesus said if one of those stinky Roman soldiers asks you to carry something for one mile, and you get to the one-mile marker, I want you to keep on walking. And if you’ll just keep on walking beyond what people expect of you, every step that you take beyond what people expect, you build tremendous loyalty, but it’s also transforming for our life. To your character, he refreshes others will themselves be refreshed. So I could go on and on about that. I have a, I wear these crazy little hats sometimes. On the side of that, it says “be a blessing,” underneath it says “and you will be blessed” because I think that’s really the formula to life. That’s business to me. Business is a spiritual game. It’s how do I do more for others than anybody else in the industry, and that’s what every great religion, I’m personally Christian as well, but every great religion has some theme like “Love thy neighbor like thyself.” It’s the essence of what humanity needs, that’s what our spirit needs. And so when you practice that in your business, your business grows. How you got a hundred thousand, a hundred thirty thousand employees, I think is that what I read? It’s about twice then actually, you’re k.

Employee Recruitment and Selection

It’s about twice, then actually you’re kind of wearing this Chick-fil-A name tag, you have a quarter of a million employees, yes, but it’s a lot of teenagers. We print a lot of W-2s, you know. We have a very high retention rate; however, our retention rate is 3x better than our competition. And because they stay with us, we’re able to teach them civility and kindness and graciousness. I like to think, tell you if any of the folks that are watching today, if you’ve got any sons or daughters, and you want us to teach them how to be respectful and say yes ma’am and no ma’am and “it’s my pleasure,” then you need to send them to Chick-fil-A. We’re like a junior Cotillion for food service because there’s a lot of heathen barbaric teenagers out there that need to hear.

Well, tell me, though, so shocking to customers though to hear, you know, a teenager be respectful, they’ve never seen that, and it’s an attentive and connection. Oh yeah, yeah, it makes the food taste better. Ben Franklin said that the handshake of the host affects the taste of the roast, and it works with chicken sandwiches too.

With a quarter of a million employees and you have another 2,700 locations or 3,000, you’ve got some. Oh, that’s about 3,000 now. Three thousand, okay, good. There’s one just opened around the corner from the Olympus last week on Lantana down here, and I couldn’t believe how fast it was built. But then the very first day, there were lines all around.

So, I want to ask you two questions. First, tell me how you recruit those people because to have that kind of culture, yes, you’ve got to train it, but that’s not that I read that you guys work hard at making sure you get the right kind of person to come join you in the first place. And you have a very unique setup in terms of, let’s take it one at a time, how you recruit the people, and then secondly, you have a different philosophy. This is not something like McDonald’s where people might buy five of them as an investment. You really work to select people, and you still own the real estate. So, tell me two things: first, how do you recruit? How do you train? How do you know somebody’s right, especially when you have an organization as big as it is? How have you leveraged that? What’s the process or what are some of the thoughts or questions? And then, two, tell us about how you’re different in your setup of the leader of that organization as opposed to most of your franchises.

Well, thank for all of us, as Peter Drucker said, it’s not about the “what,” it’s all about the “who.” That’s right. And when we can make good decisions about the “who” that represents our values, that’s an extension of our own personality, whatever that may be, is so very important. When we select our restaurant operators, we typically think of what we call the three C’s. We think about their competence, their business acumen, their competence, and their character, and the chemistry, their passion, their enthusiasm. And in order to go through that process, we spend a lot of time with people. This past year, we had 127,000 people that made an application to be on our corporate staff or to be a restaurant operator, and out of that, we selected about 110 to be restaurant operators and another 200 to be on our corporate staff. Wow, so you have to spend a lot of time with people to get to know that. We can cut that down to about 7,000, and then the cost per interviewee, and going through that. So it’s really hard to become a part of Chick-fil-A. Someone said that it’s easier to get a job at the CIA than it is with CFA, and we try to live up to that. We check things; we check grade point averages and all these other kinds of things.

Employee Recruitment and Operator Relationship Continuation

even politicians are finding that it’s important to be truthful on your resumes and so forth, and we do that. I believe they’re learning, but well, we check that kind of thing. And if people are dishonest on simple things like grade point averages and that sort of thing, then there’s a character issue there, and we’ll just go into the next person because we don’t want to bring that into the organization.

You asked about the operator relationship we have with our operators. As we think about what’s our Hedgehog, Jim Collins asked us, you know, what’s the one thing you do better than anybody else? Well, we could say it’s the chicken sandwich, but we know internally that it’s the relationship we have with our restaurant operators. They’re entrepreneurs, being in business for themselves but not by themselves.

So, our deal is the same today as it was when we opened our first mall location in 1967. Dad would build a location, as we do today. We’ll buy the land, sometimes we do a ground lease, we’ll build the location out, and then we’ll sign up an operating agreement for an individual to operate that location. And, of course, they have to operate it to our operating standards. If they don’t, we only require a ten-thousand-dollar deposit, if you will. It’s like a deposit on an apartment or something. If you leave Chick-fil-A after three years, that’s completely refundable. That’s all they need to start: ten thousand dollars. Now we’re the Capital Partner. I get it. So, by the time we buy the land, build the building, we’ve got about four million dollars in that investment to begin with, but our average restaurant sales volume is 9.2 million dollars annually in sales. Wow. Our average operator income is right at six hundred thousand dollars a year. That’s net to them. Wow. About 25 percent of our operators have a second location. So you do the math, and if you do that math, you’ll understand why we have a 98 percent retention rate. I’m going out restaurant operations, man. That’s beautiful. That’s really awesome. Yeah, the only way you can leave is you can die or retire. That’s the only way you’re going to want to leave Chick-fil-A.

Well, tell me the process that you develop in innovation. You know, Peter Drucker always said business is really two things: innovation and marketing, finding a better way to serve the customer, and the marketing, getting the one-two business with you, your innovation and the way you process people both emotionally, the connection that’s created, so it’s not some squeaky little box, but also the volume. Like I drove by the one the other day; it’s on my way here. It was closed today because it’s Sunday, but literally, there were like three lanes of cars wrapped around, but they were going through so fast. What did you innovate in that area that’s allowed you to process?

Innovation and Anticipation of Change

Because, by the way, if you don’t know, Chick-fil-A has been selected what, eight years in a row, as the most loved restaurant by Americans. It’s pretty wild, maybe even more. That’s pretty extraordinary, right? But they’re also delivering this fresh, good food, but you’re also doing it at speed and with a connection. So what did you reinvent in that area that made this possible?

Yes, we do a lot of simulations, we do a lot of testing, modeling, and on and on. So we take a very engineering approach to how we do innovation, both for our equipment, recipes, and other things that are going on. So the drive-through, this is a really good example. When COVID hit, we were about 60 percent dine-in, 40 percent going through the drive-through. Now today, we’re approaching about 90 percent drive-through, only 10 percent coming in. Does it change that much? Still 10 percent coming in. That dining room is a big footprint, you know, and we’ve got a lot invested in that footprint. Yes.

But being able to do the digitization of all businesses have to be very conscious of the curb appeal, which is primarily the website, all the digital interface that goes on. We’ve invested very heavily in that, thankfully before we had to. And if there’s anything I can encourage people who are listening to this program, you’ve got to stay ahead of the curve, you’ve got to anticipate where things are headed. Wayne Gretzky said, “Anticipate where the puck is headed.” My favorite quote on that comes from General Electric, comes from Jack Welch, the legendary CEO, and he said this: “When the rate of external change exceeds the rate of internal change, disaster is imminent.” Disastrous, in other words. We can be changing the wallpaper and getting new colors on this and that, but we’re making change. But when the rate of that change is not in and consistent with how much external change is going on, that little delta difference played out over time means that you’re going to be the next Kodak. It means you’re going to be the next BlackBerry. It means you’re going to be the next Sears department store. You’ve changed stuff, but you’re oblivious to how Sam Walton was dramatically changing mass merchandising in the area of department stores and service.

So, we’ve had to really anticipate, whether it’s going—I, for me, I’m a champion of change. I’m a champion of innovation. I’m a champion personally trying to do new things. That’s why I’ve got “in training” on my name tag. I didn’t see that. I’m still—I’m still trying. And Kathy, 50 years of service in training. That’s awesome. Give me a hand for that. That’s awesome.

So I’m still in the classroom. I’m still a trainee. And I find that if you’re a trainee, generally people are more patient with you when you’re—when you’re—I thought that’s going to work at home with my wife Rhonda. She said, “You don’t get away with that. You know you’re here at home.” One of the conversations I had with Bernie Marcus, who’s the co-founder of Home Depot. So I’m standing in a Home Depot with him, and he’s telling me about all these displays he’s got and so forth. He says, “You know, I used to start up my management meetings on Monday morning.”

Philanthropy and Family Succession

Talking about all the mistakes I’ve made the previous week, I was stunned by that. He said, “I’d start my Monday meetings talking about all the mistakes I’ve made the previous week.” And I never heard Jack Welch talk about that, a lot of other businesses talk about how to be transparent about mistakes that you’re making, but it’s brilliant because we’re all making mistakes. That’s right. And if we can just give ourselves permission to make mistakes, and we get smarter over time, we get a lot of value from those mistakes, and if other people can profit from it. So, I’m just a real proponent for us to be very transparent and very honest about mistakes and shortcomings that we’ve got in life, knowing that people know that we’re really trying to get better. We want to learn, we have an insatiable appetite for curiosity. Yes.

And in my view, curiosity is the most essential principle. I just finished reading Michael Dale’s new book. He’s got a kind of a second book they just released. I just finished it last weekend, and at the very end of it, I think it’s the last sentence, last paragraph, he talks about how essential it is for leaders to have an insatiable sense of curiosity, that thing that drives us to travel, to ask questions, to interview people, and to be on this quest, to be on a search. And businesses have to stay on that search, stay on that quest, especially if you’re a 76-year-old family business that’s never had a year of sales less than the previous year. You start being on that quest. That’s pretty wild, never had sales less than the previous year in 76 years. That’s extraordinary.

But you’ve got to stay with it and keep it that way, that constant never-ending improvement. And you don’t manage from Atlanta. I’ve talked to several people, they said, “This guy lives on the road. He’s at every opening. He’s meeting customers.” Tell us a little about your philosophy of why you do that.

Yeah, well, I like the hospitality industry. By its very nature, it’s very hands-on, engaged, being involved, being involved with the team members, knowing about their issues that they’ve got going on, going to funerals, going to big life events, and things that are going on, and just being real and open and transparent, honest, and accessible to people. Yes. And that personality begins to get throughout the whole organization. Many businesses in food service, as they get older, the founders are long gone. We’ve forgotten the founder’s mentality. We get into a financial accounting, kind of mindset. That’s just the death of any business from any time the CFO takes over. The food service business, sell your stock if you’re working with those employees, the company’s updated, your resume because the end is near when the accountants take over. I don’t know if we have any accountants here, but food service, hospitality, you want to keep the accountants at bay. Stay closed on Sunday. Keep that fresh grease lemonade out there. Be personal, stay engaged.

I enjoy camping out with our customers. I camped out 150 nights with a sleeping bag and a tent for about—how does the wife feel about that?

And I’m still married.

Clearly still in training with his marriage. If I can make it to August, it’d be 50 years. Wow, congratulations. That’s amazing. That’s beautiful. Did you know that only six percent of the marriages make it to 50 years? Wow, only six percent. But if we can hang in there, stay committed, get to the hard parts, own it, and on and on, it’s invincibles that make it successful in business. But it sets up your children, you know, to have success. At least you’ve done your part to model it, and part of that modeling is also so that you can get the next second, third generation, perhaps.

Can’t be John Maxwell, who’s one of our common friends, I’m sure, says that success is all about succession. And in family businesses, if the ownership is not an option, I mean, if you’re going to go from one generation to the next, there are ownership responsibilities that they don’t have a choice on that. Now, if they want to work in the business, they have a choice about that. I love what Steve Harvey said recently. I’ve quoted it many times. He said, “Your career is what you’re paid for, but your calling is what you’re made for.” That’s right. And so, our next-generation kids have to deal with, you know, is this a calling in your life? Do you feel that this is something that God is leading you to do? Because if you don’t feel called to do this, then you just be a shareholder. But don’t try to run the business or influence the business. But we have 12 in generation three. They’re married, mo…

Challenges and “Eat Mor Chikin”

One of the most challenging times in our business was back in 1982. We were dealing with inflation, but it was much more significant than today’s concerns. My dad had borrowed $10 million to continue expanding the business, as shopping malls were growing rapidly at the time in 1980. We moved into a brand new corporate office building with about 100,000 square feet of space. Interest rates went up to over 20 percent, causing a severe financial crisis.

My dad was the only one who could put all the pieces together to understand the magnitude of the crisis. We persevered through it and got through that challenging period. My dad had my brother, sister, and me at our home, and he would be transparent about what was going on in the business, both the good and the bad, including the challenging times. Transparency is essential in building business acumen and a business vocabulary in the minds of the next generation.

Another question you asked was about the “Eat Mor Chikin” campaign with the cows. It was developed by an agency in Dallas, Texas, called The Richards Group, about 21 years ago. These cows may not know how to spell, but they have become a memorable and humorous part of our advertising. We continue to use it because it works, and people find it entertaining.

People sometimes send me letters complaining about the cows’ misspelling and argue that it’s a disservice to literacy in America. In response, I like to have a little fun with it, reminding them that it’s all part of the humor and charm of the campaign. We’re going to keep “milking” it until the cows come home!

Wrestling and Discipline

My background in wrestling had a significant impact on my life, and I’m grateful for it. Athletics, including wrestling, teach discipline, character development, and the importance of staying physically fit. I learned personal discipline and the value of taking care of myself physically. Even today, I continue to maintain my physical fitness through activities like running.

There are four areas in life that I consider essential:

1. Mental: Staying a student with a teachable attitude, having a quest for knowledge, and being curious.
2. Emotional: Maintaining emotional balance, having a sense of hope and optimism, and managing emotions.
3. Physical: Taking care of one’s physical well-being through proper sleep and diet.
4. Spiritual: Addressing the spiritual components of life, whether through faith, humility, or acknowledging inadequacy.

These aspects, including the discipline and personal growth I gained from wrestling, have played a crucial role in shaping my life and my approach to business.

Closing on Sunday

The decision to be closed on Sundays has a unique origin. It wasn’t initially driven by religious or spiritual reasons. Instead, it stemmed from a personal commitment my dad made as a child. He grew up in a boarding house where he had to wash dirty dishes, shuck corn, and shell peas on Sundays. He didn’t enjoy this work on Sundays, especially when everyone else was having a good time.

So, when my dad opened his restaurant in 1946, he decided not to open on Sundays, primarily because he didn’t want to make others work on a day he disliked working himself. Sunday wasn’t a significant trading day back then, and this decision to remain closed on Sundays has continued ever since. It’s become an important part of Chick-fil-A’s identity, even though it didn’t initially have a spiritual foundation.

Shopping Mall Hours and Sunday Closures

Shopping malls and even shop Regional shopping malls were closed on Sunday back in the 60s and 70s but in the 80s they began to have extended hours for holiday shopping began to opened up on Sunday by then we already had it in our lease that we were going to be closed on Sunday and we were challenged by a lot of developers that said you know we really want you to open up on Sunday and on and on and on but we made the commitment but it’s so remarkable that as we mentioned earlier our volumes that we do are just extraordinary but there is a practical application and that when you’re closed on Sunday it makes your food taste better on Monday you know one people had to go an entire 24 hours without eating your food so they had to go scarcity hits the scarcity yeah you know wow that’s a food tastes really good on Monday morning but it gives our people a chance to rest uh you know the grind of retail the grind of 160 cars an hour coming through your drive throne and tell you there’s a lot of grind and burn and energy that takes to keep that going on typical operators got you know uh over 120 employees per restaurant uh any one time they got 25 they’re they’re there somebody’s not showing up somebody’s got issues and all kind of things that are going on so there’s a lot of requires a tremendous amount of energy to operate at Peak Performance what our customers expect and so to be able to relax on Sunday and not have to worry about somebody not showing up not having to worry about equipment breaking down not have to worry about I.T cyber security issues going on you know you just able to just a rest you can restore physically and spiritually hopefully uh restoring your marriage and maybe have some fun with your kids and seeing my dad just scratched out on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon watching a ball game you know just just rest man he went to sleep really quick on Sunday afternoons I bet the way he works yeah but but on Monday he was ready to go that’s very cool and I find it is a tremendous competitive advantage to shut it all down because man the energy and the restfulness that we can have on Monday improves Monday Tuesday Wednesday that little incremental difference for the time you people ask you how much money does it cost shall they close on Sunday I said man if you really knew the incremental service that we get and the sales that get on Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday more than makes up directly more as it makes up the fact that we’re closing on Sunday and our competition hadn’t figured that out but I’m telling you that’s the truth that’s very measurable that’s absolutely brilliant beautiful and Brilliant both you know I’m not that smart now you say it’s pretty you know that was my dad’s decision but I certainly brought into it and so has my uh third generation as well my brother and sister and I signed a covenant before Mom and Dad passed away about the rest of our lives we’re going to continue to be closed on Sunday because we didn’t want them to be any question about that that’s going forward

Environmental Responsibility and Recycling

I read the the red Polo shirts that they wear are made out of plastic bottles is that true tell us about that that is so we do a lot we’re we’re having 17 plastic bottles to make one shirt or something like that all of us have to be very environmentally conscious uh and it’s about nutrition it’s about waste removal it’s about um responsible sources of Supply you know coming up through the whole deal and uh yes I mean we’re doing a lot of solar powered restaurants now I say a lot we’ve got three that are open up now in California we’re going to do more about that but I think it’s part of just being a responsible citizen of the community and including apparel as well where we can recycle we also collect a lot of foam cups and on and on so it’s a big responsibility how many uh bottles are actually saved a year just by that’s a good question I don’t know that stat that’s a good one I know that we’re juicing a lot of limits out in California because I read it was millions and minerals of bottles because I think it’s like isn’t like 70 18 or 19 bottles makes one shirt you ain’t know more about that

Family Values and Purpose-Driven Lives

okay what your family has done is extraordinary it’s not only giving people healthier food and made it faster and quicker but it’s spread kindness it’s spread love it spread values that really are invaluable and I think a company you know why do you form a company a lot of people format for their own Financial Independence which is beautiful but I think it’s also chance to engender values you both have done that and I think that’s what gives the drive that keeps a generation or two to continue to go there because it was just the economics it gets to a point as you well know where the numbers don’t really affect you anymore personally it’s really what you know where is the meaning and you brought meaning to your family through your service through these restaurants and to so many of your employees and that’s why you’re so beloved eight years in a row is the favorite restaurant we all need to live Purpose Driven lives and I would just close by saying that our corporate purpose uh is this is to glorify Go.

Living a Purpose-Driven Life

Our corporate purpose uh is this is to glorify God by being a faithful Steward of all that’s entrusted to us and have a positive impact on all the coming contact with Chick-fil-A we should all desire to live purpose-driven lives and it makes all the difference in the world you’re amazing thank you you’re in your family thank you bro all you’ve done that’s here for Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-A.