During her career, Cheryl Bachelder had been a senior executive at two
other food franchising companies, Domino’s and KFC, and she’d learned to
love the model. But when she took office at Popeyes, in 2007, which was
struggling from a lack of strategy and too much short-term thinking,
she found that the company’s relationship with its franchisees was
severely strained. As she and her team worked to turn Popeyes around,
they would have to both regain the owners’ trust and fire up their
enthusiasm for the future. They would also have to create an arsenal of
brand-building ideas and a national advertising campaign to build
consumer awareness. In talks about how they should lead and which
stakeholders should be their primary focus, the team members settled on a
model called “servant leadership,” in which the people of an enterprise
come before self-interest. And they agreed that Popeyes franchisees
should be their most important customers: “No one,” Bachelder writes,
“has more skin in the game.” The company conducted its first in a series
of franchisee satisfaction surveys and began measuring what matters
most to owners, namely restaurant-level profitability. It launched a
number of winning new products and acquired sophisticated software to
help franchisees choose the best locations for new restaurants. The
result has been eight years of steady growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]