When I shared with Steve Loehr that Kwik Trip finished in a virtual tie with QuikTrip in our 11th annual CSP/Service Intelligence Mystery Shop, his response hardly surprised me:
“While it is a virtual tie, we see it as losing by 0.2!”
Entrepreneurial types don’t like anything but being No 1. That may sound like hubris or excessive testosterone, and in many cases it is. But it’s also a dichotomous form of humility, a conviction of wanting to fulfill one’s maximum potential.
Anyone who knows Loehr knows him as a family-focused person of deep faith and incredible integrity. His traits are emblematic of Kwik Trip and the culture created by founder Don Zietlow.
It is no different at Tulsa, Okla.-based retailer extraordinaire QuikTrip. I can count on hands and feet the number of times CEO Chet Cadieux has said creating good-paying jobs is what fuels the company’s craving for growth. (See p. 38 for a closer look at Zietlow and Cadieux and their excellent teams.)
Neither Zietlow nor Cadieux (nor Chet’s father, Chester) seeks to have his face chiseled on Mount Rushmore. Their brilliance is that it is not fame that drives them, but rather a greater humanitarian goal that centers around their thousands of employees and countless customers.
Mind you, I’m not discounting the importance of ego. And when I say ego, I don’t mean the euphemistic application represented by the likes of Donald Trump and other high-decibel types. I mean it from the psychoanalytic sense: that of one’s self, the opened eyes of a curious child eager to absorb, distill and experiment. The belief that God has granted me life to accomplish something positive, maybe even something great.
Our mystery shop is a maze of metrics, a ledger of observable and measurable benchmarks. It impartially assesses whether we are executing our programs effectively. And it does not tell you whether your store is an architectural Rembrandt or your foodservice an epicurean delight. Nor should it.
Too many of us speak about magic bullets, about fool’s gold. We look for the big serve as a way of winning points, when often in tennis it is the player with the most consistent strokes who wins the match.
In our current mystery shop, my favorite performance was that of Cenex Zip Trip. I’ve known Ian Johnstone for many years, and he’s one of the most pleasant and honest folks you’ll ever meet. He was very reflective when I shared with him that his chain had finished in the top five among an all-star cast of larger operators.
“I know we’re not the biggest store, and we’re certainly not the fanciest,” he said to me during a recent Cenex corporate event in Sioux Falls, S.D. “But we take the basics very seriously. Are the floors mopped, the bathrooms cleaned? Are the promotions positioned correctly, is the coffee fresh, is the roller grill working, is our fountain fully stocked?
Johnstone summed it up well for Samantha Oller during an interview for our cover story: “From top to bottom, our role is to have ordinary people do extraordinary things.”
This is a chain that takes great pride in the fundamentals. In my opinion, their next challenge is to be more daring, to apply those fundamentals to a more alluring and distinguishing offer that further distances Cenex Zip Trip from its competition.
This is precisely what QuikTrip, Kwik Trip and Cumberland Farms have truly mastered: the art of crafting what Jim Collins artistically calls the Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) and pursuing that vision with extraordinary discipline and fundamentals.
For more about the results of this year’s CSP/Service Intelligence Mystery Shop, turn to p. 47.
Forgive me for my digression and indulging in my personal life. I’m writing this column in early July, just days after we as a nation celebrated our country’s birthday. Two years ago, I spent July 4 on a pediatric cancer ward as our younger son, Daniel, was undergoing treatment for non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
I remember looking outside of the room and seeing medical staff and a row of strangers coalescing about 20 yards down the hallway.
A young man in his early 20s—a former starting high school quarterback just a few years removed from his glory days—was exhaling his final breaths.
The silence was deafening. Tears for a stranger streamed down my face. As I embraced the victim’s girlfriend, she asked about my son and said, “Remember the little things. Have a dream, but remember to get there takes lots of steps.”
Each step is a lesson. Each time we clean the floors, stock the shelves, change out the coffee, we are giving our customers—our fellow human beings—a greater experience. Our acts are not monumental, but when we think about their outcomes, we suddenly transform perfunctory tasks into meaningful actions.
We are saying to our customers and to ourselves, “I care.”
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