Foxtrot, an urban convenience-store chain based in Chicago, has been through some ups and downs over the past year.
Parent company Outfox Hospitality abruptly closed Foxtrot’s 33 stores in April, and its two Dom’s Kitchen and Market grocery stores. Then, Further Point Enterprises, the holding company that bought the c-store’s assets in an online auction in May for more than $2.2 million, asked Foxtrot founder Mike LaVitola to help in reopening stores in September.
“For me, that was a function of ‘is our team excited to come back, are our vendors excited to come back?’ If you don’t have a great team, there’s no point in doing any of this,” LaVitola told CSP at the first store re-opening. “[I wanted to] make sure local vendors that we love were excited to come back and that we had the right team in place. Once I knew that our operation folks were on board, I was on board.”
The convenience-store chain has reopened a handful of stores in Chicago and two Dallas stores, with plans to reopen 10 stores total.
However, the Illinois Department of Labor has continued attempts to recover more than $3.8 million in back wages and benefits for more than 350 displaced workers. Foxtrot, Dom’s and Outfox Hospitality failed to give employees and local government officials 60 days of notice before closing and laying off workers. As required by law, an employer that fails to do so is liable to each affected employee for back pay and benefits for the period of the violation, up to a maximum of 60 days.
Nevertheless, after the closures left employees without jobs and put out many vendors without warning, the chance to come back in, rebuild the team and rebuild partnerships with small and local vendors—which was “the whole impetus of founding the company”—has been exciting, LaVitola said.
LaVitola has learned that team members’ buy-in to the product it finds and sells is one of the most important aspects of operations.
“The merchandising team and I can go out, find the most delicious, interesting, story-rich product, but if our teams aren't into it, tasting it, excited or passionate about it, then it just doesn't matter,” he said.
Rebuilding relationships with vendors and previous employees was the most necessary and time-consuming part of reopening, LaVitola said.
“It was lots of time and conversations with [vendors and employees] to describe how the company will be operating going forward, what we really value and why we were doing this,” he said. “Everything comes down to the people… [The employees] know the regulars in the store, they know how the neighborhood works, and they make that store the neighborhood store.”
It’s a reminder that the success of the company is determined by spending time inside stores with team members, he said.
The management team is 80-90% smaller than what it previously was, LaVitola said.
“I think having a smaller team and going back to that culture of stores are what matters,” he said. “It's been really refreshing.”
Another way Foxtrot is simplifying its operations is by limiting the number of brands it offers and streamlining its foodservice menu to the best items, he said.
“Folks were really using us as a cafe and a coffee shop, but when we set up the store initially, it was really more of a market,” LaVitola said. “The market is still very important, but we learned a lot of lessons about how to run a coffee line, service times. A lot of the work we did [for the reopening] was behind the bar to speed up service.”
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