Reviewed by Stefanie DiLegge
Eat Mor Chikin, Inspire More People by Samuel Truett Cathy is a biography that recounts the founding of Chick-fil-A. Cathy shares with the readers his morals, values and views on business throughout the book. Cathy explains that communication and trust are key components to his managing style. Although similar to the Total Quality Management, the Chick-fil-A management system is unique and extremely successful.
Samuel Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-fil-A, was born into an extremely poor family. Cathy’s father struggled to find work and make enough money to support the family. Tragedy struck the Cathy family early on with the death of one child and another diagnosed with polio. In order to try to make ends meet, Cathy’s mother started a boarding house to make some extra money. Cathy’s mother turned out to be the breadwinner of the family. Early on, Cathy began to understand the importance of work. He sought out many different jobs to help his family in any way possible. From his newspaper delivery job, Cathy learned the best way to stay in business was to always please the customer. The newspaper route proved to be instrumental in shaping the business mindset of Cathy.
Years later, Cathy and his brother Ben opened up their first restaurant, the Dwarf Grill. The Dwarf Grill, later renamed the Dwarf House, was a twenty-four hour diner known for great food that customers could expect quickly and at an affordable price. Customers were the center of attention and were always pleased with the service. Cathy sought to create a lifelong, loyal customer with each new face that would come into the Dwarf Grill. Cathy poured his life and soul into the restaurant. He would work overtime and remain on-call twenty-four hours a day in case the small staff needed an extra hand.
Although Cathy’s eye was on the success of the restaurant, the brothers made a bold decision to close its doors every Sunday. Cathy spent much of his childhood in church and with family on Sundays. His main guidance in life came from his Sunday school teachers. He wanted to continue with his service to God and spend his Sundays teaching Sunday school. Cathy believed in helping others and the community. His motto for life was about the giving and taking of unexpected opportunities. After the success of his first restaurant and a couple of tragedies along the way, Cathy took advantage of an unexpected opportunity and built the foundation for Chick-fil-A.
Cathy married his wife Jeanette McNeil, his childhood sweetheart and love of his life. Shortly after they got married, Cathy faced the obstacle of rationing during WWII. Beef products were among the most difficult items to get during the rationing period. Struck with an unexpected opportunity, Cathy was approached by poultry suppliers that could not sell oddly shaped chicken breast meat. This intrigued Cathy and he began developing a recipe to sell the chicken. After four years of trial and error, Cathy perfected the chicken sandwich famously copyrighted as the original Chick-fil-A Chicken Sandwich. Cathy began to market the sandwich to restaurants and take a small portion of the sales the restaurants sold. However, he soon realized consistency was impossible to manage and his name would be tarnished with a less than spectacular product. Finally, he moved to open a new restaurant.
Taking advantage of the “malling” of America, Cathy opened new quick serve restaurants in malls. He based his new brand of restaurants, Chick-fil-A, on the basis of complete honestly and high standards to be upheld with every customer. Customers could see everything cooked and served before them. This idea transformed Chick-fil-A into a prestigious fast-food restaurant.
As the restaurant grew into a corporation with many franchises, the fundamental methodology in which it was founded has not changed. Cathy promotes every aspect of his business with trust, honesty and love. He trusts every employee down to the teenagers working at the local Chick-fil-A. His corporation stands for honesty, morality, integrity and a love for the community they serve. Cathy single-handedly built a multi-billion dollar corporation by attracting new customers and killing them with kindness, outstanding service and quality creating lifelong consumers. Much like the consumers, employees are loyal to the business. On a rare occasion will a team-member, operator or corporate manager quit. Most times team-members leave for school purposes and return later, operators retire and pass the franchise to their children and corporate management employees retire after many years at Chick-fil-A. Cathy has built an American icon in a corporation and is slowly changing the standards to which fast-food restaurants should rise.
S. Truett Cathy manages Chick-fil-A much like the Total Quality Management system. TQM is based on the principle that corporations must find out consumer needs, translate the needs and produce a quality, dependable product at a low and efficient cost. Cathy believes, like TQM, if operators train their employees to the best of their ability, the quality of work will be high. If employees produce high quality work, less people would need to be hired, fewer mistakes would be made and costs to the producer would be cut. Therefore, Chick-fil-A would operate with little variation and customers could expect the same high quality food and service at every restaurant visited across the nation. Also like the TQM system, Cathy manages Chick-fil-A with an emphasis on employee communication and happiness. Cathy entrusted much of his business decisions in his employees. While his management strategy works for him, I feel that putting too much trust in the employees is dangerous. In my opinion once Cathy decides to retire and hand over the business to one of his sons, his son may not be able to have the same faith in the employees. The new manager might try to take more part in the process and cause resentment among the employees for the change. Also in my critique of Cathy earned respect among his colleagues because of his hard work ethic and the amount of his soul he invested in the company. I believe that without the same experiences Cathy went through and overcame, his son may find it difficult to gain the same respect from employees and manage the corporation in the same way as his father.
In my opinion, I would recommend other PR students to read this book. Cathy’s management system and brand identity for Chick-fil-A fundamentally shows the importance standards among each employee within the corporation. The book can teach PR students to keep a high level of integrity and honesty when it comes to the work they do. Also, Chick-fil-A’s standards challenge many American businesses. Chick-fil-A faces extreme pressure from modern society to open on Sunday. Although it may be financially beneficial to the corporation, the mission of the brand is to devote Sundays to days of worship, family and service to the community. It takes a strong PR professional to battle the constant criticism Chick-fil-A receives for its old-fashioned mindset. In addition to the Sunday closure struggle, Chick-fil-A does not advertise much in mainstream media. The original billboard and word-of-mouth approach has worked tremendously for Chick-fil-A. From this, I believe that PR students would learn from Cathy the continuing importance of traditional media outlets and the importance of buzz-worthy projects to get free coverage. I feel that students would benefit from the book by analyzing the fundamentals of the PR profession and the impact it still has on modern society.
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