The meeting made it crystal clear that the relationship between Popeyes and its franchisees was strained. The company had gone through four CEOs in seven years, and sales had been choppy throughout that period. In retrospect, I was naive and overly optimistic. My hope was to inspire the entrepreneurs who own and operate Popeyes restaurants about the bright future of the brand. I wasn’t technically an employee yet, but I decided to attend and make a presentation. My first official day as CEO of Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen was November 1, 2007, but the company was holding a big franchisee meeting in Orlando a few days earlier. The result has been eight years of steady growth. It launched a number of winning new products and acquired sophisticated software to help franchisees choose the best locations for new restaurants. 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. 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. They would also have to create an arsenal of brand-building ideas and a national advertising campaign to build consumer awareness. 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. 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. 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.
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