Growing Brand Culture From The Ground Up with Steve Robinson

Scaling Up Business with Bill Gallagher

Can entrepreneurs and business owners hire for cultural fit instead of trying to train new employees on your culture? Put another way, could your company take an approach to HR that could be summarized as: “We don’t train culture; we hire it”?

In this episode, Bill talks with Steve Robinson, who worked for three decades for a company that firmly believed that they didn’t train for culture, that they instead hired it.

Steve Robinson is a consultant, author, and speaker specializing in organizational culture, brand strategy, marketing, and advertising. As the former EVP and CMO of Chick-fil-A, he led their marketing, advertising, brand, menu, and hospitality strategies.

Key topics that Bill and Steve explore in this episode:

- Chick-fil-A's success is due to careful candidate selection and empowering employees, managers, and leaders.

- Trust in leadership.

- Maintaining culture through training, reinforcement, and consistent messaging.

- Chick-fil-A's culture is built around clarity of purpose, core values, and brand promise.

- Chick-fil-A finds and trains independent contractors to run stores, sharing profits and motivating them to deliver great customer experience.

- Multi-million dollar mistakes.

- Chick-fil-A’s decision to differentiate itself from competitors.

- The Blue Ocean Strategy.

- Understanding your customer’s lifestyle and values, not just their demographics.

- The success of a billboard campaign that featured cows wearing Chick-fil-A t-shirts, generating buzz and publicity.

Thanks to Steven A. Robinson for being on the show!

Connect with Steve on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-robinson-2a50921b/

Learn more about S Robinson Consulting: https://srobinsonconsulting.com/

Get Steve’s book, "Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A": https://faithgateway.com/products/covert-cows-and-chick-fil-a-how-faith-cows-and-chicken-built-an-iconic-brand-1

Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of the Scaling Up Business podcast, is an international business coach who works with C-Suite leaders to achieve breakthrough growth.

Join Bill in the Growth Navigator Coaching Program: https://ScalingCoach.com/workshop

Bill on LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/BillGall

Bill on YouTube: https://www.YouTube.com/@BillGallagherScalingCoach

Visit https://ScalingUp.com to learn more about Verne Harnish, our team of Scaling Up Coaches, and the Scaling Up Performance Platform, which includes coaching, learning, software, and summit. We share how the fastest-growing companies succeed where so many others fail. We help leadership teams with the biggest decisions around people, strategy, execution, and cash so that they can scale up successfully and beat the odds of business growth.

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Chapters in this episode:

(0:05) Scaling businesses.

(5:00) Leadership and trust at Chick-fil-A.

(11:41) Maintaining culture through purpose and values.

(17:57) Chick-fil-A's brand promise.

(24:07) Chick-fil-A's growth strategy.

(29:54) Marketing strategies in the fast food industry.

(36:05) Learning from mistakes.

(41:25) Brand growth.

This episode was produced by Story On Media & Marketing: https://www.successwithstories.com