Domino’s Pizza
Listen to the people who are closest to the customers and the marketplace. They will give you your best advice and input.
“There are no leadership secrets that I am aware of!” says David Brandon, CEO of Domino’s Pizza. “My experience tells me that it is important to be a coach and a teacher. Lead by example. Articulate a vision. Find out how people want to be treated and treat them that way. Build a great team. Surround yourself with people smarter than you are.
“Study effective leaders. Read what they write. Listen to them speak. Observe what effective leaders do right and emulate them. Observe what lousy leaders do wrong and avoid their mistakes.
“Don’t be afraid to admit that you don’t always have all the answers. Just because you are made the leader of an organization doesn’t mean you suddenly possess all knowledge and experience on every facet of the enterprise. Listen to the people who are closest to the customers and the marketplace. They will give you your best advice and input.
“Don’t be afraid to ask for help. You will need a lot of it if you plan to be a successful leader.
“If you want to know whether someone is a good leader, ask the people who work for them. They will tell you what is real.”
Domino’s vision statement reads, “Exceptional people on a mission to be the best pizza delivery company in the world.” As part of this vision, David has a list of goals he wants to achieve.
- Opening the 10,000th Domino’s store worldwide
- Being named one of the 100 best companies to work for in America
- Becoming a Fortune 500 company that regularly exceeds the expectations of its investors
- Continuing to grow market share in the pizza delivery category worldwide
- Becoming known as the employer of choice among all quick-service restaurant companies
- Attaining low employee turnover and high levels of operation performance
- Having fun
“Domino’s Pizza had a culture that had evolved over a number of years. It measured success as doing just a little bit better each year than the previous year.
“Clearly, that kind of culture becomes dangerous over time, because while you are measuring success according to your own internal benchmarks and feeling pretty good about yourself, your competition can be kicking your butt.
“That was the case with Domino’s when I arrived four years ago. We felt good about our record of steady same-store sales growth. But while we were growing a little, some of our competitors were growing a lot!
“We had lost market share for seven straight years in the pizza delivery-category, and we had allowed certain competitors to become formidable while we were obsessed with our internal focus.
“I introduced Domino’s to what I call the Wall Street mentality,” says Brandon. “It meant we were going to benchmark ourselves against the very best in our category—and we couldn’t declare victory until we beat them.
“We set our business objectives around growing market share and improving our operations as perceived by customers and independent research, not as perceived by us!
“I changed the leadership team by recruiting people who brought experiences and knowledge from other companies in the industry. We cut costs and redeployed capital to those areas of the business where we could create competitive advantages and gain customer support.”