Wingstop has big plans to grow from 2,000 to 7,000 locations in the coming years.
How?
Meet Stephanie Herrington, the woman tasked with repeating and improving operational successes as they expand. As Wingstop’s Operations Excellence Manager (side note: amazing job title), Stephanie exists to set a high bar for how a store should operate, while making it really easy for stores to execute.
What makes her particularly well-suited for such a role is how she came up in the industry. Before Wingstop, Stephanie spent 16 years with Raising Canes, where she worked her way up the ranks:
- crew member (3 years)
- shift manager (5 years)
- trainer
- training manager
- operations manager
- center of excellence manager
In short, she knows what it takes to do the work because she’s done it. And she can empathize deeply with the teams who manage stores as she creates standards, processes, and tools for them to be successful.
Stephanie recently joined Crunchtime’s Ops Innovators webinar panel for Delivering Excellence at Scale Through Ops Execution. She shared insights on how her team operates at Wingstop, including the importance of maintaining brand standards and how to ensure a successful rollout.
Wingstop has a goal of becoming a top 10 global brand, and with such a lofty goal comes challenges. Specifically, the more you grow, the more challenging it becomes to ensure consistency throughout the brand. It is essential to become more strategic in communication and consider how that information is sent down the line.
One crucial part of ensuring operation excellence that Stephanie focused on is the impact of maintaining brand standards. She mentioned the importance of learning all you can from things like limited-time offers and applying those learnings to future endeavors. Above all else, the biggest key to maintaining brand standards is consistency. Wingstop conducts audits once a quarter for each restaurant to ensure brand standards are being met with the desired consistency from store to store. One key way to ensure this consistency is to provide every restaurant with the same tools. Stephanie mentioned that Zenput makes this task far easier than it would be otherwise.
“Zenput has been wildly impactful in becoming more consistent, making sure that we are providing every restaurant with the same tools, meaning they are all using and seeing the same thing in each location,” Stephanie remarked during the panel session. This level of stability from location to location is absolutely crucial in maintaining consistency when it comes to a brand expanding as rapidly as Wingstop.
No effort to maintain brand standards can be complete without technology to help, and how you implement that technology is key to success. Wingstop is heavily focused on becoming more digitally forward, just as many other brands are. Technology such as in-store kiosks for ordering or mobile apps for ordering ahead are some of the many examples of how the restaurant industry is progressing and becoming more technologically advanced. Wingstop is taking in this new landscape to become more digital-forward. But the introduction of new technology presents both increased opportunities as well as some potential drawbacks.
Stephanie stated, “There are opportunities that we face from wanting to be more digital, not just from a consumer perspective. That user experience on the other side of your digital products is really important because we always aim to serve them, but also what impact does that have inside the four walls of your restaurant? The more technology we introduce to guests, the more technology we have to be able to manage internally.”
As a result, Wingstop needs to find a careful balance between the right time and the right technology. Making sure that rollouts happen at the right time is absolutely pivotal. It’s important to make the hard decisions and sometimes say that the time isn’t right yet or even to delay further implementation depending on the results of an initial rollout.
Stephanie provided a good example of this, explaining how Wingstop recently rolled out an e-commerce platform, which was a huge accomplishment for the brand. She emphasized that when rolling out new technology, you can’t underestimate the training required. While there are many people who have strong technological knowledge, you are also going to serve many people within brands who don’t. This means as Wingstop continues to bring in more technology, how they implement it and train staff, and the type of support that they provide is key. For this particular rollout, over 200 people in the company were involved in the project, from ideation and testing to creating training materials and being boots on the ground doing actual training. Stephanie remarked, “If you put the right resources into a project, you will be successful, but you have to dedicate those resources. You can’t underestimate the needs of the field when it comes to that implementation, because they tend to need a lot more support than we realize sometimes.”
When implementing new technology and processes, it is important to be able to drive operator adoption. Stephanie added, “The most important thing about adoption is asking how are you convincing people that this is worth their time. It shouldn’t need a lot of convincing, but it is sometimes a sales pitch. I'm selling this to someone when I say, 'We are going to implement this and this is why it is important, this is why it benefits you.' Explaining why and making sure that you are presenting it in the right way is really important, but more than anything, bringing people along for the ride is very impactful.”
One way Wingstop practices this is through a franchise advisory council. Every time Wingstop meets with the council as a brand, they discuss things that are in the pipeline. They operate as a sounding board from the beginning on things the brand may want to do, which creates buy-in from the beginning.
Additionally, whenever the project reaches the testing phases, they are not just testing in corporate locations, but also with brand partners as well. This means they are taking people along for the ride throughout the entire journey of whatever project is being tested or implemented. This has a drastic impact on buy-in so that people feel that they are a part of something, and then once it reaches the implementation phase, they are already familiar and much more prepared to implement.
For more insights into how to leverage technology to drive operational excellence and support growth, view the webinar in its entirety here.
