How McDonald’s simplified their process with chalk and a tennis court
The Founder has arrived on Neflix.
If you’ve not seen this 2016 film starring Michael Keaton then I totally recommend it.
It is one of the most inspiring business films, showing the grit and persistence, and some questionable contracting that allowed Ray Kroc to take McDonald’s from a single restaurant set up by the McDonald brothers into the global brand we know today.
One of my favourite scenes happens at the start as the McDonald brothers recount to Ray Kroc how they came up with their food preparation system that could allow them to get meals to customers in 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes.
Instead of trying to iteratively improve their processes from within a functioning restaurant, they decided to close for a number of months and re-design their system from scratch.
To do this, they went to a tennis court, grabbed some chalk and measured out the exact dimensions of the restaurant.
They then drew in the prep stations as they were currently.
Having drawn their restaurant, they brought in their staff and asked them to recreate their work - a true example of roleplay!
They found that in order to prepare a meal in the current design their employees were bumping into each other, inefficient and making mistakes.
The brothers got to work, wiping the tennis court down, moving prep stations around and focusing employees on only one simple task each that could easily be passed onto the next station without duplication, delay or bumping into each other.
After multiple iterations, they discovered their ideal system.
Each employee now had a simple task that they could repeat quickly and consistently - with the end to end process delivering food and drinks to customers at speed.
All they had to do now was rebuild their physical restaurant to the same specifications.
How can you abstract your processes from the real world?
You might be thinking - well we don’t run a restaurant, or even serve customers in a physical building.
But you have processes.
Your buyers go through a journey from third party content to your website, to your SDR, to your AE, to your sales engineer, to your contracts, to your onboarding team, to your CSMs and onwards…..
Often the closest we get to mapping these processes out is on a digital tool like Miro or Lucid Charts.
What would it feel like to talk and walk through your processes with the real people that perform them?
Would you find out that your processes are inefficient, duplicated, slow and produce a poor buyer and seller experience?
Would you see the delays and errors that creep in by watching people try to work?
Worth thinking about.
Now - where can we rent a tennis court that we are allowed to draw on?!
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