The results speak for themselves:

• Same store sales have grown for 24 years
• Market share has grown for 24 years
• Service speeds four times faster than competitors
• Order accuracy at least ten times better than the closest competitor
• Employee turnover half the industry average

Pal’s Sudden Service has accomplished all of this with what may be the ugliest store design in fast-food history—and it may be coming to a major thoroughfare near you. Pal’s was recently named one of Restaurant Business magazine’s “Future 50,” which are restaurant chains that have proven their concepts, are fast growing, and are getting ready to go big.

Pal’s key concept is a management system based on the Baldrige model. The restaurant chain won the Baldrige Award in 2001. It established the Business Excellence Institute to share its best practices with other organizations, and those lessons aren’t just for food service companies. More than 50 nonprofit organizations and government agencies have taken the training BEI offers, which once again demonstrates the universality of Baldrige principles. You can learn more about Pal’s BEI by clicking here.

Pal’s did its first Baldrige assessment in 1995. As I’ve seen with other organizations, the first assessment often produces profound insights, and the same was true for Pal’s. “From the founding of this company until 1995 we didn’t know what business we were in,” said Thom Crosby, the CEO at Pal’s. “We took it for granted that we were in a service industry. When we did our first assessment, we realized that we were a manufacturing concern. We bring in raw materials to create our own distinct products. The scales dropped away from our eyes. It changed how we viewed our business and the data we wanted to collect. Performance that was good had impeded us from being a great company.”

To learn more about Pal’s, click here. To learn more about conducting your own Baldrige assessment, click on these articles:

• The Organization You Want
• Baldrige Core Values
• The Baldrige Criteria
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• New Baldrige Resource

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