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Your customers understand that your expenses are up, and they continue to visit restaurants that offer them fair price/value. Employees, too, read the papers, and rely on their supervisors and corporate leadership to instill confidence. Likewise, other stakeholders like franchisees and financiers need to be assured of the state of business and the steps you're taking.

Geoffrey Colvin, senior editor-at-large at Fortune magazine and a longtime observer of and commentator on leadership and business, spoke at the Elliot Conference last month. Part of his presentation focused on what the best companies do in times like these. He said they don't stop building the brand or its people. They communicate more, and more intensively, even though their instinct might tell them to hunker down and wait until there is something definite to say, because everybody wants to hear from them. They evaluate their customers to determine who they make money on and who they lose money on, and figure out how to convert the latter into profitable customers. And if they have to cut resources, they don't cut “fairly,” but they reward the best people even more.

I'd like to add one practice that successful companies use in good times and bad: They maintain real partnerships within the supply chain. It was at work at the Elliot event: Industry leaders from restaurants, manufacturers, service providers, associations and more all had the common goal of leading their companies and the industry through this downturn.

What drew us to Fazoli's, CiCi's Pizza and Austin Grill, featured in our Cover Story, “In This Together,” was their willingness to work with their distributors and manufacturers. They share proprietary information with their suppliers, who share theirs as well, to creatively find solutions to be more efficient, save money and ultimately meet the customers' needs.

It takes trust to work together instead of stealing margin points from one another. To do so requires sharing knowledge throughout the procurement process. Even if the suppliers are already doing a good job, providing the right product delivered on time and properly handled, it is a leap of faith to share costs and profits, consumer information and competitive secrets. Will the information they return be fair and accurate? Will their consumer research be skewed toward their own product? Will they keep the information you share confidential or sneak it to their other customers?

And trust takes time and small steps. Start small and keep things simple. There will be mistakes along the way. Work from the top of the company down, because no matter how great the relationship is between the distributor rep and a purchasing manager, they can't pull this off without corporate leadership.

Start with those suppliers who provide the most and most critical items, those that affect how the customer views the brand. Then your customers will continue to find you reliable, too.