Raising Cane's Weathers Hurricane Gustav
The quick-service chicken chain relied on advance planning, teamwork and communication to reopen quickly after the storm.
By Maya Norris, Managing Editor -- Chain Leader, 9/12/2008 7:44:00 AM
With more than half of its company stores located in the Gulf Coast, Baton Rouge, La.-based Raising Cane's weathers its fair share of hurricanes every year. Hurricane Gustav in August was the latest storm to test the 70-unit chain's survival skills. It forced the chicken QSR to close 35 of its 58 company stores in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, but the company was able to reopen more than 25 of them in less than three days after the storm passed. Vice President of Operations Ian Vaughn talked to Chain Leader about the chain's disaster-recovery efforts, providing lessons to those hunkering down for the next storm.
What was key to reopening so quickly after the hurricane hit?
We started preparing a week prior to the storm making landfall. Any time a storm starts to get into the Gulf, we have a storm response team that we put together. And we start getting everything ready logistically in the event that we do get hit. So we have a large team that rallies together.
On the storm response team, everybody has normal roles that they play, but we change their roles dramatically in the event of an emergency. So somebody who is an area director for us is going to move to the operations inventory manager and make sure that we have all inventory counts and all the stores have the right amount of product that they need. Then there's an operations manpower manager. There's a reopening manager that goes into the restaurant and gets them all on their feet as fast as we can and rallies teams.
It's really just a huge collaborative effort, but the main advantage that we had with this one was we were very, very proactive in what we were doing. We all knew our roles going into it. And we walked into this one with our eyes wide open. So the turnarounds were able to happen much faster to the point where we would find out we had power in one restaurant and two-and-half hours later it was open and operational.
After a hurricane, it typically takes a few days to locate all of your employees. How did you end up getting them all back to the restaurants so quickly?
In the pre-emptive communication that we put out, we gave everybody a link to a Web site that we set up. And we also have an 800 number that we set up for all of our crews. So before they leave for evacuations, we put this information in their hands, and we ask them to check it once a day.
And as they are checking it, we are looking ahead one to two days and estimating reopening timelines that we are getting from the power companies here. So if we know that this area is going to be restored by this day, we are putting on there that this store is projected to open on X day. And so those crew members are instructed to call their manager and get in touch. Since we didn't have cell phones for a few days, our general managers have a list of all cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses. So they would not only send our bulk e-mails, they'd send out bulk text messages.
How do you handle food safety and distribution?
We have [refrigerated trucks] that will house our refrigerated products. Those are set at very, very low temperatures. Every time we go and gas them up, it's the same thing as having a normal cooler. We will do temperature checks to make sure that temperature is staying very consistent. It's a little easy for us because we have just a couple of main items that need to be refrigerated, that being items like milk and chicken and fries. So if we had a much bigger wider variety of menu, it would be a little bit more difficult than what it is for us currently. But we gas up those trucks about twice a day. So twice a day we're in there checking temperatures.
A hurricane also has a huge economic impact on the company. What do you do to make up for the financial losses associated with a natural disaster or prevent those losses from adversely affecting the balance sheet?
We had some sales losses from being shut down ahead of time. And there was a period of time where stores were shut down from anywhere between two and three days, up to a week.
In the process of reopening the restaurants, we aim to try and service as many of our customers as we possibly can. So we'll go to a limited menu because, No. 1, we don't have access to all of our products during that time period. So we switch to a one combo meal option. And it allows us to sell in much larger bulks what we typically can in normal operations. So if the lines are very, very long, we speed up the process, and we're able to turn a lot more tickets during that time period and help recoup some of the losses that we had had.
So you were able to make up those losses?
Yes. If we were reopening the restaurants right now, there's no way we'd be able to make that up. So the quick response and turnaround definitely helps. We were the only restaurant open in a majority of places where we were at.
A lot of your stores are located in areas that are hit by hurricanes every year. What kind of lessons have you learned from previous hurricanes like Katrina and Rita?
The No. 1 thing for us that we learned after Katrina was, we've got to be proactive and plan going into something like that and you can never take a hurricane too lightly.
So what we have changed since that time period is our preparation steps leading up to a storm. So from the moment there is even a tropical depression that's threatening the Gulf, that entire storm response team goes into effect in tracking the storm, preparations for communication and gathering materials, all that kind of stuff. Because once you're without power for a period of time, you have to have all those items handy and you can't be making them up last minute. So we have booklets that are pre-set up now. Every manager has hurricane emergency kits in their restaurants. We have satellite phones. And we try to poke holes in everything that was not so successful for us in Katrina and aim to improve it this go around.
I think that was the only reason we were able to recover from Gustav so quick is because we took lessons learned from the past and implemented them for this program going forward.
So is everything back to normal now?
Yeah, for the most part they are back to normal as of a day-and-a-half ago. When the last two stores reopened yesterday, we were fully back on our feet. We're in contact with our franchise partners once again and all of our restaurants across the nation. Now we're watching Ike as he approaches Houston. So we'll probably have to go through the whole thing with our [five] Houston restaurants.
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