The fast food sector, notorious for its churn, posts an annual employee turnover rate north of 130%. Yet Southpaw has rewritten the script. Since taking over struggling locations, the company has halved turnover for key roles, including shift leaders and managers. The result? Not just better-staffed restaurants but significant improvements in customer experience and financial performance. One Southpaw acquisition saw revenue rise nearly 30% in the first year, driven by better staffing and operational fixes. While others slash costs to polish their margins, Southpaw is demonstrating that investing in people yields exponential returns.

This article is part of Branding Strategy Insider’s newsletter. You can sign up here to get thought pieces like this sent to your inbox.

A People-First Playbook

Southpaw’s strategy starts by tackling the human capital deficit in distressed franchises. “When franchisees are ready to sell, they often start cutting corners,” says Judd Wishnow, Southpaw’s co-founder. Labor budgets are slashed, maintenance is deferred, and morale sinks. Southpaw’s response? Over-hire, over-invest, and over-communicate.

At a typical Taco Bell, corporate guidelines suggest six managers per store. Southpaw aims for seven and a half. The extra spend is recouped through lower turnover and faster service times. In Louisville, Southpaw’s team reduced drive-thru wait times from 5.5 minutes to 3 minutes—a 45% improvement that unlocked new revenue by simply processing more customers. “If you fix the people issues first, the financials take care of themselves,” Wishnow says.

The company also makes morale-boosting investments many rivals wouldn’t contemplate. During its first year in Atlanta, Southpaw spent over $5 million on deferred maintenance—replacing broken equipment, fixing air conditioning units, and sprucing up dining rooms. Employees, skeptical at first, quickly took notice. The result was a virtuous cycle: happier staff, faster service, and higher customer satisfaction.

The Service Profit Chain in Action

Southpaw’s approach echoes Harvard Business School Professor James Heskett’s seminal research on the “Service Profit Chain.” Heskett argues that employee satisfaction drives customer loyalty, which in turn fuels revenue growth. In fast food, where the product is somewhat commoditized, the human touch often determines whether customers return. The numbers back this up. Taco Bell’s top-quartile franchisees, which often lead in employee retention, report 20% higher sales per store than their lower-performing peers.

Southpaw’s philosophy is shared by Chick-fil-A, another standout in an industry defined by razor-thin margins. Chick-fil-A boasts annual revenue per location that dwarfs rivals like McDonald’s, thanks in part to its industry-low employee turnover rates. The company’s secret? Extensive training, well-defined career paths, and a culture of recognition. Southpaw’s innovations may not yet rival Chick-fil-A in scale, but they underscore the same principle: prioritize people, and profits will follow.

More Than A Paycheck

Southpaw doesn’t just outspend competitors on salaries or headcount. The company focuses on creating an emotional connection with employees, from entry-level workers to area managers. Regular team rallies, often held at venues like Topgolf or axe-throwing centers, double as morale boosters and recognition events. “When we take over a market, we want employees to feel like they’ve joined a family, not just a company,” Wishnow explains.

The human connection goes beyond parties. Southpaw offers free mental health benefits to all employees from day one. Managers and shift leaders—positions prone to burnout in fast food—also receive performance-based bonuses, peer-to-peer recognition through the company’s digital “WOW” program, and frequent face time with senior leadership. Wishnow’s weekly travels to visit store managers are part strategy, part cultural reinforcement. His goal? “To show our team they’re seen, heard, and supported.”

The results are striking. In one market, Southpaw celebrated a year with virtually no turnover for managers—an almost unheard-of feat in an industry where attrition is a given. Lower turnover has helped stabilize operations and reduce the costs associated with constantly recruiting and training new staff.

Lessons For Any Industry

Southpaw’s success holds lessons far beyond fast food. Many industries—from retail to manufacturing—grapple with employee disengagement and retention challenges. The company’s playbook offers a few universal takeaways:

1. Invest Beyond Minimums: Meeting baseline staffing or maintenance standards may keep the lights on, but exceeding them can unlock outsized gains. Employees perform better when they feel supported, whether that means fixing a broken fryer or providing extra managerial coverage.
2. Foster Emotional Loyalty: In industries where employee loyalty is fleeting, creating an emotional bond can differentiate an employer. Recognition programs, clear career paths, and genuine leadership visibility all play a role.
3. Treat Labor as an Asset, Not a Cost: Cutting corners on staffing may improve short-term margins, but it’s a false economy. Long-term profitability often hinges on consistent execution, which requires a stable and motivated workforce.

The Case For Caring

Southpaw’s results speak for themselves: faster service, higher revenue, and happier employees. Yet Wishnow insists the company’s mission goes beyond financial metrics. “We’re building something bigger than a franchise business,” he says. “We want our employees to feel hopeful, connected, and cared for.” That, more than any franchised menu item or marketing campaign, may be Southpaw’s most powerful innovation in a rough industry.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Stephen Wunker, Managing Director of New Markets Advisors and Author of The Innovative Leader.

The Blake Project Can Help Build Your Brand From The Inside-Out. Please email us for more about our purpose-driven brand culture programs.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

1. What Assumptions Will You Prove False?

It’s so very easy to accept historical assumptions about an industry. When I’m speaking in front of a new audience, I’ll often begin with an exercise that asks them to think about solutions for an industry that they’ve probably never worked in, and still the answers are so traditional. Yet a simple change in reference to shake their assumptions then creates totally different options.

This article is part of Branding Strategy Insider’s newsletter. You can sign up here to get thought pieces like this sent to your inbox.

What can you do to let go of your old assumptions? A few suggestions:

– Look at how your industry functions in a totally different country, or at how an analogous industry works (for example, large hospitals can look at large banks and vice versa).
– List out assumptions and play with which ones you can reverse.
– Imagine you were an entrant into the industry starting from a totally different place (Amazon, a start-up, etc.) and think about what you’d do.
– Really stand in your customer’s shoes and consider all the different ways they might get their jobs done.

Assumptions box us in, and they’re so powerful because they’re so invisible. Making them explicit is a critical way to defang them.

2. What New Advantage Will You Create?

We spend so much time focused on maximizing the advantages we have. That’s great, but it leaves a great deal unexamined. Do you really think that your industry will function the same way 20 years from now? What new advantages might spring up to reshape the playing field? What can you do today to foster those?

As Clay Christensen chronicled extensively, industry giants aren’t usually toppled by other Goliaths. It’s David, competing asymmetrically, who knocks them out. How can you be David?

3. What Will You Walk Away From?

Companies – even, admittedly, boutique consulting firms like the one I lead – find it so hard to STOP doing things. Yet, no matter the level of our ambition, we just can’t do it all.

Be disciplined about finding things to halt. What takes a lot of attention or resources, looks like a continued struggle, and has few surprises yet to deliver? You can’t start great things if you don’t cease doing others.

ACTIVE VOICE. It’s a philosophy of living and a strategy of managing. Let’s make 2025 a year of being ACTIVE.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Stephen Wunker, Managing Director of New Markets Advisors and Author of The Innovative Leader.

The Blake Project Can Help You Create A Bolder Competitive Future In The Jobs To Be Done Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

These are the kinds of problems we all should have. In 1972, Bushnell’s Pong became the first commercially viable video game, and it churned out money.

This article is part of Branding Strategy Insider’s newsletter. You can sign up here to get thought pieces like this sent to your inbox.

Atari’s Pong overcame earlier entrants’ shortcomings. It was simple. The arcade setting allowed for new users to easily observe others’ play and to try the system out for just a few cents. Arcades were motivated to get people to try the game.

By overcoming barriers to trial and adoption, it created a runaway success.

The company’s home version of Pong sold 150,000 units, but Bushnell had his sights on building a system that could play a range of games through inserting cartridges into a machine. By the early 1980s, Atari’s revenues were over $2 billion. It had become the fastest-growing company in U.S. history.

Atari had a market share of 75% and seemed utterly dominant.

Then it collapsed. Atari’s revenue halved in just one year. The company was sold off in 1984 and, despite a few comeback attempts, it never recovered.

Accelerate Your Job Search With Marketing’s Most Advanced AI Career Coach

Why? Three big reasons:

1. STRATEGY — Atari made most of its money from selling game cartridges, not the console, but it did not control the supply of games. Competitors emerged from nowhere, often with low-quality games that degraded the overall experience.

2. PEOPLE — The company became a magnet for talented developers, but it couldn’t hold on to them as computing became more accessible for the general population. Its losses included one disillusioned junior employee with bright prospects: Steve Jobs.

3. OPTIONS — Today, Nolan Bushnell says his worst business decision at Atari saved all of two cents. That would have been the additional cost of making its game cartridges capable of read-write, rather than just read. They could have been upgradable, and system obsolescence would have come more slowly. But the company eliminated that critical option, to save all of two cents.

Plan your strategy, hold onto your great people, and develop options. If Atari can fail, so can any company.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Stephen Wunker, Managing Director of New Markets Advisors and Author of The Innovative Leader.

The Blake Project Can Help You Create A Bolder Competitive Future In The Jobs To Be Done Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

Telling awkward truths has little upside for the truth-tellers. These truths can:

• • Have widespread positive impacts, but create few specific big winners
  • Lead to there being quite clear losers
  • Could be stated by someone else better suited to absorb any blowback
  • May be wrong

Even those unscathed by a truth-teller may come to fear the person. After all, something dear to you might be targeted by that individual in the future.

Yet innovation requires this behavior. Without it, zombie projects persist, companies march in the wrong direction, and firms miss big opportunities outside their usual target zones.

This article is part of Branding Strategy Insider’s newsletter. You can sign up here to get thought pieces like this sent to your inbox.

How can you cultivate a culture of telling awkward truths?

1. Talk with your team about instances where things got derailed because hard truths were ignored.

2. Show that mistakes are OK. A project-ending mistake doesn’t need to be career-ending; thus, truth-telling won’t be fatal to work colleagues.

3. Invite dissenting views about important decisions. As legendary GM boss Alfred P. Sloan once famously said in a meeting, “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision. Then, I propose we give ourselves time to develop disagreement, and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”

4. Do skip-level meetings to get hard truths from those below you. To quote a Kellogg’s executive about the perils of managerial sugar-coating, “Problems enter this building on the ground floor as Corn Flakes, and by the time they get up here they’ve become Frosted Flakes.”

5. Talk about your own mistakes and things you wished you understood earlier. Role-model what you’re looking for. Posters on the wall won’t change the culture. Truth-telling will. Do it, or all other efforts to improve your innovativeness will struggle.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Stephen Wunker, Managing Director of New Markets Advisors and Author of The Innovative Leader.

The Blake Project Can Help Build Your Brand From The Inside-Out. Please email us for more about our purpose-driven brand culture programs.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

But what exactly makes for an innovative leader? Leadership is a multi-dimensional endeavor. It’s not just about crafting bold strategy, inspiring innovation, or thinking fast. Take two historical examples.

This article is part of Branding Strategy Insider’s newsletter. You can sign up here to get thought pieces like this sent to your inbox.

In the 1910s, Henry Ford ruled the auto industry. Yet by the end of the 1920s, Alfred P Sloan had knocked him off his perch without having the manufacturing scale, low costs, or wide distribution that Ford enjoyed. Sloan’s underdog company was an amalgamation of marginal brands, yet this firm – General Motors – pulled off the feat without any major technological revolution. Instead, Sloan understood the market well and pushed his company to innovate in new directions: the auto trade-in, auto financing, and the modern organization of a firm into staff and line functions are all innovations credited to General Motors. Together, these creative moves proved critical to challenging Ford’s dominance.

More recently, Steve Jobs at Apple built a defensible niche in personal computing, then upended two market leaders – Blackberry and Nokia – to re-make the smartphone industry. He wasn’t a technologist, but he set a clear, bold strategy and crafted a well-defined product vision. To deliver it, he recruited and enabled a highly talented team, pushing hard for excellence. He wasn’t beyond admitting failure, as with the Apple III, the early GUI entry called the Lisa, and the Apple Newton handheld computer. But he quickly pushed on to new frontiers.

How To Create Innovative Leaders

To understand how today’s innovative leaders think and behave, I teamed up with my co-authors Jennifer Luo Law and Hari Nair, currently at Philips and Procter & Gamble respectively, to interview 50 of them. We selected them based on the clear results they have achieved, and the innovative ways that they accomplished those results – and we made sure to cover a mix of industries, enterprise size, job functions, and geographies.

The findings are published in our book, The Innovative Leader: Step-By-Step Lessons from Top Innovators For You and Your Organization. What emerged from the interviews was a picture of six vectors along which innovative leaders excel. Together, the names of these vectors spell out a fitting acronym: CREATE.

These are the six traits that emerged from our research.

As a pre-condition for being an innovative leader, our interviewees stressed the importance of being connected to the people they serve, whether the company’s customers or employees. To be effective, leadership has to move the company in the right direction, and connection provides the basis for knowing which way to go.

Leaders look to understand the market firsthand. One of our interviewees, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, puts it elegantly and succinctly when he identifies the source of all innovation as “the most humane quality that we all have, which is empathy.”

Accelerate Your Job Search With Marketing’s Most Advanced AI Career Coach

Of course, customer research can become an echo chamber for how the company already thinks. Kimberly Weiss, who leads the mortgage business at First National Bank of Omaha, recounted to us how she re-thought the ways her large institution gathers customer input. “We used to have a 40-question survey about all aspects of customer satisfaction during the mortgage process, like ‘How much did you like your loan processor?’ Well, what if they never really cared about their loan processor? We threw that out, and replaced it with a single question: ‘From 1 to 5, did we create an exceptional mortgage experience for you?’ If you answer 5, we ask why you answered that way. If you don’t, we ask why not. We want to know, in their words, what truly matters.”

Understanding the workforce also makes a big difference. When Joey Bergstein became the chief executive of Sabra Dipping Company, one of his early moves was to work the night shift in a hummus plant. Beyond reading the PowerPoints, he wanted to know firsthand why workers were leaving and how to ensure reliable operations. He told us, “You can ask people what’s going on, but you’ll get neutral answers. When you see it with your own two eyes, it heightens the sense of urgency and deepens your understanding for what is really happening.”

Role Model

A leader sets a tone for their organization, whether it’s a small team or the whole enterprise. People take their cues about how to act from those who lead them. Do the leaders observe and question before deciding on a solution? Do they push to consider several alternative courses of action? Do they think several steps ahead about opportunities and risks?

Jan Swartz knows about role modeling. As chief executive of Princess Cruises during the pandemic, she saw three of her 20 ships struck by outbreaks of Covid-19. Authorities wouldn’t allow them to dock, for fear of bringing the disease into their countries. Passengers and crew were fearful, and people on the ships were dying. Observers wondered if the cruise industry would have any future. It was incredibly, unrelentingly, bleak.

What did Swartz do? She left the company’s headquarters near Los Angeles to fly straight to the pandemic’s early epicenter in Asia. She wanted to demonstrate that a core Princess value is caring for people. While the company could do only so much to manage the outbreak, she conveyed through her own actions that both passengers and crew should always feel cared for.

Partly through role modeling, Swartz built a set of shared values. She recounted: “Everyone had to make decisions on the fly. But they all knew what our True North was, because we had articulated our core values incessantly. In the fog of war, people had the discretion to make decisions that they felt were based in those core values.”

Evolving

When Nadella took the reins at Microsoft, he rapidly pivoted the company to focus on cloud offerings. This paid off: within five years the company’s stock price had appreciated more than four-fold (having barely moved during the 14-year tenure of Nadella’s predecessor Steve Ballmer). The company seemed to be firing on all cylinders.

But Nadella knew that computing wouldn’t stand still, and in the midst of all the success he kept pushing for what’s next. In 2019, he tinkered on his own with emerging Generative AI models, and was astounded by their capabilities. Microsoft invested $1 billion in a tiny, 100-person start-up, called OpenAI. The move certainly worked out: Microsoft’s share price has nearly tripled again since that time.

Audacious

Innovative strategies may be executed in stages, but they’re seldom timid. Sometimes they require highly decisive action.

Ron Shaich has demonstrated this a few times. As the founder of the restaurant chain Au Bon Pain in 1978, he was a pioneer of what’s called fast casual dining. He grew the chain to hundreds of stores across the United States. But, like Nadella, he kept looking around corners too. Shaich had Au Bon Pain pay $23 million to buy a separate business with just 20 stores, the St. Louis Bread Company. As he looked deeply into his new firm’s economics, he made an audacious move. Au Bon Pain spun off its main business into a separate company, and Shaich doubled down on the St. Louis Bread Company. Later on, he sold that business – re-christened as Panera – for over $7 billion.

Three-Sixty Thinker

Creative strategy came up time and again in our interviews. It is a cornerstone of innovative leaders’ plans. Alfred P Sloan and Steve Jobs were each renowned for the strategies they shepherded. They looked well beyond the core product they sold to innovate in areas such as ecosystem partners, internal processes and customer experience.

These opportunities exist in even long-standing industries. The agribusiness giant Ofi (Olam Food Ingredients) has over $10 billion in annual revenue. Although food trading and processing is a low-growth industry, Ofi has expanded rapidly through consistently seeking what’s next. Its president Kamesh Ellajosyula told us, “I have been relentless and consistent with my message for change. No matter how many knocks I take, I will keep coming back, coming back, coming back. In this role, you have to be prepared for the long road.”

Coffee is one business line in which Ofi thought three-sixty. It examined the billions of pounds of coffee cherry flesh that it was throwing away every year. It turns out to be a superfruit rich in antioxidants – so now, Ofi is developing a new market for this one-time agricultural waste.

Enabler

Innovative leaders know that their success can’t depend just on them. Even executives famed for being autocratic, such as Steve Jobs, assemble a first-class cadre of lieutenants around them. They see innovation as a team sport.

Effective leaders find ways to inspire innovation throughout their organizations. As Laura Caron, the head of an innovative elementary school in Massachusetts, recounted to us: “Yesses beget yesses, which beget more good ideas. If I could give advice to my younger self, I would have been bolder to say more yesses to signal innovation faster.”

This also means finding appropriate innovation inspirations for people throughout the organization. “You want to be shown real examples of ‘people like you’ who are able to be an innovator,” Michelle Brennan, Johnson & Johnson’s company group chairman for Europe, Middle East, and Africa, advised us. “Highlight people who have had realistic wins, not just miracle wins.”

Getting Started With Create

Each of these traits takes time to cultivate, both within a single leader as well as throughout an enterprise. But the leaders we spoke with commonly talked about three endeavors for building innovation excellence.

First, they sought to set clear innovation aspirations. What strategy was their company following? Innovation is a means to an end, so what is the end? What sorts of innovations are desired? Laying out the direction for their firms enabled both coherent action and reduced frustration with innovation efforts that might get nixed for being off-target.

Second, they built mechanisms for good ideas to go somewhere. They wanted to avoid people becoming disillusioned by having their ideas linger without implementation. Even small wins could establish momentum for bigger triumphs later on.

Last, they cultivated behaviors for long-term success. Through building capabilities, recognizing innovation efforts, and connecting people across organizational silos, they helped to ensure that people could take ideas and run with them, making big ideas even bigger.

Create is a foundation for innovative leaders, and links to broader efforts to enable organizations as a whole. By adopting Create as their personal approach, leaders ensure on-target, effective, ambitious innovation. That’s what fast-moving times require.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Stephen Wunker, Managing Director of New Markets Advisors and Author of The Innovative Leader.

At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define or redefine and articulate what makes them competitive at critical moments of change, including defining a vision that propels their businesses and brands forward. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers