Chamber 🏰 of Tech Secrets #38

Reflecting on 20 years at Chick-fil-A

The Chamber 🏰 of Tech Secrets is open. Thanks to everyone who sent an email or made a comment here or on LinkedIn to say congrats about Jackson. I really appreciate the community that exists around the Chamber 🏰 of Tech Secrets… I always read, appreciate, and generally reply to everything you guys say. Thanks for being here! This week is not really about tech, but rather about what I have learned as I reflect on my 20 years at Chick-fil-A. I hope you find it beneficial.

Reflecting on 20 years at Chick-fil-A

During my college years, I worked at a local Chick-fil-A restaurant as a Team Leader, managing the front counter area, working the drive thru, cleaning the dining room, and restocking sauces. At that time, Chick-fil-A was still fairly regional. Most payments were cash as we did not yet take credit cards (but we did take personal checks). We still hand cupped coleslaw each morning. We did not sell milkshakes. There was no Chick-fil-A One mobile experience. I think I capped out my hourly earnings at $6/hour.

During college, I only interviewed with two companies: Accenture and Chick-fil-A. I got offers from both on the same day and told Chick-fil-A “yes”. I showed up a few months later fresh out of college with minimal real-world experience. The most useful skill I had was relational database modeling and SQL. I was far less mature than I thought I was at the time. I knew far less (about anything and everything) than I thought I did. I was nervous to share my thoughts, apprehensive around people with big titles, and diligently avoided confrontation. I was slow to speak in meetings. People used terms I didn’t understand and I would patiently wait for context to emerge naturally — sometimes over weeks — before figuring out what they were talking about. I remember the this distinctly with “cloud computing”, which I found very confusing at the time. 😜 Overall, I was simply hoping to do a good job, avoid getting noticed and hopefully not get exposed as someone who didn’t really belong.

As of Friday, June 7, I have been working at Chick-fil-A for 20 years. 😱

I literally cannot disconnect Chick-fil-A’s influence on my life from the person I am today.

The things I value, the way I think, how I work, what I know, what I do, the way I have grown… all have been highly influenced by this wonderful organization.

For fun, here are a few things I have worked on over the years:

• third-level escalated support for all restaurant systems (in-store client server and web apps)

• data replication from stores to corporate for supply chain orders, daily sales data, etc. using Sybase database replication technologies over dial-up internet connections

• simple bug fixes and code changes in Delphi for our locally-hosted “ERP” for restaurants

• developer productivity tools and code release automation (in like 2008)

• lots of SQL in Oracle and Sybase databases for countless purposes

• solution architecture using enterprise middleware tools like Oracle SOA, Mulesoft, etc.

• implementing the user profile APIs for Chick-fil-A One in java for the first time

• leading the move to AWS Cloud for the enterprise (along with others, I take no credit)

• helping shift our organization to a DevOps / Product Team focused model

• launching our data lake infrastructure

• creating our IOT strategy and Edge Compute capabilities

• leading the Enterprise Architecture practice and a fantastic team of wonderful people who try to make sure that technology helps us win

There are many, many more. A lot of the work is meaningful, but I am even more thankful that some of my best friends have come from working on some of these projects.

Reflections on 20 Years

I want to share a few reflections from my 20 years, both to celebrate and hopefully help you think about your own career.

• Gratitude: I have to start with gratitude. The business I work for and the family that owns it are nothing short of outrageously generous. They are committed to slow and conservative growth so that we can be a company that doesn’t do layoffs. Ever hire is long-term. We share wonderful ideas like “value results and relationships” and “be the world’s most caring company” and we actually pursue them. Everyone that I have ever worked for has invested in me and cared for me as a person. To any of you who read this, you know who you are: Thank You! I would not be the person I am today without your influences on my life. So what action you take away from this? Two things:

  • Express your gratitude for people who invest in you to those people. They will appreciate it and it will make your relationship stronger. And its the least you can do. Do it early and often.

  • Become a person who invests in others such that they are going to think of you when they reflect on their growth and are grateful. Do it for them, not for you.

• Purpose: Chick-fil-A has a Corporate Purpose. I see it on a plaque any time I enter our Support Center’s main building. I know many companies have the same. What I think is rare about Chick-fil-A is that the Corporate Purpose actually drives everything that we do. It reads: “to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all we have been entrusted with and to have a positive influence on all who come in contact with Chick-fil-A”.

  

  Photo credit: Wall Street Journal

  Stewardship (thinking like an owner) and positive influence are two core things I can rally around. What action can you take? If you can, attach yourself to a place that operates by a purpose (I know they are rare) and make sure its one that resonates with you. It will make your work so much more meaningful and will enrich your life.

• Play the long game: I almost left Chick-fil-A at one time over what seemed like a lot of money but was trivial in the long run. That would have been one of the biggest mistakes of my life. In those conversations, someone told me that I needed to “play the long game”. It was not what I wanted to hear at the time, but it was so true. I was thinking short-term. Another time, I remember looking around the department I work in and thinking “wow there are already leaders and potential future leaders ahead of me for all these area, I just don’t see where I will ever have any opportunity to move any further”. Short-term thinking. There have been countless opportunities since. I already wrote about the benefits of job-hopping vs staying long term, so I’ll stop here, but I definitely have learned that, at any given time, my perspective about what is possible in the long-term is far too narrow. “We overestimate what we can do in the short term, but underestimate what we can do long term” — I think this says it well. By playing the long-game, I can overcome my own limitations in vision for the future and allow time to work for me instead. Speaking of time…

• Personal growth compounds: Each bit of personal growth you experience —whether intentional or absorbed via osmosis — is like adding a few dollars to your high-yield savings account (for simplicity of metaphor — obviously you would 401k match first, then max your ROTH, build an emergency fund, etc etc 😜). Without even knowing it, you will exercise that growth on a daily basis, resulting in a compounding effect. You’ll make intentional deposits too through challenging projects or personal development. A few more pennies in your account. Then you experience the benefits of time and compounding. When you look in your account after 5, 10, or 20 years you will find that you are far more “rich” than you ever expected was possible. This is how I feel and what I have experienced. I entered Chick-fil-A as a mere shadow of my current self, and I am not shy to say that I am pleased with who I have become because it honors those who made it possible (and most of those people are not me). What can you do with this? INVEST. IN. YOURSELF. Sometimes you will benefit from the culture around you. Other times you will have to devote some time to grow yourself and set yourself up for future opportunity. Start early because time is your friend. Deposit often because the larger the base, the greater the compounding effect.

• It takes more than “tech skills”: I started my career with a few tech skills. I grew some more over time with different experiences and roles. Some were on the job and some were personal development investments on my own time (learning programming languages, cloud services, etc.). Most of the things I learned early on are irrelevant and obsolete now (Sybase database replication over dial up internet, anyone?). More important than each specific technical skill, I built what I think is a pretty solid foundation over time such that new things that come along mostly make sense to me and I can see how they would fit into our enterprise architecture. Tech changes fast and will keep changing fast so, if you want to be able to grow with your business, you need to focus not on mastering a single thing, but mastering how to add new things to your current things. This may not be perfect advice for everyone but I think it would be useful to many. Get curious and stay curious and don’t get lazy on learning new things. At some point though, knowing all the tech becomes not enough. So my advice is to make sure you 1) build organizational context so you can understand how things fit together 2) develop soft skills so you can be influential and build good relationships and 3) be okay to steadily plod towards “better” because change is hard and it takes time.

• Everything else: I could go on and on about things I have learned but I would never hit them all because I have been shaped in so many positive ways slowly over time — like a pebble that gets smooth in a river — that attribution is impossible. I am confident saying that, if I had accepted an offer from Accenture, I would not be who I am today.

There are thousands of phrases running through my head — “here to serve”, “if you aren’t selling chicken, you better be helping someone who is”, “create raving fans”, and of course “my pleasure”.

It is easy to get frustrated with work for any number of reasons. I have my frustrations on a regular basis (often daily). Our former Chick-fil-A President retired last year and in his last talk, he said this about Chick-fil-A as a company: “Is it perfect? No way… But is it special? Absolutely”. I love this perspective and try to remember it every day. No place is perfect and we can always improve on many things… but the place I have spent the last 20 years is truly a special place filled with incredible people pursuing a meaningful mission and purpose, and that is more than I could have ever asked for and more than I deserve. I am grateful for 20 years, and looking forward to spending the rest of my career right here. 🙏