Organisational Culture, Leadership, And Strategic Management Practices In Moe’s Southwest Grill

Organisational Structure

Moe’s Southwest Grill is one of the fastest growing fast food chains of America. It was founded in the December of the year 2000 in Atlanta, Georgia. The fast-food chain got the name Moe’s an acronym for Musicians, Outlaws and Entertainer.  The restaurant chain is currently having 500 stores in different parts of North America is currently serving an average of 150 thousand guests per day. In the recent years, the company expanded its chain to countries like Russia and Turkey. Presently, the company costs around 500 million and has employees more than 10,000 with Mr Paul Damico as the President of the company since 2007 (Moes.com, 2018). Moe’s is well known for its nachos, tacos and burritos. According to a recent report, it came in to view that Moe’s is opening a new restaurant on an average of every six-day gap and since 2015, the company is growing and improving at a rate of 70% every year (Moes.com, 2018). The company is having their research facility at Atlanta, Georgia with the CEO himself as the Chief of the research facility.

Fig 1: Growth of Moe’s US Franchises

(Moes.com, 2018)

The organisational structure of the Moe’s Southwest Grill is very simple. The restaurant chain is owned by one of the famous organisation, Focus Brands. The higher authority of the restaurant chain comprises of Mr Paul Damico as the president and CEO along with 10 other managers, executives and Vice Presidents, who looks after, the growth of the company, marketing, food representation, public relations and so on (Moes.com, 2018). The next level comprises of Scientists who researches and finds out how new things can be introduced to make their restaurants differentiable from others (Taylor, Bogdan & DeVault, 2015). The third level comprises of the franchise managers who look after their own franchise, appoint staffs for that branch, and do necessary changes in his own branch and so on. The last level comprises of the staffs at different branches who are engaged in works like food serving, cooking, table cleaning, and order taking and so on. The company claims itself to be a customer friendly organisation with customers and the staffs being their priority. According to a recent report by Brizek and Dosser (2014), the brand is having around 78% customer satisfaction with their branches across different parts of North America.

The restaurant chain is in business for more than 10 years but till 2008, the brand was looking like a newcomer in the fast-food chain. Later, when the chain was acquired by Focus Brands, Paul Damico was appointed at the management level. The brand made many changes as a part of their strategic management and Paul Damico also played a huge role, he took the responsibility to re-energize and refresh the brand (Moes.com, 2018). At the start of 2010, Paul changed the business plan and decided to make the company grew. The first thing they worked on is the aesthetics of the Moe’s, which wasn’t looked after since its birth. Among the other changes were the changes in the colour of the walls, and influenced from the findings of Hatch (2018), it can be commented that their new style menu with different and interesting names to attract the customers, new furniture at all its franchises to give an ergonomic feel to its customers and so on. As per the findings of Batenhorst et al. (2015), the main things for which Moe’s is now famous for includes their ‘Welcome to Moe’s’ greetings at all its franchises and the ‘all you can eat’ salsa bar. With this, they introduced self-service in all their franchises and the customers accepted it as they were delighted with the new coloured walls with designs that refresh and re-energize them.

Strategic Management and Leadership

After Paul Damico coming to the administrative level, he made a new rule of all the executives directly reporting to him with all the day’s report and he personally made constant interaction with the supply chains, regular customers with a greeting, and so on without leaving the full work on his executives. The company hired new staffs with the maximum age limit being 35 as they wanted energetic and positive staff, who would spread the positivity among the customers (Moes.com, 2018). This new strategic management changes in early 2011 helped the brand to grow its customer base by 20 – 25 percent with a customer spending an average of 38 minutes at the restaurant compared to previous 25 minutes.

Fig 2: Chat showing increase in average spending time and customer base

(Source: Created by the Researcher)

Influenced from the findings of Jesinoski, Miller & Volker (2016), it can be opined that another thing which helped the company to arose to such a great extent is the introduction of their new app named Rock ‘in Rewards through which, customers can use the Augmented reality feature of the phone to interact with the characters and food items which are pictured on the walls. This attracted customers including the kids towards it. All these changes helped the company to become the leader of the Mexican fast-food companies with the highest growth rate, customer base and customer as well as employee satisfaction rate.

In the race of time, all the companies and giant brands are competing with the objective of growing their market share, customer base, revenue and so on. However, according to the findings of Karam and Saydam (2015), the main thing, which the developing and developed companies consider as a great opportunity to expand their market in different regions is the online food delivery and partnership with food delivery organisations and companies. Moe’s despite having a good customer base and satisfaction rate, they are not looking to expand their business online, through delivery.

Moe’s is having their own Android and the iOS-based application named Rock ‘in Rewards through which, the customers can view the menu cards and use the app to earn rewards based on order at Moe’s branches and franchises (Moes.com, 2018). As per the analysis of Kimes and Laqué (2015), the main thing the app can do is the use of augmented reality to interact with the food items and characters on the restaurant walls, but the company doesn’t pay any attention with no future hope to integrate a food delivery feature in the app. The company should look into the matter as most of the restaurant chains are doubling and sometimes tripling their income with the help of the food delivery. Influenced from the findings of Lawlor, Dunne and Rowley (2016), it can be advised that Moe’s can add their feature in their own app with a minor update as they are having a well-optimised app. This will not only help the company to deliver food to many people but also will help the company to increase customer base as well as the customer satisfaction.

A Major Issue of Organisation and Solution

Most of the business now a day has Strengths, weakness, opportunities and Threats. Now we are going to discuss one of the major strength of the Moe’s southwest grill business. The strength is that the company cares about customer feedback and wants to improve themselves with the help of that. With this objective, Moe’s use different types of media systems to take the feedback from their customers and can interact with customers (Moes.com, 2018). For example, Moe’s built their own app Rock ‘in Rewards which has a feature allowing customers to customise their menu according to their taste and favourites. With the help of this feature, MCGLOTHLIN (2014), states that people can choose different ingredients, which they want to put on their foods served there, like taco, burrito or quesadilla.  

The contingency theory says the following things. Firstly, each and every organisation is an open system, satisfied by careful management and adaptation to environmental circumstances.  Secondly, as per Suzuki, K., & Nelson, M. R. (2018), there is no best way to organise a business, the appropriate task depends on the dealing of the given task and environment. Thirdly, the management of the organisation must be concerned to achieve goals. Lastly, different types of organisations are required in different environments. If we go by this theory, Moe’s Southwest Grill is an organisation, which is adapting to the changes like influencing people with the use of social media, the management is also concerned with the achievement of the goals and worked with the software developers to develop the Augmented Reality based app, which is the change is environment and demands of the customer as we are advancing towards digitalisation. According to all these, the Contingency Theory is justified, and the following feature is also justified as a strength of the organisation.

Fig 3: Comparison between Contingency theory and Organisation’s current position

(Source: Otley, 2016)

According to this theory, the company should have a good interaction with its employees as well as its customers and the company should advance towards betterment by working on the feedbacks by the customers. In case if this theory is followed, Moe’s has their own public relations team and a software development team who are constantly associated with taking feedbacks from the customers and with the objective to make their dining experience good, the company integrated the augmented reality feature in their app, so that customer can choose and customise their food on their own. Based on the findings of Spradley (2016), it can be critiqued that the company management also tries to provide a good working environment for the employees and employees are always in touch with the top executives and the president of the organisation to motivate them. In this way, the theory justifies the following point as the strength of the organisation.

Evaluating A Significant Strength of The Business

Fig 4: Chart based on happiness growth of customer after providing feedback

(Source: Developed by the Researcher)

In the participant observation method, a top-level authority staff like the President or CEO comes in disguise and keeps a watch on the employees by being an employee him. In this case, the President of the company of the company became the employee at one of his branches and kept a watch on the environment and staff behaviour. In the end, he found out a staff was not up to the mark and he was not dealing customers politely and got fired up. As per Schoffman et al. (2016), this not only helps to get an idea, what’s going on in the smaller branches but also to get detailed information, which is not in papers. Other ways to evaluate business practice are – Checking customer satisfaction, taking 360-degree feedback and so on.  

The Organisation is doing a great job by taking the feedback from the customers and working on them, but they would have to introduce food delivery in their app or in collaboration with other food delivering company. The food delivery service would help the company to reach new limits with a huge bump in the sale of the products and customer base. Moreover, the organisational structure and the leadership are in good hands.

Conclusion

Moe’s Southwest Grill is one of the biggest Mexican fast food restaurant chain and is working hard as a team to hold its topmost position in the fastest growing fast-food chain with Chipotle Mexican Grill as its main competitor.  Since the appointment of Paul Damico, the company has changed very much and is advancing day by day. He introduced many new concepts like funny food menus, changing the wall colours and designs, and ergonomically designed furniture, the new app with augmented reality feature for customers to customise food and earn rewards and so on. The company is working hard to spread its hands in different parts of the world.

References

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Moes.com, (2018). WELCOME TO MOE’S. Retrieved on 21 September 2018. Retrieved from https://www.moes.com/