Next year, passengers on Southwest Airlines flights will be able to find their assigned seat and, for an upcharge, get to luxuriate in an extra 5 inches of legroom – just like they do now on Delta, American, and United.
The days of open seating and “one class” cabins, like on the flight I’m on today, are numbered.
This huge change is coming to the carrier whose business strategy initially appeared on a cocktail napkin – a carrier that, once, had plastic, re-usable boarding passes.
It also turns out that an activist investor is being very critical of Southwest’s management and performance and wants to replace two-thirds of the board with new people – and fire the CEO and executive chair.
Thus the openness to change by current leaders.
Elliot Investment Management says that the current team “has delivered poor returns for shareholders and has not held management accountable for Southwest’s unacceptable performance.”
They also have a survey showing that Southwest customers want these changes.
Be Your Own Activist Investor
What can you learn from the seismic change happening at Southwest?
For your successful multi-unit independent restaurant company, it turns out that YOU are the activist investor, CEO, and executive chair combined – so your job remains safe.
But being the activist investor also gives you great power and responsibility to look critically at your own restaurants.
Answer These Questions
- What radical action do you take – in an environment that values guest count above all else – to make your guests happier and attract lapsed users and non-users?
- How do you adopt the best of industry standards and still differentiate your brands so they become special?
- Should you adopt technology to make your restaurants more efficient – or dump it to increase your hospitality quotient?
- Should you update your offerings and stop serving menu items that do not make you super-proud?
- How do you give your managers the time and power to develop better relationships with guests and spend more time developing people vs. paperwork?
- How can you re-invent and activate unique branding, messaging, and culture that no one can match?
- What would make it easier for customers to communicate with you, to park, to find your locations, to get in and out quickly, to register a complaint, and to have issues corrected?
- What employee benefit packages will upgrade your people and your operations?
- What rings loudly in your head as you read? What increases guest count, revenue, and profit?
- What does the equivalent of the radical change coming to Southwest Airlines look like at your company?
- When do you start to increase guest count, raise revenue and profit, and outpace the competition?
