My family usually drives home from vacation on a Sunday, and every single time, somewhere along the highway, Chick-fil-A sounds really good. So we stop at Whataburger instead. We’re happy with Whataburger (this is Texas, after all), but what we really wanted was Chick-fil-A.
It’s fine. We know why Chick-fil-A is closed, and we respect it.
And we’re clearly not the only ones who feel that way. Chick-fil-A rang up a whopping $23.9 billion in sales last year, which puts it behind only McDonald’s and Starbucks among America’s restaurant brands.¹ And it did that while being open six days a week.
Truett Cathy opened the first Chick-fil-A restaurant in 1946 and closed it on Sundays so he and his employees could rest and go to church if they wanted to.² Eighty years later, every Chick-fil-A still closes on Sunday—even the one inside the Atlanta stadium where the Falcons play.³ A few years back, one analyst estimated those Sundays cost the chain more than a billion dollars a year in sales, and they close anyway.⁴
This month, Truett’s grandson Andrew, who runs the company now, said no to two more things. He told CNBC that Chick-fil-A won’t go public and won’t take outside money. As he put it, “We’re able to plan for the quarter century, and we don’t have to plan for the quarter.”⁵
And while McDonald’s just announced plans to test AI that takes your order at the drive-thru, Cathy said Chick-fil-A won’t go there: “We’re not gonna substitute that interaction with technology, because we feel like that hospitality is so important to create that warm environment for consumers.”⁵
Then the Today show asked him why the restaurants still close on Sundays, and he didn’t hedge: “It is our anchor, in the sense of what our corporate purpose states, that we’re in business to be a glorifier of God.”⁶
Last month I wrote about Scott Bedbury’s brand mantra, the three words at the core of a brand where each word has a job, and I promised I’d come back to the middle word. This is that month.
For a company, the middle word is usually a category, the market it wants to own. For a mission-driven organization, it’s a conviction, the thing you’ve been called to, and that’s the change I made to Bedbury’s form when I built the Brand Soul™.
Here’s the difference. A company picks its category, and when the market moves, it can pick a new one. But nobody picks a conviction, and nobody believes you have one until they watch it cost you something.
Chick-fil-A could open on Sundays next week if it wanted to, and the money would be sitting right there. The Cathy family turns it down every week, and I think that’s exactly why people believe them when they say what the company is for. They don’t close on Sundays as a growth strategy. Andrew Cathy calls it the anchor.
Back in July I asked you to find the sentence, the reason your organization exists. Saying that sentence out loud doesn’t cost you a thing, though.
So this month I want to ask you a harder question: What has it cost you?
Most organizations have convictions that have never really been tested. They’re on the website and in the annual report, but they’ve never stopped a single decision.
Your conviction gets tested when somebody hands you a good offer that doesn’t fit, like when…
- A government grant would cover a third of your budget if you take the Gospel out of the program.
- A major donor will fund a new program if you launch it, and it doesn’t fit what you’re called to do.
- Someone on staff suggests letting AI write and send your thank-you notes to save time.
None of those are bad ideas, and they usually come from good people who want you to grow. That’s what makes them so hard to turn down.
Take the thank-you notes. If you believe every donor is a person and not a transaction, somebody on your team keeps writing them by hand, even when it takes all week.
Donors notice this more than you’d think. They react the same way my family does at Whataburger on a Sunday: a no might disappoint them for a minute, but it earns their respect. They figure an organization that turns down easy money will be careful with theirs.
Chick-fil-A gets to say no in public every Sunday. Most of your nos happen in a board room, where nobody outside ever hears about them, so your donors never get the story.
Two parts.
First, write down your middle word, the one-word conviction your organization was called to. If you found your sentence back in July, start there.
Second, look back over the last twelve months and find one time that word cost you something. Maybe it was a grant you turned down, or a sponsor you said no to. Write it down next to the word. And if you can’t find one, be honest with yourself: what you have right now is a slogan, not a conviction.
If you do find one, tell your donors about it. Your best story of the year-end season might be sitting in your board minutes.
Don’t hand this one to Claude or Chat. They can write you a beautiful conviction in seconds, but they can’t tell you what you’ve turned down.