The joke around here is that we are on the Burgerville beat. The Holland Inc. – owner of 39 Burgervilles in Washington and Oregon – is a PR machine. The company is routinely announcing new programs and innovations, promotions and hires, affiliations and partnerships. And since part of our mission at the Vancouver Business Journal is to chronicle the activity of Southwest Washington business, we cover these announcements as a matter of course. Sometimes, though, from this particular company, it feels like a deluge – hence, the Burgerville beat.
The company made the decision a couple of years ago to stop advertising and start telling its stories. Smart move, too, because the stories are quite compelling, as you’ll read in Charity Thompson’s Page 1 story “Beyond Burgers” and its adjacent sidebar – a particularly “beefy” news package. Just in its stores, the company is expected to reduce garbage hauling fees by $100,000 this year through composting, recycling and lowering food waste; has offered affordable health insurance to all employees working an average of 20 hours a week; and is fully invested in wind power for 100 percent of its energy.
But more important is the idea of storytelling that is becoming entrenched in the Burgerville culture and really informing the way the company does business. In fact the company has recently proven the power of storytelling among their own front line employees. Spokeswoman and trainer Charlena Miller talks about meeting with the workers in one particular store and engaging them in the Burgerville story. That store then hit a record in promotional sales and moved into the $2 million sales category. They simply got behind it. A far cry from recent news about Portland-based Hollywood Video, which is being accused by employees of firing over lack of promotional selling.
This kind of training through storytelling has been so successful for the company that it has now designed a course, which it may choose to market to governments and other businesses for internal training purposes. Think Pike Place Fish Co.’s “world famous” fish mongers.
Having maintained strong growth over several years now, and turned its focus solely on Burgerville restaurants, The Holland is setting its sights much higher than customer retention. The company is ready to tell its story to other businesses and to the restaurant industry at large, seeking to affect policy change around hot-button topics like health care and sustainability in the fast-food arena. While it may seem that sustainability isn’t controversial and that businesses everywhere are jumping on the bandwagon, we are still talking about the industry that institutionalized the ketchup packet.
Storytelling has been a useful tool for the company and contributed significantly toward its success. It’s a good idea for them to take the broad view. Burgerville has been instrumental in putting Vancouver on the map, and as I see it, it can and should use its resources and knowledge to help other businesses keep us on the map.
