Marketing Brings Them In, Ops Brings Them Back

Chili's just closed its 20th consecutive quarter of same-store sales growth — one of them at 31.6%. Restaurant margins climbed from 11.9% to 17.6%. Average unit volume went from $3.1M to $4.5M. CEO Kevin Hochman paid down more than $570M in debt doing it. His explanation for the turnaround wasn't a rebrand, a new concept, or an AI initiative. It was four words: "Marketing brings them in; ops brings them back."

Hochman didn't reinvent Chili's. He didn't chase what other chains were doing. He looked at what Chili's already did well — the Tex-Mex identity, the value, the classic menu — and doubled down on executing it consistently instead of layering on something new. That instinct has a name in community-development work: Asset-Based Community Development, a principle I first learned from Dr. Michael Christensen at Ocean Grove. Before you catalogue what's missing, you inventory what's already there — the strengths, the relationships, the capabilities a community or organization already has — and you build from that base instead of a gap analysis.

Most AI transformation conversations start backwards. Leaders open with a capability gap analysis — what we don't have, what we need to buy, what the org is missing — before anyone asks what the organization already does exceptionally well. Chili's answer wasn't "what AI tool fixes our traffic problem." It was "what do we already do better than anyone else, and how do we make sure operations doesn't break that promise once marketing has done its job." The same question belongs at the top of every AI initiative list, not the bottom.

Marketing gets people in the door. Systems, process, and follow-through are what bring them back — whether that's a restaurant chain or an AI rollout inside your own company.

From Dancing in the Wind, my book on leading through complexity and change.

Before your next AI initiative gets funded, have you asked what you already do exceptionally well — or only what you're missing?