Former McDonald’s operations leader, Harish Ramalingam, shares 8 lessons on scaling restaurant profitability, staffing to peak demand, and driving operational discipline across multi-unit markets.
Margins are tighter. Labor is more complex. Demand is less predictable.
For multi-unit restaurant operators, building a high-performance market in 2026 requires more than instinct, it requires discipline.
In a Fourth webinar, “High-Performance Markets: Scaling Discipline & Profitability with Lessons from McDonald’s”, former McDonald’s operations leader, Harish Ramalingam, shared what separates strong-performing regions from struggling ones and what operators should prioritize this year.
Here are the key takeaways.
Many organizations set growth targets like “+4% sales.”
The problem? Most crew members can’t translate that into action.
Harish shared an example from McDonald’s: instead of communicating “4% growth,” the goal became “24 more cars per day.” That number was posted, tracked hourly, and understood by everyone, from shift managers to drive-thru crew.
The difference was immediate. Employees could say exactly how many cars they were up versus last year.
Lesson: Goals must be operationally translatable. If frontline employees can’t explain the goal in plain language, execution breaks down.
One of the most common performance killers in multi-unit operations? Initiative overload.
High-performing regions limit themselves to no more than two major priorities at a time.
Everything else falls into:
When GMs juggle too many objectives, focus collapses. When focus collapses, execution suffers.
Operational takeaway: Simplification scales. Complexity doesn’t.
When margins tighten, many operators instinctively cut labor.
But broad labor cuts often trigger a downward spiral:
High-performing markets treat labor differently. They invest in peak hours.
Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. The highest-volume windows are where staffing must align to demand.
Harish noted strong correlations between staffing properly during peak and overall profitability. If the system calls for 14 team members during lunch and you run with 10, service suffers, and so does revenue.
Lesson: Labor is not just a cost. It’s an investment when aligned to demand.
This is where forecasting matters. Staffing based on weekly averages isn’t enough. Peak-based scheduling drives performance.
Although the webinar centered on operational discipline, forecasting was an underlying theme.
If you don’t understand:
…you can’t staff accurately.
Reactive labor decisions often show up too late, after payroll closes or after guest satisfaction drops.
High-performance markets operate proactively:
Profitability is decided before the shift begins.
Two regions within the same brand can perform dramatically differently.
Why? Mid-management discipline.
Directors of Operations and VPs of Ops act as “CEO of the patch.” They:
Without strong leadership layers, scale breaks. Technology can standardize systems, but leadership sustains discipline.
When asked what’s hardest to standardize, Harish pointed to daily operational routines.
Opening procedures. Store walks. Hygiene checks. Equipment readiness.
These aren’t glamorous initiatives, but when daily standards slip, sales follow.
The best operators obsess over:
Operational drift is rarely dramatic. It’s gradual, until it shows up on the P&L.
One surprising data point shared during the webinar:
Service recovery builds loyalty.
But service recovery requires:
This is another reason operational discipline matters. When managers are overwhelmed with manual tasks, guest experience becomes reactive instead of intentional.
Looking ahead, Harish emphasized three themes:
Competition is evolving, from value wars to changing consumer behavior to emerging technologies.
In complex environments, simplicity becomes a competitive advantage:
High-performance markets aren’t built on instinct alone. They’re built on systems that translate strategy into daily behavior, across every location.
Running one store is different than running ten.
Running ten is different than running one hundred.
What separates strong markets from weak ones isn’t brand size, it’s operational clarity.
When goals are translatable, labor aligns to demand, and leadership reinforces focus, profitability becomes repeatable.
In today’s margin environment, that repeatability is what protects long-term growth.
If you’d like to go deeper into how leading operators create translatable goals, staff confidently to peak demand, and scale discipline across every location, you can watch the full webinar on-demand.
If you’re exploring how to reduce reactive labor decisions, eliminate manual scheduling work, and align forecasting directly to staffing and payroll, Fourth can help.
Our AI-powered forecasting and workforce management platform connects demand, scheduling, compliance, and labor performance in one system, giving operators the clarity and control needed to build consistently high-performing markets at scale.
Christina Lau: Hi everyone, thank you so much for joining our webinar today, and welcome to everyone tuning in. I’m Christina from the Fourth team — I’ll be your webinar host today.
Christina Lau: We have an interesting topic to cover, and I’m excited to hear all about it. Before we get started, I’ll go over a couple of housekeeping notes as people are joining and getting settled.
Christina Lau: First: this is being recorded in case you want to rewatch it later, share it with someone, or if you have to step away at any point during the webinar. We’ll be emailing the recording, so no worries.
Christina Lau: Second: if you have questions at any point, please feel free to ask. If you’re joining us live, you should see an option to submit a question towards the bottom right of your platform. And if you’re watching this recording at a later time, you can always email us with any questions you have as well.
Christina Lau: Now for the webinar: today we have a special guest who will be sharing his expertise and insights on high-performance markets.
Christina Lau: I’d love to officially introduce our guest speaker, Harish Ramalingam. Harish is a strategy and operations leader with over 15 years of experience across QSR and consumer. Harish has previously held leadership roles at McDonald’s across four different regions, with a $3.5B business across 11 states, and at Dean Foods, where he oversaw multi-state markets, driving operational discipline and unit-level profitability, as well as leading corporate strategy.
Christina Lau: Joining Harish is Jay Altizer, Fourth’s Chief Operating Officer, who will be moderating today’s discussion. Jay partners closely with restaurant operators and brings a very practical, operations-first perspective on how technology is helping teams improve labor efficiency, control costs, and scale more consistently across locations.
Christina Lau: Thank you both for being here with us today. Jay, I’ll let you take it from here.
Jay Altizer: Thank you, Christina — and thank you mainly, Harish. So excited to have this conversation.
Jay Altizer: Harish and I have been friends for a long time, and he knows more about restaurant operations — and more about a lot of things — than me. He’s forgotten more than a lot of people know. This is going to be fun.
Jay Altizer: Thank you so much for making time to talk with us today.
Harish Ramalingam: Oh, pleasure, Jay. Thanks for having me.
Jay Altizer: You got it. Let me set this up quickly. I’ll describe the agenda for what we’re going to cover today, and then we’ll get into it.
Jay Altizer: What I thought we’d do is talk a little bit about what makes a good operation — a good unit, a good region. I think that is harder to do in the last year or two than it may have been in the past.
Jay Altizer: 2025 was a challenging year for most of the multi-unit operators I’ve talked to. There’s a lot of labor complexity in getting your operations right. Depending upon your menu, the commodity environment may not have been friendly to your margins last year. And it’s been increasingly difficult to push pricing onto consumers in what’s been an unsteady demand environment. It’s hard.
Jay Altizer: So specifically, we’re going to walk through three or four topics. We’ll start with what makes a high-performance market versus a low-performance market — indicators, stories, what it feels like when a market is in trouble, or what it feels like to be in a high-performing market.
Jay Altizer: We’ll talk down the P&L: what “good” looks like, what’s behind it in a strong market, and on the other end what challenges look like.
Jay Altizer: And then we’ll end by talking about how, for leading brands or growing brands, you get operational discipline as you scale — what scaling looks like, what you need to have your eye on — and maybe finish with a few points to watch in 2026 in this environment.
Jay Altizer: If that sounds like a reasonable agenda — thanks again, Harish. I say we get into it.
Harish Ramalingam: Yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to it.
Jay Altizer: Let’s start with this: talk to me about what a high-performing market — or a high-performing set of units — looks like, and how that compares with a more challenged market.
Harish Ramalingam: Got it. For context, I was with McDonald’s for eight and a half years, in Dallas, Houston, Seattle, and Nashville — so we relocated quite a bit. And I’ll tell you: there was a lot of difference between the top-performing regions and the average-performing regions.
Harish Ramalingam: I’ll start with this. In McDonald’s, we used to have “Plan to Win,” which is a national plan, and every region has to come up with a local plan based on it.
Harish Ramalingam: Where most regions fail is not having a translatable goal to start. For example, I was in Houston. When we started, we had a goal of sales up 4%. For executives and corporate employees, that’s easy to understand. But when you go to a store and talk to a crew member and ask, “What is the goal?” some won’t know, some will say it’s 4%. And if you ask them to explain what 4% means, most will say, “I don’t know — I don’t even know our sales.”
Harish Ramalingam: So clearly the goal is not translatable all the way to the end. My opinion is: every employee should be able to explain the goal in a way they understand.
Harish Ramalingam: So we went back and said that goal isn’t working. We need something everyone can understand.
Harish Ramalingam: If you go into a McDonald’s, they measure car counts. You’ll see a paper where they have the hours last year on the same day, and the number of cars they transacted today — so you can see versus a year ago.
Harish Ramalingam: We came up with the goal: “24 cars more,” which translates to 4% sales. A crew member can understand it because they track every hour how many cars you can move this year compared to last year — 8 to 9, 9 to 10, every hour.
Harish Ramalingam: We did a full rollout where we went to franchisees and middle managers and said: every person should be able to understand this goal, and it should be tracked at the restaurant.
Harish Ramalingam: When I started walking into restaurants, you’d see crew members excited saying, “Hey, we’re 10 cars up today already, and it’s only 10 a.m.” People were tracking it — and you could randomly ask, even if you’re going through the drive-thru: “How many cars are you up today?” and they’d say, “16,” “18.” You’d know people were really following it.
Harish Ramalingam: That’s extremely important. I’ve seen many companies with goals that the people who deal with customers don’t understand or can’t speak to. That’s a huge difference between strategy and operations. In good-performing regions, the goals from the top transfer all the way to the bottom.
Jay Altizer: I really like that example — making goals easy to understand and translatable, and widely communicated.
Jay Altizer: Something I’ve seen in other operators is that’s not always the case. Sometimes you’ve got a lot of goals, objectives, paperwork — it becomes an undoable task for the store manager to balance priorities, much less the crew. There’s a new item, a cleanliness initiative, labor-to-sales… a plethora of metrics. If the leadership team isn’t doing the homework to get specific, it makes it confusing at the unit.
Harish Ramalingam: No — I think you’re right. Goals need to translate. Then there’s what we call the “major standards” and “minor” items.
Harish Ramalingam: You cannot have more than two majors for any region. On a day-to-day basis, a restaurant goes through a lot — shift manager to general manager to crew. If you push more than two majors, they lose focus.
Harish Ramalingam: There’s a “standard way of doing business” — things you have to do, no question. Then there are minors that come and go; you focus, but it’s not the top priority.
Harish Ramalingam: Not having more than two majors is one of the biggest recommendations. I’ve dealt with organizations from two restaurants to a hundred restaurants — and in the successful ones, the majors are very focused on one or two things every month.
Harish Ramalingam: Ultimately it comes to having a cadence — a discipline meeting — where you say, “Here is what we need for the month,” so everyone speaks the same language. Then measure it (weekly or daily, however frequently), communicate it, reward it, and incentivize people.
Harish Ramalingam: Simple business. Not complicated. Easy to say — very hard to execute — but those are principles I’ve seen people do really well.
Jay Altizer: Did you see situations where better operators or franchisees had to balance priorities — you’re focused on a couple things, and somebody wants to push something else in? How’d that conversation go?
Harish Ramalingam: I’ll give you an example. When a customer walks into a restaurant or drives through, they look for four or five things: speed, friendliness, accuracy, clean restaurant — and overall friendliness. You can call it whatever you want, but those are the big elements customers look for.
Harish Ramalingam: Every organization can look at their data and say, “I’m lagging in one of these.” You get that through customer feedback, complaints, different forms of feedback.
Harish Ramalingam: So I know an organization that said, “We’re not scoring well on friendliness.” They had a hospitality program — but they said, “I don’t like the word hospitality because a 15-year-old crew member doesn’t understand it.” So they called it “Super Friendly,” which everyone understands. They focused on that.
Harish Ramalingam: Everything has to start from data — trended data over 12 to 15 months — to understand what’s going on. It may not be true for every restaurant. For some, it may be speed. For some, it may be friendliness.
Harish Ramalingam: They copied ideas from Chick-fil-A — respect to Chick-fil-A, they did a wonderful job. One practice: during the interview, if you don’t smile two or three times, you don’t get the job. They don’t tell the candidate — they just observe. If you smile, you’re naturally a friendly person. So they hired the right people, trained them, and focused on getting their friendly score very high.
Harish Ramalingam: They didn’t care as much about speed for a month or a month and a half — they focused on friendliness — and it worked. Customers started telling them there was a big change in the restaurant. Nothing happens in a day, but over time.
Harish Ramalingam: Focus for that restaurant or chain was purely “be friendlier,” and everything else follows.
Jay Altizer: Good segue — let’s talk about the P&L. Compare a healthy store versus a challenged store. Walk down the P&L: sales, labor, food, waste. What’s a good P&L versus a challenged P&L?
Harish Ramalingam: It starts with training — hiring and training. A good organization will have great hiring and a good training practice so people know what’s going on and execute to it.
Harish Ramalingam: When I was getting trained at the restaurant, my general manager was such a stickler. He wouldn’t allow me on anything — I had to do French fries because that was the easiest thing to do at the time. It’s an important best practice.
Harish Ramalingam: If you look at good organizations versus average organizations: good organizations look at labor as an investment. Average organizations look at labor as a cost.
Harish Ramalingam: Labor can be an investment or a cost depending on how you set it up. For example, I can have 14 people working during lunch and move more cars through. Or I can have only 10 people — and I’ll move fewer cars. The biggest difference I’ve seen is people who understand labor is an investment, especially at peak hours.
Harish Ramalingam: You cannot have high labor throughout the day — you need to understand when your peaks are. At McDonald’s, it’s breakfast, lunch, dinner — those six hours. You need to invest labor during those peaks.
Harish Ramalingam: I’ve seen restaurants that hire and staff specifically for that peak time and say, “That’s what I need to invest.” Other restaurants say, “I’m going to cut labor because it’s too expensive.” That’s a big difference.
Harish Ramalingam: McDonald’s had reports — SOAR report or VLH report — that tell you how well you’re staffing to the peak based on the needs. It’s not an average across the week — it’s peak-focused. If the system says you need 14 people and you only have 10 or 11, there’s a strong correlation with sales and profitability. Very strong correlation, at least in the restaurants we could see.
Harish Ramalingam: Training shows up in food controls too — inventory every day, waste control. And then maintenance — how well you maintain machines.
Harish Ramalingam: If you look at the P&L, food and labor are close to 55–60% of the P&L. Control those two, and it differentiates a good restaurant.
Jay Altizer: That matches what we see. I like how you described how these things show up on the P&L.
Jay Altizer: A couple things I took away: training and getting people to understand the system and their role — that’s how you influence outcomes. And labor as an investment is not something we hear everywhere.
Jay Altizer: Labor-to-peaks is a concept we try to advance with customers — getting into a forecasting mindset, like manufacturing: thinking ahead about demand, peaks and spikes, weather or external factors. If you’re nailing the peaks — people there to get the cars through — that’s when you make money.
Jay Altizer: We see operators spiral sometimes: “I’m not making money, I’ve got to cut labor.” If they cut labor broadly, over time guest satisfaction drops — it’s the beginning of the end — and then sales drop. You end up less happy than you were when you thought cutting labor was a good idea.
Jay Altizer: It’s not saying spend frivolously — but service and friendliness drive demand and repeat business.
Harish Ramalingam: I’ll give you one last stat. When a customer walks in or goes through drive-thru and gets a great experience, the odds of them coming back within the next 14 days is about 28–30%.
Harish Ramalingam: However, if a customer has a bad experience and you make it right — they come and say they had a bad experience, and you fix it — the odds of them coming back is 68% within the next 14 days.
Harish Ramalingam: Nobody expects you to get it right the first time, but they want to see you make it right. That drives loyalty — the “customer always wins” mindset. People don’t take the time to make it right, even if it’s the customer’s mistake — it doesn’t matter. Service and friendliness drive repeat business.
Jay Altizer: That’s incredible — double the repeat by fixing a problem versus just doing a good job.
Jay Altizer: Were you measuring that?
Harish Ramalingam: Yes — they’d ask questions like: “How often do you come to McDonald’s?” and “What’s your chance of coming back in the next 14 days?” There’s a lot of data, and teams look into that. Sometimes there’s a coupon. But when someone goes out of the way to make things right, you feel like the company cares about you — and you want to give them business.
Jay Altizer: Super interesting.
Jay Altizer: Let’s talk about scaling. What are the ways you think about taking lessons and practices and getting them to work across hundreds of units? My guess is simplification and focus, plus how you hire and train.
Jay Altizer: We see this a lot: running one is different than running 10, different than running 100.
Harish Ramalingam: Scaling is important. If you look at McDonald’s, people expect the same burger to taste the same in Florida and Seattle — consistency across the country. That’s because they scaled effectively and stayed consistent for customers.
Harish Ramalingam: When I look at big organizations — 80 stores, 100 stores, 120 stores — it’s not rocket science, but it’s hard to execute. You need strong mid-management.
Harish Ramalingam: Let’s say you have 100 restaurants — I’ve seen differences in execution between patches even within the same market, because of leadership differences.
Jay Altizer: That’s interesting. And when you’re saying leadership, which role would that be specifically?
Harish Ramalingam: That mid-management role — VP of Ops, Director of Ops — is extremely important. They’re acting like the CEO of that patch. They need to be strict and make sure what’s important translates. They meet weekly, keep discipline, meet supervisors, meet store managers.
Harish Ramalingam: What really differentiates is keeping it fun. If you make it fun, it becomes translatable.
Harish Ramalingam: I remember organizations running friendly competition — ranking restaurants one to ten or one to fifteen across metrics. I’d ask someone, “What is that store number?” They knew their ranking, but they didn’t know who the competitor was.
Harish Ramalingam: So we changed it to the general manager’s name instead of the store number. Now they knew each other from weekly meetings. People would text: “You’re number 14, I’m number one.” Everybody wanted to win — and they worked together toward the business targets.
Harish Ramalingam: As you scale, you can have a million goals — but what you lack is fun and motivation for people to do it day in and day out. Incentives matter — making it fun matters — because every human being wants to win. They don’t want to be number 14.
Jay Altizer: I love that. It’s like fantasy football — competition. Work should be fun.
Jay Altizer: Let’s take it home and talk about 2026. In this compressed-margin environment, demand challenges, value pricing, battling for share of wallet — operators are trying to use technology in marketing, in the guest experience, and in operations.
Jay Altizer: What are two or three things you’d suggest operators keep front of mind heading into this year?
Harish Ramalingam: It always starts with the customer and ends with the customer. Keep an eye on what your customer needs are.
Harish Ramalingam: With AI and technology coming in, competition is completely different than 20 years ago. For example, GLP-1 is a major competitor to the fast food industry — underrated — and I think in the next 10 years it’s going to matter because it reduces appetite.
Harish Ramalingam: You also have traditional competition — supermarkets are always competition.
Harish Ramalingam: I think you want to do two things well: be better than yesterday, and be best in the block. Every restaurant should be consistently improving and understanding customer expectations.
Harish Ramalingam: Customer expectations change. AI is changing everything. I had a treadmill that didn’t work, tried to call a call center, long wait — I went to ChatGPT, and it gave me steps to fix it. Customers are adapting to technology. We need to understand what the customer need is and deliver it.
Harish Ramalingam: So keeping an eye on the customer is the most important thing.
Harish Ramalingam: And again: the first best practice is easy, translatable goals — make sure everyone can speak and explain them, from crew members to executives. People don’t give it enough importance — it makes a big difference.
Harish Ramalingam: Make it fun. Have clear goals. Make it fun. Keep an eye on the customer. That’s a win for 2026. Technology evolution will disrupt industries — keep an eye on that.
Jay Altizer: That’s a good place to wrap it up: keep it simple, focus on a few things, keep it fun for the team, and stay on top of customers and customer needs. Fantastic and timeless advice.
Jay Altizer: Proud of myself for getting through this session and not joking around as you and I tend to do. Hopefully the audience found a nugget or two.
Jay Altizer: Christina, do we have any questions?
Christina Lau: Absolutely. We’ll move into Q&A. Thank you both for a great discussion so far. If you haven’t asked a question yet, you can still submit one. If we don’t get to yours today, we’ll follow up separately.
Christina Lau: First question: what is the toughest habit to standardize across stores?
Harish Ramalingam: Good question. What I’ve noticed from my experience is the daily program — when you walk into the store, there are certain things you have to do: walk through the store, what I would call clean hygiene.
Harish Ramalingam: Unfortunately, that’s a tough one. People take it and don’t follow it across the store, which creates bad habits and results in sales performance issues.
Harish Ramalingam: Daily habits — walking the store, making sure everything is set up for the day at 4 a.m. or 5 a.m., whenever you start — changes the context of the restaurant. As much as we emphasize it, it’s the most important thing. I’ve seen it vary quite a bit.
Christina Lau: Second question: what did the best operators do when they had a bad week or bad month?
Harish Ramalingam: Bad months and good months are always going to happen. You may have construction and suddenly see a sales loss of 30% for a month or two.
Harish Ramalingam: The best thing is to look forward. Understand what happened and whether it’s in your control. Construction and losing sales isn’t new. Understand what happened, then use that to solve it.
Harish Ramalingam: People who dwell in the past and complain are not going to win. The best people say: “Here’s what happened last month, here are the learnings, and here’s what we’re going to do next month so it doesn’t happen again.” It’s about thinking about the future, not worrying about the past.
Harish Ramalingam: Everybody is going to have a bad month. What you learn and what you do about it is what matters.
Christina Lau: One more: how do you know when a GM is overwhelmed versus just not executing well?
Harish Ramalingam: That’s an easy one. When you go in and ask about the goal — “What are you doing?” — the GM tells you. If the GM cannot tell you the difference between a major, a standard, and a minor (what we talked about earlier), it’s very clear they’re overwhelmed.
Harish Ramalingam: That’s a standard tell. If you ask, “What is your objective? What are you working on?” and the GM talks about more than two things, they’re overwhelmed and doing too much. That’s a good benchmark.
Christina Lau: That’s all the time we have for questions. Thank you to everyone who submitted.
Christina Lau: And to conclude: thank you again, Harish and Jay, for this conversation, and thank you to everyone who tuned in today.
Christina Lau: We hold webinars every month here at Fourth, so hope to see you at the next one. Otherwise, have a great rest of your day.
Christina Lau: Bye.
Harish Ramalingam: Thanks.
Jay Altizer: Thanks.
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