starfish

February 4, 2007

Thinks Big About the Little Guy

By MICHAEL FITZGERALD

IN 1990, Steven T. Bigari was running a string of McDonald’s franchises in Colorado Springs and spending most of his working hours thinking about the big bad wolf at his door, otherwise known as Taco Bell, which was killing his business with a promotional menu of items costing only 59 cents each.

One day, the restaurants’ owner, Brent Cameron, who was also his mentor and friend, sat down with him over breakfast at one of the franchises, just off Highway 83. “O.K., Steve, what’s your plan?” he asked.

Mr. Bigari outlined the situation, and it was dire: their operations were hemorrhaging cash. Then he presented a plan to cut costs by eliminating, among other things, paid vacations for crew members. What happened next would change Mr. Bigari’s life.

“Brent politely asked me to step into the vestibule and he stuck his finger in my face and used a foul word for one of the three times I ever heard one cross his lips,” Mr. Bigari said. “He said, ‘You can afford to give up your rizzing-razzing vacation, but they can’t, so I hope you have a better plan than that.’ ”

Mr. Bigari said he got the message: take care of your people. It was a message that stuck with him even after Mr. Cameron died and Mr. Bigari became a top McDonald’s franchisee himself — eventually owning 12 stores, three patents and a reputation for clever ideas, like letting customers pay with credit cards and outsourcing the drive-through. Even as his business grew, he kept Mr. Cameron’s crew benefits in place, and began adding to them.

Indeed, over time, he went much further. He created a system to help resolve the problems of the working poor who staffed his restaurants by pulling together or creating an array of services, from arranging day care to organizing transportation to making small emergency loans. The goal, he said, was to keep his employees on the job and focused on customers.

Now he is trying to persuade others to offer this kind of help to their workers, not as an act of kindness or charity but as a way to reduce employee turnover and increase profit — as, he said, it did for him.

This is a major challenge. After all, American business culture tends to focus on employees at the top, not at the bottom. And many don’t want to be told that they pay workers poverty-level wages. Mr. Bigari says he thinks that they will see the light when they see the return they can get from helping the working poor, both as employees and as customers.

MR. BIGARI, 47, is an unlikely candidate to save the working poor. He is a millionaire who lives in Colorado Springs, a politically conservative city that is far from the coastal enclaves of most social entrepreneurs, the catch phrase for people who come up with innovative, nongovernmental ways to address social problems. He has the no-nonsense short hair and straight back of a West Point graduate. (He was in the class of 1982.)

. . .

Mr. Bigari says he knows he is tackling a far bigger problem than a McDonald’s franchise has to face — a point he illustrates with a story about a beach strewn with starfish. A boy is throwing them back in the ocean, one by one, when a man comes by and says: “What are you doing? You can’t possibly make a difference here.”

Without looking up or pausing, the boy picks up another starfish, tosses it in the ocean and says, “Did for that one.”