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dean durling
of Quick Chek
R E T A I L
L E A D E R
O F
T H E
BY SAMANTHA OLLER || soller@cspnet.com
40
CSP
December 2010
Y E A R
Photo by Scott Mitchell
“Retail is detail—that’s what’s so
intriguing about our business,
and what we’re doing here.”
December 2010
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41
A
rep for a major
beverage company
is on a flight home
from the NACS Show. He notices that
his seatmate is reading CSP magazine.
“Hey, are you in the industry?” the
beverage rep asks. “Who do you work
for?”
“Quick Chek,” the man replies.
“Oh, really?” the rep asks, and flips
through his mental Rolodex for the name
of Quick Chek Corp.’s beverage buyer.
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CSP
December 2010
“Do you work for Bill Tencza?”
“Yes,” the man says, before returning
to his reading.
The man is Dean Durling. The story,
says Tencza, Quick Chek’s senior category manager for packaged beverages,
snacks and candy, is classic Dean Durling.
“Dean could have said he was the
CEO and president of the company,
but he just went with it. If there are successes here, he won’t stand up and say,
‘I did this.’ It’s ‘us.’ ”
Quick Chek Food Stores, Whitehouse
Station, N.J., is synonymous with innovation, disciplined execution and highquality employees. It is a remarkable
achievement, considering the company
has flourished in a state where building
a new store takes four years and regulations shackle the easy money of the
c-store business: smokes, fuel and beer.
With 125 stores in New Jersey and
New York, Quick Chek is small compared to giant independents such as
QuikTrip and Sheetz, but its impact on
industry thinking is arguably just as
great. And it’s here where leadership
has made the difference.
Dean is the third leader of Quick
Chek, a company established by his
father, Carlton Durling, in 1967 and
then led by his mentor, Bob Page, for
three decades. Some might presume
that, after becoming president in 2003,
Dean had the easy part: take what was
built and just stoke the embers. But that
would be underestimating him.
“As he took over the company
totally, it was important to maintain
solid fundamentals already established,”
says Bruce Krysiak, a Quick Chek board
member for the past 10 years, and former president of Toys ‘R’ Us and Dollar
General. “He wanted to grow the company faster in a positive way and was
interested in how to make the company
better. Where can we innovate more?”
“We call it ‘restless dissatisfaction,’ ”
Dean says in an exclusive interview with
CSP. “In the business, it’s never really
being satisfied, and how do we improve
things? Sometimes we appreciate what
we’ve done, but then say, ‘How do we
move on?’ ”
You see the results in Quick Chek’s
made-to-order foodservice program,
which generates one-half of in-store
profits. You sense it in the expansive
coffee bar with its digital timer that
tracks freshness. You admire the chutz-
December 2010
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Family Time
“His character is very home-bound,” says son Jonathan about
Dean. “It’s really about enjoying the people around him.” He shares
the childhood memory of wintertime at the farm, when his dad
would pull him and his siblings on a toboggan behind his Jeep
down the snow-covered hills. Afterward, they would come inside
to a roaring fire. “Looking at photos, you’ve got hot chocolate in
the background, the big fireplace,” he says, laughing about how
the scene resembled a catalog. “We each have our own Patagonia
fleeces with our initials on it.”
Whenever the older Durling children—Jonathan, sister Ngaere,
and brother Chapman—are in town, Dean will prepare a healthy,
hearty meal to bring the family together.
“Steak on Fridays, chicken on Sundays is the joke of my sister,
brother and I,” says Jonathan. “I think every parent does that: In
order to get the family together, it’s based around the dinner table.”
And dinner conversation is kept decidedly democratic.
“Sometimes he will stop the dinner conversation if it focuses too
much on one or the other, and make it go to one of the other
children,” says wife Liz, mother to Oliver and Posey. “Maybe Posey’s
looking bored and he’ll say, ‘OK, Posey, tell me about riding today.’”
pah of the self-checkouts—an industry
first—and the embrace of social media
and creative marketing campaigns. But
the friendly smiles and passion of
Quick Chek employees drive it home.
“He wants you to take full ownership,” says Liz Ferraro, store leader for
Quick Chek’s store in North Branch, N.J.
“When I’m in my store, I feel like my
store is my store—not Dean’s. And
because he is so driven, and the risks that
he takes and the changes he makes, he’s
not afraid of risk or change. And he
made me not afraid of risk and change.”
“When he comes in, what I really,
really love is that he goes to each one of
my employees, shakes their hand and
tells them, ‘Thank you for doing a great
job,’ ” says Tina Ogilvie, store leader for
the Bloomfield Quick Chek. “He tells us
all how proud he is. Then in the middle
of that, I usually find him standing off
to the side, just watching and analyzing
“When you come into a
business that your father
started, you don’t always
come in wanting to
change things. … I think
[Dean’s] not constructed
that way. I think he’s
persistent in his desire for
continuous change.”
every single thing that’s going on in the
store, because he’s got to be who he is.”
A servant leader. A cerebral thinker.
A man who thrives in the controlled
chaos of retail, with its countless moving parts.
“You have to do 100 things right to
be the best: people, processes, having
the right coffee, subs, real estate, maintenance,” says Dean. “Retail is detail—
that’s what’s so intriguing about our
business, and what we’re doing here.”
And it’s in this spirit of innovation,
leadership and continuous improvement that CSP is honored to name
Dean Durling as its 2010 Retail Leader
of the Year.
QUIET PERSEVERANCE
Dean is an established member of the
New Jersey gentry. He has a prep-school
pedigree. His passions have included
sailing, dressage and fox hunting. And
he has a level of control, from the way
he prioritizes his thoughts to his conservative, crisp clothes, that is simply
admirable.
“He’s a quiet soldier, marching along
to his own drumbeat,” says Stan Sheetz,
CEO of Sheetz Inc., Altoona, Pa., a
friend who has served with Dean on
the NACS board. “The guy’s pretty set
in his ways. An example is his blazer
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and button-down shirt: Even if you tell
Dean to ‘go casual,’ he still has on that
damn button-down shirt and blazer.”
Dean, 55, lives in his childhood
home, a rambling but refined house
built by his father on the scenic Durling
farmland; family lore has it that baby
Dean was carried upstairs on a ladder
while the home was under construction. His parents and brother also live
on the compound, in farmhouses
nearby. And although the cows on the
surrounding fields are gone, the agrarian heritage of Quick Chek perseveres.
Dean’s great-grandfather established
the Durling Farms milk business in
1888, producing, packaging and processing milk, and shipping it throughout the New York metropolitan market.
His grandfather grew distribution and
oversaw a fleet of milkmen. But by the
late 1950s, supermarkets were
encroaching on that business. For Carlton, as third-generation leader, it meant
that Durling Farms had to become a
retailer to survive.
Those first Quick Chek Food Stores
were downtown “superettes,” stocked
with milk, bread, a deli and produce.
Bob Page joined in 1968 as general manager. While he ran the stores—which at
that time numbered three—Carlton
focused on finances and real estate.
“The office was in the back of a
store, and in the wintertime when the
truck unloaded, snow came into the
office,” says Page, laughing at the memory. “It was great, because we learned
to make lots of mistakes, and learned
the business from the ground up.”
It’s part of what Dean refers to as
Quick Chek’s “DNA.” “The principals
in our dairy business were fresh products, friendly people and serving the
New York metro market,” he says.
PEP TALK: Dean and senior vice president of operations Mike Murphy meet
with new Quick Chek employees for
an 8-hour orientation, during which
they learn the hallmarks of company
culture and performance standards.
“When you think about it, those are the
same things we do today.”
During that time, young Dean
would ride his bicycle to the Durling
Farms processing plant and catch a lift
on the milk truck to the stores to stock
shelves. He accompanied his older
brother, Corey, on a milk route and
stayed busy with chores on the farm:
“Our team members are
really part of our brand
and how our customer
sees us. We have to make
sure as we grow that we
don’t allow that to be
weakened or diluted in
any way.”
mowing the lawn, bringing in the hay
and, in his down time, chasing cows,
fishing and riding ponies.
As the second-oldest of three children, Dean was not the traditional heir
apparent of Quick Chek. He was given
the chance to work at the farm and in
the stores, but there were no reserved
spaces. That philosophy has extended to
his five children and 2,600 employees.
“I call it ‘opportunity,’ ” says Dean.
“We’ll provide opportunities, but people have to take them. We’re not going
to deliver it on a silver platter. So as I
was growing up, whether it was on the
farm, in the stores, over summers or
over holidays and Christmas, I found
opportunities and then I took them.”
It was a stealth progression of sorts.
“There wasn’t a heck of a lot of
attention that went to Dean,” says wife
Liz, a Rhode Island School of Design
graduate, citing his middle-child status
and understated personality. “So he
would just observe things around him
and quietly learn. I think that was what
made him strong and successful.”
In 1977, after graduating from Cornell University with a food-retailing
degree, Dean joined the humanresources department at Quick Chek.
He eventually moved through marketing, real estate and other departments
on his way up.
“My responsibility was of course to
mentor him, round him out and watch
him grow,” says Page. By this point,
Dean had become Page’s obvious successor. He was named CEO in 1988. His
brother, Corey, today president of a dairy
marketing consultancy, as well as a board
member and co-owner, had worked in
the stores but pursued other interests.
By the late ’80s, Quick Chek was a
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Winston Churchill once said, “There is
something about the outside of a horse
that is good for the inside of a man.”
For Dean, horses have provided a thrill
from childhood through adulthood.
While he gave up riding later in life, he
still has a soft spot for the sport.
“I never really lost that love for riding
horses,” says Dean. “But the best thing
about it was the thrill. It wasn’t riding
horses in shows. It was more the thrill of
racing or going fast and steeple chasing
and taking fences. And the thing that
really delivered that was fox hunting, or
fox chasing. In fox chasing, what happens
is you take hounds out, 40 hounds, and
they’ll work across the countryside
looking for the scent of a fox …
“One may see something, and it’s
almost like business. If somebody has
an idea, they talk about it. A couple of
other hounds come over, they talk about
it, and the next thing you know, you’ve
got 40 hounds screaming at bay, running
off in that direction.”
thriving, strong retailer. Page had built a
solid foundation upon which Dean could
create an even more ambitious operator.
The focus on food and coffee, understanding customers, the initial efforts at
employee development and the growth
of Quick Chek to 100 stores laid a foundation, says John Schaninger, Quick
Chek vice president of sales and marketing and a 30-year employee.
Dean, says Schaninger, “also has a
long-term view of things, but it’s much
Photo by Scott Mitchell
Master of the Hunt
MAP IT OUT: Just in case you are not sure what geography encompasses the New York metropolitan
market that Quick Chek seeks to dominate, Dean will happily show you a map of the area, with Manhattan
as its epicenter.
more structured, and he has a path to
get there.” He introduced discipline and
purpose to the company’s retail journey. And the destination: be the best
fresh convenience marketer in the New
York metropolitan market.
SPINNING THE FLYWHEEL
At Quick Chek headquarters, a map of
the region outlines the ambition. With
Manhattan as the epicenter, a red circle
encompasses the 75-mile radius that
the company is focused on dominating.
Focus is important, says Mike Murphy, senior vice president of operations.
With 34 years under his belt, he’s a true
Quick Chek veteran.
“Sometimes in the past, we’ve had
too many objectives in a year, and what
happens when you have too much
stuff is you don’t do a good job of getting it executed,” says Murphy. “[Dean]
has a very clear focus. He involves the
team; he works very hard on getting a
consensus as to what we’re doing and
why we’re doing it. He can be relentless
in pursuing it.”
Indeed, in any conversation with
Dean, it’s not long before he brings up
Quick Chek’s flywheel. In his office, a
placard illustrates the three integral components that, in the vernacular of business guru Jim Collins, create the
“flywheel effect,” or a self-sustaining economic momentum for the company.
Quick Chek is a great place to work,
which makes it a great place to shop,
which makes it a great place to invest.
The first piece was set in place during the Page years, when the executive
team became engrained with Larry
Wilson’s “Playing to Win” strategy of
building company leadership and a
strong company culture. The theory: If
you’re not playing to win, you’re playing to lose, and letting fear prevent
employees and the company from
growing. It places the willingness to
change, innovate and take calculated
risk as the driving force.
“Most cultures don’t work because
people can’t manage their fears,” says
Page. “They’re worried about letting
go. They’re afraid of being the best they
December 2010
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O Captain, My Captain
can be and giving it all they have.”
For Quick Chek, the process of
establishing a strong culture took five
to six years of training, from management down to store-level employees.
Much of it focused on hiring team
members who were eager to work as
part of a team toward specific goals and
be willing to try new things.
Today, Quick Chek hires for attitude
over skills with a behavior-based interviewing process. Each potential recruit
is asked similar questions by two people,
who then must come to an agreement
on how well the interviewee fits the bill.
“This has helped getting employees
on the first day, asking questions.
They’re engaged, and that’s what we
want—we want people who are
engaged in this business,” says Murphy.
Murphy and Dean meet with each
new employee and oversee the 8-hour
orientation. “Our team members are
really part of our brand and how our
customer sees us,” Murphy says. “We
have to make sure as we grow that we
don’t allow that to be weakened or
diluted in any way.”
Quick Chek is constantly enjoying
the rewards. Schaninger tells of a customer who had forgotten his wallet
containing more than $800 at the
counter of a Quick Chek store. When
he went back to the store to find it, a
team member gave it back—fully
intact—and refused to accept a reward.
Schaninger later asked the team member about the incident. “She said, ‘Why
would I take it? It’s not my money,’ ”
he says. “How perfect is that?”
“Now we know it works, because it
perpetuates itself,” says Page. “Dean
comes down with the senior vice president of operations and human
resources, and they talk to every single
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With his understated personality, Dean is always surprising friends and family with his hidden
talents. Son Jonathan recalls a father-son sailing competition at the local yacht club when he
was around 12 years old. His leg of the race did not go well.
“I got second to last,” recalls Jonathan, now a sales rep for Altria. “I was so ashamed,
and [thought] poor Dad would get out there and we’d be the joke of the fleet. But I didn’t
even know this—Dad was an amazing sailor; he grew up sailing as well. He got in a boat
and came in first. It wasn’t first by a little bit: He whupped everyone.” That includes the yacht
club’s sailing coach. This was enough to clinch third place for the Durling team.
new employee … about the culture and
what their responsibility is. Culture is
a responsibility of everybody; it’s not
the responsibility of one person.
“It’s about leading,” he says. “It’s not
that [Dean has] done any one thing,
because the people who’ve worked for
him have done it.”
Happy employees, as the saying
goes, make a great place to shop. But
that third piece of the flywheel—profits—did not appear until later.
“If it’s a great place to work and shop,
profits will be there—leave it silent,” says
Dean, recalling the logic at the time. “But
then three years ago, I looked at it and
said, ‘Wait a minute—we need profits.’
And people need to know that and
understand what happens to it.”
Thirty percent of profits are paid
out in bonuses to employees; the
remaining 70% is reinvested in the
company to build and remodel more
stores, and introduce new programs.
“This makes it a great place to work,
so we’re providing opportunities for
us to grow and do better,” says Dean.
“It’s sharing in the growth both in
profits and opportunities.”
EVOLUTION VS. REVOLUTION
Dean is a firm believer that evolution,
as opposed to revolution, is the best
form of change for Quick Chek. It stays
COLD HANDS, WARM HEARTS: Dean and
his family enjoy the slopes on a recent ski trip
in Deer Valley, Utah.
true to market forces and proceeds at
a pace that ensures quality execution.
“I don’t make any big strategic decisions,” he says.
But when he took over as president
in 2003, Dean had an adjustment to
make to the business model that could
be described only as huge.
For a convenience retailer with more
than 40 years under its belt, Quick Chek
is a relative newcomer into gasoline,
having opened its first fueling locations
only 10 years ago. With the company’s
deep roots in food, it took time for
everyone in company leadership to
accept that food and fuel can mix.
The other “excuse” for not getting
into fuel, says Dean, is the regulatory
and geographic gridlock in New Jersey,
not only in terms of permitting, but
also dealing with the prospect of
mandatory full-service and fighting
local opposition.
But as the new Quick Chek team saw
it, fuel was a strategic necessity, especially
as the state of New Jersey continued to
ratchet up excise taxes on cigarettes. Dur52
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December 2010
ing strategic planning, the group wrestled with the following: “If cigarettes
went away, how would we survive?”
“That was the turning point,” says
Dean. “OK, no new stores will be built
without fuel.”
It did not come without sacrifice.
Quick Chek had sites slated for development, with more than half of them
unsuitable for fuel. “So I had to take
those out of the pipeline, and then we
had to write it off,” says Dean. “When
we did that, that was putting a stake in
the ground and saying, ‘OK, we have
the direction we’re going.’ ” Today, 28
sites offer fuel, including all nine locations in New York.
Dean describes Quick Chek as
“aggressive marketers,” and considering
from whom he learned the business—
RaceTrac and Sheetz, among others—
it’s little surprise. And he was a careful,
patient student, the retailers say.
“What Dean tends to do, before he
pulls a trigger, is fully study things, try
to understand what the nuances are of
this new business … and really try to
Setting Priorities
While Quick Chek has had a few turning
points that have forced it to choose a
path, on March 7, 2000, Dean realigned
his priorities. His eldest son, Chapman,
was in a serious motorcycle accident.
“I had a lot going on in my life
then,” Dean says. Beyond running Quick
Chek, it included chairmanship of NACS
and committee work; serving on
company and charity boards; and
hobbies such as horseback riding and
fox hunting.
“I got a pad of paper out and I
wrote everything down that I was
involved in, everything that I was doing
in my life, and I circled two things,” he
recalls. “No. 1 was my family, and No. 2
was Quick Chek. I came to the
realization that if I could be the best
husband and father, and the best leader
for Quick Chek, that would be it. That
would be satisfying.”
Photos by Scott Mitchell
CHECK IT OUT: In test at four stores, self-checkout
has so far proven successful for Quick Chek. Team
members interact with and guide customers during
the transaction, keeping the employee-customer
bond firmly intact.
understand how it could help their
organization, and help them to potentially drive more customers into their
stores,” says Sheetz.
“He researched wholesale, retail,
equipment, the layout sides of it, and
operating in New Jersey—one of the
few areas of the world that requires full
service,” he continues. “I think everyone
else in the world forgot how to do that,
and Dean had to learn how to do it. “
“He’s executed the gasoline program
exceedingly well, especially for someone
in the gasoline business for such a short
time,” says Carl Bolch, president and
CEO of Atlanta-based RaceTrac. “He’s
an excellent student. Right now, he’s
deep into the self-checkout, and it
seems like he’s doing it in a very
thoughtful way, and in a pioneering
way for our industry.”
He credits Dean for having the confidence and initiative to tackle such bold
change. “When you come into a business that your father started, you don’t
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December 2010
always come in wanting to change
things,” says Bolch, who worked
through the ranks of his own family’s
wholesale business. “A lot of times
you’d come in and make initial changes,
but then think you’ve done it all or
enough, and move over to the mode of
“We’ll provide
opportunities, but people
have to take them. We’re
not going to deliver it on
a silver platter.”
being satisfied. I think he’s not constructed that way. I think he’s persistent
in his desire for continuous change.”
POSITIVE PRESSURE
While Dean has overseen some of
Quick Chek’s biggest transitions, he is
better known for steering steady, incremental improvement. The company’s
financial year starts in November, with
numbers set by month for sales, grossprofit dollars and margin. Progress is
reviewed on a weekly basis. Indeed,
each Sunday morning, you’ll find Dean
sitting at his kitchen table, laptop open
and the financial results of the past
week spread before him.
“We close our week on Friday night,
and reports run Saturday night. So
Sunday mornings we’re looking at
reports, and Monday mornings are
very important to how we’re going to
react,” says Dean. “In retail, you’ve got
to react right away.”
On Monday mornings, the senior
management team gathers to review
the numbers and agree on a direction.
“Every week when you come in, on
Monday morning, you have to know
your numbers,” says Tencza. “Marketing is judged on sales, gross-profit dollars and margin. If you’re off on any of
your categories—I have six categories—you have to have an explana-
Way to Go
Quick Chek employees receive a special
“Way to Go” note from Dean and senior
vice president of operations Mike Murphy
after a successful week of business. Criteria
include going “above and beyond,” any
store that has sales increase over 5% or hits
its shrink number, and stores that hit budget
to the yearly plan.
tion why you’re off by noon.” The
weather and recession do not apply.
Despite the pressure for those with
red on their P&Ls, in the end, everyone
at the meeting is the part of a team.
“We all have different roles in getting
to the numbers, but each person has the
same numbers,” says Murphy. “We’re
not working in silos. If someone is missing on a number, what can we do? Can
the answer come from our controller,
if the question is financing something?
Can it come from marketing or operations? Or it can come from Dean.”
It’s a process that the Quick Chek
team refers to as “getting into the root
cause”: Avoid the blame game, and
instead focus on what went wrong,
what needs to change and how to get
back on track.
Dean’s steady head helps keep the
team focused; he’s more likely to throw
out a hypothesis than an expletive.
“Dean is very even-keeled when it
comes to an issue,” says Murphy.
“When you get emotion into a prob56
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December 2010
lem, you get back into silos, protect
your turf, and don’t get into what the
root cause of the problem was.”
There’s accountability inside the
stores as well. Each month, all stores are
mystery shopped during all shifts.
“[Dean] has a very clear
focus. He involves the
team; he works very hard
on getting a consensus as
to what we’re doing and
why we’re doing it. He
can be relentless in
pursuing it.”
Scores of 90 or above—typically earned
by more than 90% of stores—win a
$50 bonus for each nonmanagerial
store team member. Those who don’t
make the grade know exactly why they
came up short.
Murphy and Dean also schedule vis-
its to each store twice a year, and they
compare those numbers to the company standard. “It’s about catching people doing it right,” says Murphy. “People
know what our expectations are.”
Quick Chek gets to the root cause of
successes as well. It will place its top 20
performers with the bottom 20 to talk
about how they excel in sales, shrink, hiring or any other metric that needs
improvement.
COMPETITIVE SETS
While privately owned Quick Chek
declined to share specific growth figures,
it confirmed gross revenues of more
than $700 million and continued samestore sales increases year over year.
In 2009, store traffic was off in the
morning because of unemployment,
with loss of construction jobs the leading cause, says Dean. “You find ways to
drive traffic, customers and sales. At the
end of 2009, when the economy had
hit the biggest skids it ever hit, we had
a record top line and record sales; we
NEW DEAL: Quick Chek’s new branding,
spearheaded by vice president of sales and
marketing John Schaninger, has taken on a
life of its own. While it was originally designed
to communicate freshness, the new logo also
gave some customers the impression that
Quick Chek was a green company. To make
good on the “promise,” the retailer installed
solar panels at its headquarters and built its
first LEED-certified store.
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CSP
December 2010
opened a record number of stores, we
hired a record number of new employees, and we had a record bottom line
and record bonuses during one of the
worst economic times of the last 50
years,” he says.
Much of the success can be credited
not only to the company’s stellar foodservice and coffee program, with its
20-minute freshness guarantee, but
also Quick Chek’s innovative marketing, including popular Facebook page
and a “skinvertising” campaign: Customers who make a purchase earn a
hand stamp that entitles them to a free
sub. The company has also built a
sense of community through its
annual Quick Chek New Jersey Festival of Ballooning, which brings out a
crowd of 150,000.
With its entrenched market position, strong employee culture and spirit
of innovation, Quick Chek seems to
have all of the advantages, even in the
face of competition from retail heavies
such as Wawa, which has begun opening sites in Quick Chek’s Northern Jersey stomping grounds.
“[Quick Chek is] very focused on
customers and their people, and I think
that’s their No. 1 differentiator,” says
Krysiak. “No. 2, they’ve been established
in their market for a long time. It’s very
difficult to get locations, even for them,
so they have to work very hard to
grow.” Third, the stores are well run
and innovative, he adds. And No. 4,
Dean is at the reins.
“[Dean] is always trying to push out
and ask, ‘Can we innovate more? Can
CLASSIFIED FILES: Inside and outside
Dean’s office sit file cabinets cataloging
Quick Chek’s retail and operational activities.
If team members can’t find a particular fact
or figure, they know Dean will have it somewhere in those files.
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December 2010
we do more for our customers?’ He’s
never satisfied with where the company
is,” Krysiak says.
It’s restless dissatisfaction such as
this that is helping Quick Chek move
closer to its goal as the best convenience marketer in the New York metro
area. Whether it reaches the target is
entirely up to Quick Chek customers
and employees.
“If I’m on the corner of First and
Main, and you’re on the opposite corner,
I’m going to beat you,” says Dean. “That
means we’re the best in the market. If
you look at all the different brands in this
market for convenience and quick-serve,
people prefer Quick Chek as No. 1.”
The company surveys customers and
employees annually and benchmarks
against the competition to keep track
of its progress. Dean admits that Quick
Chek will never have the most stores in
its market—but that’s immaterial.
“Customer opinion, sales, profitability,
employee satisfaction, my turnover is half
of yours, I have much better team members, I attract better people—and you
just sit there wondering why you come
into work every morning,” he says.
“That’s being the best in the market.”■
Sterling Durling
For more on Dean Durling, CSP’s Retail
Leader of the Year, visit
www.cspnet.com/DurlingRLOY.
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