Kelly’s Roast Beef
Headquarters: Saugus, Massachusetts
Founded: 1951
Number of units: 6In its 60 years of operation, Kelly’s Roast Beef has become a Massachusetts good-eats legend. It began in 1951 with Frank McCarthy and Raymond Carey Jr. as a family owned hotdog stand that happened to sell roast beef at Revere Beach.
As much as for its medium-rare, tender knuckle–cut roast beef sandwich, Kelly’s is known for its volume. In 2010, it boasted sales of $26 million from its now six fast-casual units. It went through nearly 1 million pounds of french fries and 560,000 pounds of roast beef. Its second location in Saugus is one of the top users of Coca-Cola in the U.S., says Dean Murphy, Kelly’s director of operations. “They are impressed with our sales,” Murphy says.
For its 60th anniversary this year, Kelly’s is teaming up with Coca-Cola for weekly sweepstakes drawings in which the grand-prize winner will receive Boston Red Sox tickets.
It comes as little surprise that the roast beef sandwich is Kelly’s biggest seller, priced at $5.95 and $6.95 a la carte. Some even insist that the operation was the country’s first to ever serve roast beef sandwiches. But the company’s fish and chips sell nearly as well, given the operation’s Boston-area locales. Therefore, the units always enjoy a sales spike during Lent, Murphy says. The menu is loaded with seafood options like fresh local clams, New England clam chowder, scallops, and its popular lobster roll, which contains 2 pounds of lobster for $16.95.
There are no LTOs, but that doesn’t mean the menu has been stagnant for all these years. “We realized that people eat other things. So we have added wraps, salads, and soups,” Murphy says, noting that these items appease the younger generation and the health-conscious.
There are no immediate plans to expand Kelly’s, now in its second generation of operation. “Location is everything for us. We are not actively pursuing new ones, but we are willing to look at what might become available. Our growth will be slow,” Murphy says.
Four of the units have drive thrus, and all of the food preparation is done at each individual location. The initial beach location operates from only 1,200 square feet, so when the Saugus location opened, the family included everything on its wish list, including a large seating area and plenty of storage space. It came in at 12,000 square feet. The other units range from 6,000 to 8,000 square feet. Some 400 employees help to keep the volume up.
Nick’s Pizza & Pub
Headquarters: Crystal Lake, Illinois
Founded: 1995
Number of units: 2
With two units in the Chicago area, Nick’s Pizza & Pub has made its imprint, not for Chicago-style pizza, but for its homemade, crispy, thin-crust pies. The dough, sauce, sausage, cheese, and Italian beef come from 40-year-old family recipes, says Nick Sarillo, president and founder.
He opened the first 350-seat restaurant in Crystal Lake, Illinois, in 1995 because he wanted a place where parents could take their kids for a good time and not receive scornful glares. Himself a carpenter, Sarillo built the 9,000-square-foot building using barn wood and antiques for a casual décor.
But the bigger story is Sarillo’s management style, in which he treats the 100 team members in each restaurant like part owners who share the company mission to provide the community an unforgettable place to connect with family and friends.
Team members are invited to weekly “fiscal huddles,” where they review the profit-and-loss statement. They volunteer to “own” a line item on either ledger sheet for a month. They forecast a number for that item and then aim to meet their number. For example: “Rather than me say not to waste napkins, they hold each other accountable as to how many napkins they put on the table,” Sarillo says.
One 16-year-old recently forecasted lunch sales and then devised a plan to meet his forecast by putting together an individual pizza-and-drink lunch special and promoting it at his high school.
It all provides intrinsic rather than external motivation and has helped the company keep employee turnover at an astonishingly low 25 percent annual rate. He is writing a book, tentatively called Pizza on Purpose, about his management style. It’s scheduled to release in 2012 by Portfolio, a division of Penguin Group USA Inc.
The company’s marketing is built solely on giving to community fundraisers in which 15 percent of a day’s sales go to the selected cause. It could be to help a school band, hockey team, Boy Scouts, or, recently, it was to raise money for a local family’s medical need. The group to benefit from the donation often hands out fliers, calls the newspaper, or promotes through social media, so the restaurant itself never has to advertise.
For its 2010 efforts, the company received the National Restaurant Association Illinois state Restaurant Neighbor Award in the small business category.
With the company still bouncing back from the recession, Sarillo’s growth plans for Nick’s Pizza & Pub are tentative, but he says he would like to open three more in the Chicago area by the end of 2012. Each of the units does slightly more than $3 million in annual sales.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Five Secret Successes in Quick Service - QSR magazine
VF Corporation to Buy Timberland in $2 Billion Deal - NYTimes.com
VF Corporation said on Monday that it would acquire Timberland in a $2 billion deal that will add to the apparel company’s extensive collection of brands like The North Face, Jansport, Nautica and Vans.
The deal, at $43 a share, represents a more than 40 percent premium to Timberland’s closing price on Friday.
With the addition of Timberland, VF’s sports group will account for 50 percent of the company’s overall sales. Timberland is expected to notch revenues of $1.6 billion this year, with the majority coming from outside the United States. VF estimates that it can boost sales at Timberland by some 10 percent a year, in part by growing the international business and women’s footwear.
Seniors face Medicare cost barrier for cancer meds - Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON – Facing a life-and-death struggle with kidney cancer, Rita Moore took her prescription for a new kind of chemotherapy pill to her local drugstore.
She was stunned when the pharmacist told her the cost for a month's supply would be $2,400, well beyond her income.
Medicare drug plans that cover seniors like Moore are allowed to charge steep copayments for the latest cancer medications, whose cost can run to tens of thousands of dollars a year. About 1 in 6 beneficiaries aren't filling their prescriptions, according to recent research that has put numbers on a worrisome trend.
Officials at Medicare say they're not sure what happens to those patients — whether they get less expensive older drugs that sometimes work as well, or they just give up. Traditionally, chemotherapy has been administered intravenously at a clinic or doctor's office. Pills, a relatively new option, are thought to represent the future of cancer care.
Moore, 65, was operated on in February for an advanced form of kidney cancer. She said both her cancer and kidney specialists agreed that a drug called Sutent probably offered the only chance to keep the disease in check. It's a capsule taken at home.
But she was unprepared for what happened when she went to fill her prescription.
"I cried," said Moore, who lives in a small town in central California. "What can you do when the only thing out there that can maybe give you some quality of life is unaffordable? I was devastated. I didn't know what to do."
Private insurance companies that deliver the Medicare prescription benefit say the problem is that drug makers charge too much for the medications, some of which were developed from taxpayer-funded research. The pharmaceutical industry faults insurers, saying copayments on drugs are higher than cost-sharing for other medical services, such as hospital care.
Others blame the design of the Medicare prescription benefit itself, because it allows insurers to put expensive drugs on a so-called "specialty tier" with copayments equivalent to 25 percent or more of the cost of the medication.
Drugs for multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and hepatitis C also wind up on specialty tiers, along with the new anti-cancer pills. Medicare supplemental insurance — Medigap — doesn't cover those copayments.
"This is a benefit design issue," said Dan Mendelson, president of Avalere Health, a research firm that collaborated in a recent medical journal study on the consequences of high copayments for the new cancer drugs.
Cost-sharing should only be used to deter wasteful treatment, he explained. "It is hard to make the argument that someone who has been prescribed an oral cancer medication doesn't need the drug," added Mendelson.
The study last month in the Journal of Oncology Practice found that nearly 16 percent of Medicare beneficiaries did not fill an initial prescription for pills to treat cancer, a significantly higher proportion than the 9 percent of people with private insurance who did not follow through.
Forty-six percent of Medicare beneficiaries faced copayments of more than $500, as compared to only 11 percent of patients with private insurance. Among people of all ages, 1 in 4 who faced a copayment over $500 did not fill their prescriptions. Cancer is more prevalent among older people.
"Obviously, we're leaving a lot of folks off the bus, standing at the curb, if they can't afford the medications," said Dr. Lowell Schnipper, who chairs the American Society of Clinical Oncology's task force on the cost of cancer care. It advises doctors to discuss costs with patients up front, to avoid surprises.
Medicare officials say there are currently no plans to rework the design of the prescription benefit.
But "nobody is more concerned about access than we are," said Dr. Jeff Kelman, Medicare's chief medical officer.
For many seniors, Kelman suggested, the situation is not as bleak as what Moore encountered. For example, the prescription plan is designed so beneficiaries who are poor or near poverty face only token copays. For the rest, President Barack Obama's health care law gradually closes the coverage gap known as the "doughnut hole." This year, the new law provides a 50 percent discount on brand name drugs for those in the gap.
The gap starts after Medicare recipients and their insurance plan have spent $2,840 on medications. After that, seniors are responsible for roughly the next $3,600. Once total spending reaches about $6,440, Medicare's catastrophic coverage kicks in and beneficiaries pay only a small amount.
Yet the health care law could be struck down by the courts or repealed if Republicans win the White House and Congress next year. Even if the law stands, assistance after seniors end up in the gap doesn't take away the initial shock at the pharmacy counter.
"The underlying problem is with the basic structure," said Joe Baker, president of the Medicare Rights Center, a New-York based advocacy group. "Even before you get to the doughnut hole, you've got a problem."
One solution would involve requiring drug plans to lower copayments for cancer pills. But the trade-off is likely to be an increase in premiums for all beneficiaries.
Rita Moore had to try to find her own way out of the dilemma. She lives in Corcoran, Calif., and still works as resident manager of an apartment building for seniors.
Moore decided to apply to Pfizer's prescription assistance program for patients who can't afford Sutent and other drugs the company makes. Pfizer approved a year's worth of free medication, but it took about two months to collect and review all the medical and financial paperwork.
"They were very helpful, but it wasn't a fast process," said Moore. In the meantime, she wasn't being treated. The cancer spread and is now close to her spine and her body's main artery.
"This is kind of strange," Moore said. "After you've worked all your life, you get something catastrophic and you run into news like your drugs are going to cost $2,400."
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Associated Press Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard contributed to this report.
