Yogurtland has been a frozen dairy-powered rocket for Phillip Chang. The president and CEO of Yogurtland Franchising Inc. founded the chain of self-serve frozen yogurt bars in 2006, and in the six years since, has grown the company to more than 170 locations, owned by more than 100 franchisees and employing more than 2,100.
But when on a stratospheric trajectory sometimes things don’t always go according to the script.
Which is why, several years ago, Chang threw out the script and began concentrating on the actors in his company.
“Before then, even though our stores performed pretty well, some people’s behavior didn’t reflect the culture we wanted to have,” Chang says. “We didn’t see enough of the honesty side, the respect for each other, the desire to help each other.”
Chang quickly realized that if he were going to build a stable culture that embodied high ethical and moral standards, he needed to find the people first. So he started to shift how he and his leadership team recruited, what they valued in prospective employees and franchisees, and what constituted a great hire.
In short, Chang began focusing on candidates’ hearts first and their heads second.
“When the company started, I had hired too fast, and because of that, some people had a lot of experience as far as the technical side of things, but they didn’t have high moral standards,” he says. “So I started looking at this in terms of two areas. One was the culture, in terms of the level of ethics and honesty, and the other side was their technical experience.
“I looked at how each candidate performed in both areas, but I set my bar very high on the ethical side and was more generous on the technical side. You can teach technical skills, but you can’t really teach ethics and morals.”
Since refashioning the company’s recruiting and hiring practices, Chang says it has had a profound impact on the culture of the company.
“It has been big for us,” he says. “We now look at our company more as a family.”
