Mr. Hipp: The company was founded in 1985 in Beverly Hills, California. The company grew to about 25 restaurants in early 1992, at which point it was acquired by Pepsico. In 1997 Pepsico divested CPK, along with the rest of their restaurant holdings. The new management team, including myself, took over the company at that time, and we have radically improved performance over the past three years. We are on the leader board in terms of comp sales performance over the past three years, and are currently maintaining an expansion program that should produce a 25% growth rate in EPS over the next three to five years.
TWST: Could you tell us what specifically you did to improve performance
so dramatically?
Mr. Hipp: We focused on customer satisfaction, including such things as
dramatically improving food quality and enhancing value with larger
portions. We also did simple things like reducing the table-to-server
ratio, which resulted in dramatic improvements in customer satisfaction.
I think customers noticed these improvements and we started seeing
customers come back more often, which led to stronger growth in top-line
revenue and comparable store sales.
Tickers included in this excerpt: CPKI
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