Another great year at the Balloon Festival is in the books! This event really is an example of what we are all about at QuickChek. Great team work and a great commitment to our customers! Planning for the festival starts almost as soon as that year’s festival is over. The Marketing team works hard with our vendors to get ready for the next year. Rick and the Engineering team, along with our outside Construction team, develop plans for the tent. As the event gets closer, Don and Jerry with the entire operations team work the schedule for the event.
Maria and the IT team make sure our POS is going to be ready for our team and customers. Lou and the Security team work with local police and make sure we are all safe and secure for the event. Jennifer and the Food Service team make sure we have plenty of product and vendor support. Chuck and the Accounting team work all of the invoices to make sure we are charged correctly. All of you who attended the event saw all of this team work in action. When you think of all that goes into this event it is just like when we open a new store! All of our teamwork together with our vendors to ensure a great opening that meets the needs our our customers and makes it a great place to work. We just opened Lake Grove, Long Island. This store had its challenges as there was not another QuickChek nearby. So in true QC spirit, Don and Bob G. asked for volunteers to go to Long Island to train our new team members. I thank all of you who went and helped train our new team members!
Now we are in our new fiscal year. In 2014 we certainly had our challenges. We had a bad snow-filled winter and a mild summer. We had many cost increases in food service and we struggled to get our gap down. In the 4th quarter we had sales back on track and we were well on our way to reducing our gap in food service by the 2 points we needed. This took great commitment and execution by all of you!
We need to carry this momentum into the new year! We must execute our P&L plan. We need to hit our sales and margin goals and keep our expenses in line. I know with the commitment of all of you we can get the execution we need to continue to grow our great company and meet our future needs. As always, if you have an idea or issue that needs my attention, please feel free to contact me. You can come to a town hall meeting (there are two a month) or you can reach me at 973-703-2157.
Thanks, Mike
