Great chains do not trust the standard. They check it.

Put your best operation next to your worst one. Same name over the door, same owner signing both sets of checks. Watch them run for a week and you are looking at two different businesses.

You already know why. The one thing that actually differs is who is running each place. What almost nobody says out loud is what to do about it, and the popular answer is wrong.

The popular answer is belief. Get the culture right, get the people to care, and the standard will hold on its own when you are not there.

The chains that actually hold a standard across hundreds of units do not believe that, and their own documents say so.

They watch. All of them. On a schedule.

McDonald's once wrote its inspection cadence into a filing with the SEC, because it was paying people on the result. Every participating restaurant got four operations reviews a year and three to five third-party mystery shops every quarter. The scores were weighted, the restaurants were ranked, and only the top fifth were paid. A restaurant that received less than 75 percent of its scheduled reviews had its score thrown out. Even the checking was checked.

The right underneath it is permanent. The franchise agreement gives McDonald's the right to inspect "at all reasonable times," and refusing that inspection is one of the listed reasons the company can take the restaurant back.

Disney measures constantly and treats it as everyone's job. Mystery shoppers "make purchases to verify the service." There are physical listening posts in the parks. Cast members "collect and report the opinions and observations of guests as a standard part of their jobs." The service standards are not taught once, they are "regularly reinforced throughout their tenure."

Starbucks did the loudest version of it anyone has done. On the evening of 26 February 2008 it closed every one of its 7,087 company-operated stores in the United States, from 5:30 to 8:30, to re-teach espresso standards to more than 135,000 people who had already been trained.

Read that last one carefully. These were not new hires. They were trained baristas in a company famous for its culture, and it still shut the doors on a Tuesday night to check the standard was where it was supposed to be.

The evidence that should end the argument

Researchers compared restaurant hygiene inside the same chains. Same brand, same signage, same training materials, same culture. Franchised units scored consistently below company-owned units of the same chain. At one large chain the gap was nearly five points.

Then Los Angeles County made restaurants post a letter grade in the window.

The gap closed to almost nothing.

The culture did not change. The training did not change. The only thing that changed was that somebody outside the business was going to look and everybody could see the result.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is visibility on a schedule with something attached to it. Belief was never what held the standard.

What this means about your chain

The portfolio average is covering for you. Your strong locations carry the weak ones on the monthly number, so the chain reads healthy while a piece of it runs below the line you set. You do not see the spread in the total.

You see it in the reviews that only ever come from one address. In the audit you have to hope goes your way. In standards that, as one multi-unit franchisee put it, "get watered down otherwise and we will lose the consistency that helps us be successful."

And you see it in yourself. The operation you visit performs. The one you visit least is the one you worry about. You already ran the experiment. You are the grade card, and you do not scale.

Say the honest thing about this

None of this is comfortable, and the chains know it. When McDonald's tightened its inspection regime a few years ago, its own franchisee association surveyed the field and three percent said the standards accurately reflected operations. Three.

So the promise is not that measurement is popular, and it is not that you will stop having to care. The promise is narrower and it is true.

The system watches, so you do not have to be the one watching.

Install the check

Three moves, in order.

• Score the spread before you fix anything. You cannot close a gap you have never measured. Put your best operation against your worst, on the same instrument, on the same day.
• Put it on a schedule. A standard does not fail on a date, it waters down, and something has to look at it while it is still cheap to correct.
• Attach something to the result. Every organisation above pays, promotes, or takes the business back on it. A score with nothing behind it is a newsletter.

The test

You will know it worked when the drift gets caught by the system, on a Tuesday, in an operation you have not been to in two months.

Not by you, walking in.

If you cannot say today which of your locations run your standard and which run their own, that is what The Operating Audit is for. It measures the spread between your best location and your worst.