Q1 2013 Earnings Call Transcript

Transcript Call Date 04/18/2013

Similarly, the second Chipotle in Paris is under construction and we expect to open our first restaurant in Frankfurt, Germany later this year. This comes in addition to the six restaurants we currently have in London, five in Canada and one in Paris. While we continue to be optimistic about these future growth options, including ShopHouse and Chipotle in Europe the focus of our growth for the foreseeable future will be Chipotle in United States.

I will now turn the call over to Monty.

Montgomery F. Moran - Co-CEO: Thanks, Steve. Throughout the quarter we continue to make significant strides developing our people and establishing cultures of top performers in our restaurants. I am very happy to have our two new restaurant support officers Gretchen Selfridge and Mike Duffy, helping to lead and develop our field and restaurant teams as well as helping to identify and promote the 45 new restaurant tourists that we added during the quarter.

I am also glad to be seeing higher percentage of candidates being accepted into the program than ever before as our field teams get better and better at communicating Chipotle vision to our restaurant teams.

One leader who has demonstrated special ability to lead his teams to create restaurateur cultures is Doug (indiscernible) who is recently promoted to the position of Executive Team Director over our newly created Southwest region. Over the past five years Doug and his team have developed 31 restaurateurs with an amazing selection rate of 94%. As with any of our most successful leaders, Doug knows his success comes from making the people around him better and by developing powered field leaders, who impact the restaurants everyday by coaching and inspiring others to be great.

During the quarter, we also promoted 43 restaurateurs to mentor additional restaurants, as well as five new apprentice team leaders, eight new team leaders and two new team directors. To help ensure our restaurateurs are successful when they begin to mentor other nearby restaurants, our training team is developing an R Plus training course for them. We believe this new R Plus training, which is taking place in all of our regions will set new restaurateurs up for success, by helping them become more effective leaders over multiple restaurants.

The accelerated success that we're seeing in developing our people and advancing our culture demonstrates that we have a deeper and stronger batch and our teams are getting better at understanding what it takes to develop a restaurateur culture.

Elevating and empowering these extraordinary field leaders allows them to have an even greater impact on developing and leading special people cultures. These restaurateur cultures result in better, more efficient operations and the special dining experience for our customers. Of course, one of the ways that Chipotle provides a great customer experience is through excellent throughput.

Recall that in 2012, we were able to provide faster throughput during the peak hours of the day as compared to the all-day comp. As we lapped the throughput gains we made from last year, these comparisons become more difficult. In the first quarter this year, our peak lunch comp from 12 to 1 grew more slowly in our all day comp, but our peak comp -- but our peak dinner hour comp from 6 to 7 pm did grow slightly faster than the all-day comp.

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