Montgomery Moran
Analyst · Piper Jaffray.
I mean, certainly, that's something we've always -- we never foreclosed that possibility. I will tell you that the people who come from within our organization are the most successful managers, and that remains true. And our numbers of internal promotions are extraordinary now. Of our salary managers, our internal promotion rate is at 96%. Of our hourly managers, it's over 97%. So literally, almost all of our managers are coming from within. That being said, that leaves 3 or 4 out of 100 who we get from outside, and we've always encouraged our field teams and general managers to always be on the lookout for top performers out there in the world and hire them. And what we found though is we have the wonderful ability to be able to attract very, very skilled people to come to our restaurants and be willing to take the risk and often a pay cut to start in a crew position. Because we tell them, look, if you're really, really good, you can move up extraordinary quickly at Chipotle. So we don't tend to hire people from the outside too often just because we've got this wonderful internal development program. But when we do, they're often willing to start as crew members and work their way up. We don't call it fast tracking because we don't provide certain people a different opportunity than other people. The swiftness with which they move up through the ranks is determined by how good they are. And so if someone comes in and says, I am terrific, I've got a lot of experience, I will wow you, we can say good, hop on in and let's watch it happen. And we've got our eye on you, and if you're good, we'll promote you very, very quickly. But if someone comes from the inside and doesn't say that to us and doesn't promise us the world but delivers great, great performance, they, too, will move up very, very quickly. So we try to avoid terms like fast track because that would imply a special program for people who have a lot of experience, and it's just not necessary because the system accommodates both people from the outside and people from the inside very, very well.