McDonald's to accelerate pace of restaurant openings, evaluate staffing levels

McDonald's issued an employee communication introducing the company's refreshed growth strategy that the company disclosed in a regulatory filing. The message from CEO Chris Kempczinski to employees stated in part: "When we launched our Accelerating the Arches growth strategy in 2020, we made a commitment to embrace the changes taking place around us - to grow faster, to meet evolving customer expectations and to make our brand even stronger. We can take pride in what we've accomplished. We continue to outperform the industry in global comparable sales and market share in most of our major markets. Shareholders also recognize our success as McDonald's stock trades near an all-time high, generating returns that eclipse our restaurant peers, the Dow 30 and the S&P 500. As I said at Worldwide Convention in April, 'there's never been a better time to be part of brand McDonald's.' As we begin 2023 from a position of strength, we cannot stand still... As we look to the future: it must be the collective focus of our entire System to solve problems for our customers and people once and scale our innovations faster than ever before. We'll do that through Accelerating the Arches 2.0 where we'll double down on our 'M-C-Ds,' while adding a 4th 'D,' Restaurant Development. We must accelerate the pace of our restaurant openings to fully capture the increased demand we've driven over the past few years. We will also modernize our ways of working through a new effort, Accelerating the Organization... In the coming weeks, we will have meetings with leaders to share more about Accelerating the Organization and what it means for our business. Certain initiatives will be de-prioritized or stopped altogether. This will help us move faster as an organization, while reducing our global costs and freeing up resources to invest in our growth. As part of this work, we will evaluate roles and staffing levels in parts of the organization and there will be difficult discussions and decisions ahead. We will look to our strategy and our values to guide how we reach those decisions and support every impacted member of the company. We expect to finalize and begin to communicate key decisions by April 3. As we kick off Accelerating the Arches 2.0, we're also creating new leadership roles to drive critical elements of our strategy." The letter to staff indicates that Morgan Flatley is being promoted to Executive Vice President, Global Chief Marketing Officer and New Business Ventures; Skye Anderson is being elevated to President, Global Business Services; Andrew Gregory will become Senior Vice President, Global Franchising and Development; and Spero Droulias will become Senior Vice President, Chief Transformation Officer. These appointments will be effective on February 1. Reference Link