Portillo’s ROCKS! What an honor and joy to speak yesterday for a true Chicago original, Portillo’s Hot Dogs at their sensational GM event! The more I learned about Portillo’s in my preparation to customize their Breakthrough presentation, the more impressed I became. This is a company that TRULY understands that they are in the PEOPLE business! They have built an extraordinary culture around their simple, yet incredibly powerful values of Family, Fun, Energy, and Greatness. When the pandemic hit, Portillo’s focused on their guests and team members with passion. They started a non-profit called the Heart of Portillo’s whose sole purpose was to provide support and assistance for team members who needed help. Through the two years plus of Covid challenges, Portillo’s did not lay off a single team member and refused to lessen even one iota of their dedication to excellence and quality. The result? They succeeded and grew at a time where so many others in the restaurant business struggled mightily. Their brand is legendary, absolutely revered throughout Chicagoland. And now, they are bringing their unique restaurant concept to California, Florida, Arizona, and Texas. Creating and emphasizing a culture based on passionate values WORKS!
My joy in working with this group of 250 Portillo’s leaders was to help them focus even more on the keys to igniting breakthroughs. We dived into the three breakthrough tools:
- Vision – You must SEE it to BE it!
- Personal Responsibility – If things are to change, I must change
- TEAM – Individually we may be many, but together we are MUCH!
Every story I shared connected to the Portillo’s values of Family, Fun, Energy, and Greatness. We laughed together at the ‘AHAs’ we discovered about vision… that what we focus on is what we CREATE and that so often we do not use our vision to see. Instead, we all too often use only our memory and conditioning. Whenever we use our memory and conditioning to see, we do not see what is. We see what WAS! When that simple truth is revealed, we open up to new possibilities! To bring it all together, applying every principle we learned in the presentation, all 250 Portillo’s stars experienced a breakthrough they will never forget! The cheering was deafening as they broke through their one-inch-thick boards representing fears, obstacles, habits, or doubts they now turn to dust (or should I say sawdust!). The pure emotion and unconditional support practically lifted the Renaissance ballroom six-feet off the ground! It is magnificent to see great people discover their possibilities and to do something they had no idea they could when they had walked in the room 90 minutes earlier. They emerge with a KNOWING that they are NOT over-achievers and that they can accomplish great things when they use those three powerful breakthrough tools and are guided by unstoppable breakthrough beliefs.