Business Policy and Strategic Management of Buffalo Wild Wings Essay

Introduction

Buffalo Wild Wings (BWW) is the largest chicken wing-based sports bar in the United States. The restaurant has positioned itself as high quality and taste sauces restaurant which also serves a variety of beer and sports watching services. The company contemplates expanding its operations and stores into the large world market that remains untapped. Before embarking on an expansion strategy, it is necessary that the restaurant understands several issues including internal and external factors as well as competition.

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Internal and External Issues

For an implementation plan to be successful business should review internal and external issues that may inhibit or boost its successful mission. Internal issues include the strengths and weaknesses of the restaurant. BWW strengths include strong brand, good marketing strategies, large market share, and diversification of its products including a variety of beer and tasty sauces. These are the advantages that the restaurant enjoys currently and it must protect them to continue enjoying its market share. Weaknesses are quite many and include huge part-time employees, untapped takeout market, lack of space (land) for expansion, limited control over the supply chain, high commodity prices and underperformance as compared to franchises. For the company to improve its performance in the market, it has to transform some of these weaknesses into opportunities. Also, it must continue addressing them to enhance its competitiveness.

On the other hand, the external issues include opportunities and threats. BWW's opportunities include a huge market for expansion and using franchises for accomplishing expansion strategy. The expansion strategy should capitalize on these areas to realize its objective. The threats include stiff competition, change in dining habits and volatility in market prices. The restaurant has to contract with long-term suppliers for standardization of prices. Also, it has to constantly collect customer data to keep track of the customer dining habits. In addition to these issues, the restaurant has to consider regulations especially relating to healthy beverages which may severely affect the variety of drinks offered.

Competition

BWW experiences a stiff competition which is not surprising given the highly competitive restaurant industry. The main competitors are those offering similar services as BWW which include T.G.I Friday's, Hooters, Applebees and Chilli's. Other potential competitors are the quick-service restaurants such as the Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's though BWW does not consider them as a threat since they are not interested in the takeout market. T.G.I Friday's has 1000 locations worldwide meaning that it has overtaken BWW in international market presence. However, BWW, which concentrates on the high presence in the markets it has penetrated will easily establish its brand and fight such competition posed by T.G.I Friday's. Hooters operates 160 stores and 430 franchises and s present in 27 countries. Again, this competitor has not widely established itself in the market and may not pose much competition to BWW especially if it considers setting up several stores such that it becomes easily accessed by the customers. Applebee's restaurant appears to pose significant competition to BWW as it has many stores worldwide. However, its declining revenues (from $1.4 billion in 2009 to $1.0 billion in 2011) signify that if BWW enters the market with an aggressive strategy, it may easily defeat. Similarly, Chili's, although widely present in the world markets, appears to be struggling as shown by the decline in revenues from $3.2 billion in 2009 to $2.7 billion in 2011. This might weaken the restaurant paving the way for strong BWW to penetrate and take over the market share.

Future Outlook for the Organization

BWW has a potential of being a world icon restaurant. Its expansion strategy will be largely driven by the high quality and taste sauces, cool sporty environment and traditional chicken wings. By increasing its stores as well as using franchises and joint ventures to penetrate the newer markets, the restaurant will be easily accessible to customers, and it can easily expand its customer loyalty.

However, based on the limitation of space and high cost of establishing its stores, the restaurant may in future mostly operate through franchises. This will enhance quality services to the customers since franchises have demonstrated a high capability of generating more income than company-owned stores.

Implementation of Tools for Measuring Business Success

For BWW to keep track of the business success there need to be tools for gauging performance. Some of these tools include sales revenue, net profit margin and qualified leads per month (Hubbard, 2014). To measure sales performance of the company, the sales data is collected every day and compiled monthly to generate cumulative data that indicates sales. Net profit margin is meant to report how efficient the company is at generating profit. Implementing this tool involves collecting monthly data on revenue as well as sales expenses and getting the difference. On the other hand, qualified leads per month differentiate leads likely to be potential customers. Implementation involves categorizing leads into three groups; marketing qualified leads, sales accepted leads and sales qualified leads. Each category identifies customers that are likely to establish loyalty to the firm and lead to higher sales and profits.

Conclusion

BWW can embark on its expansion plan to exploit the untapped market while working on its weaknesses to enhance its performance. To manage the competitors and surpass them, the company should enhance its presence in the marketplace through several stores. Also, it is important than success measurement tools are implemented to track performance.

References

Hubbard, D. W. (2014). How to measure anything: Finding the value of intangibles in business. John Wiley & Sons.