That is the playbook of Joe Guith, CEO of CKE Restaurants, the parent of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's. That is about 3,800 restaurants and roughly $5 billion in system sales. Before CKE he was CEO of Church's Texas Chicken, and before that he was brand president of McAlister's Deli. He has now walked into two struggling brands in a row. Both times, the fix was not a new logo.
I built 720 Sweets from one shop to seven locations, then sold it. At Workstream's On the Clock 2026 in Atlanta, I hosted the speaker interviews, and Joe's keynote stuck with me more than any other. Here is how he does it, in his own words from the stage.
Watch the full keynote on YouTube (30 min)
Full interview, key moments, and transcript: Joe Guith on turning around Carl's Jr. and Hardee's.
Watch this part: Joe on the culture you inherit (1:39)
Every new leader feels the pull to announce a fresh start. New brand. New positioning. New everything. Joe has watched that play out across the industry, and his verdict is blunt.
"You get a leader coming in and says, I'm just going to change this. We need a new brand, we're going to be new position. That almost never works."
Joe Guith
His first step is the opposite. "The first step in any kind of culture change is understanding the culture you're stepping into."
CKE has been around for 85 years. A company that old has things worth keeping and things that have worn down. "There are some things that you should embrace and maybe aren't being done well enough. And then there are the things that maybe have atrophied over time."
On the brand side, that means "embracing who you were and getting back to that." On the culture side, it means listening before touching anything. Joe is clear that CKE is still in the early stages of its turnaround. The listening came first anyway.
Watch this part: Joe on the two surveys (3:27)
Yes. This is the trap that fools a lot of leaders.
Joe has always run an employee engagement survey. At CKE he added something different: an organizational health survey. The difference matters.
"Engagement is just really, am I glad to be here, am I excited to be a part of the organization. The other is, are you excited to be here, but how are things going?" The health survey asks a wider set of questions about what is working and what is not.
The two surveys told two different stories.
"Our engagement was decent, and our intent to stay was actually pretty good, in spite of what our health survey was, which was not good. If we were average on engagement, we were like fourth quartile in terms of health."
Joe Guith
People liked being there. The way the company ran was broken. Put the survey numbers next to dozens of one-on-one conversations, and the diagnosis was plain: "It was very clear that we had an accountability issue, front to back, both within our four walls as well as with our franchisees."
If you only ask your team whether they are happy, you will never see this.
Watch this part: Joe on the decade of decline and the first-quarter forecast (8:08)
What goes wrong at old brands is rarely a lack of talent. Joe's word for it is complacency.
"If they're around for 20, 40, 60 years, there's a reason they're still around. It is not a kind economy out there." But the same brands drift. At Church's, "it was a solid decade worth of accepting, like, yeah, we're just going to lose units, we're going to have negative traffic, and I guess that's just the way it's going to be."
He saw the same thing in his first quarter at CKE. Weather was bad and the company was behind plan. An executive who has since left brought him the forecast.
"He came to me with the forecast and said, yeah, we're not going to make our plan. I said, whoa, wait a minute. It's the first quarter of the game. We're behind by a couple touchdowns, but you're saying we're going to lose already?"
Joe Guith
The person was not really the problem. "More than that, it was the organization. It's just like, oh, there it goes. We missed, and I guess we're not going to get bonus again this year."
Joe refused the forecast. CKE made plan and paid a bonus for the first time in a long time.
That is the move. "Saying what's acceptable, what's not acceptable, and being the change and saying, nope, that's not okay, we need to do better. It's those kinds of things that start to put down markers that start to shift the culture."
Watch this part: Joe on distilling the list to two or three things (11:46)
After all the listening, the list of problems gets long. Joe's rule is to make it short.
"Your qualitative list can get quite long, but then you put the quantitative overlay on it, and it distills it actually pretty quickly to know that there are two or three things. And by the way, if you're focusing on more than two or three things, it's never going to happen."
Joe Guith
At CKE it came down to two. "Get organized on process, understand how things are working or not working. And then accountability." Church's had needed a similar diagnosis.
He protects the short list with a calendar. His leadership team holds two off-sites a year. "One off-site is truly just talking about culture, values, and how we're working together. And then the second is more around planning."
The goal for each six months is small on purpose. "If you can get one or two of those things out every six months and actually go address it and make progress on it, that's massive on how you work together. I'm not talking about your sales or your business plan. It's more the how versus the what."
The how is where culture change actually happens. "That's kind of the foundation of how you change how people are working together. And ultimately that ladders to culture."
Watch this part: Joe on the franchisee culture problem (26:30)
Most of CKE's restaurants are run by franchisees, and this is where the accountability problem showed up worst.
A culture had grown up around being "franchisee friendly." In practice it meant this: "Franchisees, if they didn't like something, they would call management and complain, and then we would overrule."
Joe calls that "horrible for the culture." The message it sent to field staff was clear. "Don't disagree with franchisees, because you're just going to get overruled, and now you're really screwed, because your management doesn't have your back."
The new rule is simple.
"We want to listen to you, we want to collaborate, but we are going to hold you accountable. And no, you can't just call me and I'm just going to override it."
Joe Guith
It started inside the company. CKE moved to a real performance management culture. "It isn't just a check-the-box exercise. If you are below the line, and you're below the line a second time, then you're probably gone."
The same value then extends to franchisees. "We're going to measure it, and if you miss, we're going to help you. If you miss again, then we're going to have a different conversation."
He is honest about the limits. Joint employer rules mean a franchisor cannot dictate how an owner runs their people. "There is a real limit to what you can do. You can only lead by example."
And leading by example includes the hardest call a leader makes. "As a leader of an organization, it is your most important and your most difficult job to make the call when it's not right, and walk somebody out the door." He has made peace with it. "More often than not, I've done somebody a favor. If you weren't engaged and you weren't performing, life's too short. Go do something else."
On stage I pointed out that most of the room runs two or five locations, not thousands. Joe's moves shrink well.
You can build a culture that holds good people. But accountability only works when the standard is written down and everyone is held to the same one. For a small operator that usually means one place for every employee record, so what was agreed, what was said, and what happened next are not sitting in one manager's memory.
Holding one standard is easier when the paperwork is in one place. Joe measures everybody the same way, franchisees included. That is hard to do when the policies, the write ups and the sign offs sit in different folders. Workstream keeps them together, so the same rule applies on every shift. Explore Workstream →
None of this needs a new logo. As Joe put it, the work is "far more of just embracing who you were and getting back to that."
Joe's other five moves, on competition, the leadership team, digital, and pricing, are in the companion piece: 5 Moves Joe Guith Makes When He Takes Over a Struggling Restaurant Brand.
Understand the culture you are stepping into before you change anything. Joe Guith, CEO of CKE Restaurants, says a new brand or new positioning "almost never works" as a fix. Start with conversations, an organizational health survey, and a clear read on what the brand does well and what has worn down.
An engagement survey asks whether people are glad to be there, while an organizational health survey asks how the company is actually working. At CKE, engagement scored average and intent to stay was good, but health scored in the fourth quartile. The gap pointed to an accountability problem the engagement survey could not see.
The clearest sign is a team that forecasts a miss early and accepts it. At CKE, an executive told Joe Guith in the first quarter that the company would not make plan. At Church's, the company had spent about a decade accepting lost units and falling traffic. In both cases, the fix started with a leader saying that result was not acceptable.
Two or three, and no more. Joe Guith's rule is that "if you're focusing on more than two or three things, it's never going to happen." His team holds two off-sites a year and aims to fix one or two things about how they work together every six months.
Listen and collaborate, but measure results and follow through the same way you do inside your own company. CKE's approach: if a franchisee misses, the company helps; if they miss again, there is "a different conversation." The company first applied the same standard to its own staff, and it stopped overruling field employees when franchisees complained.
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About the author. Wilson K Lee built 720 Sweets from one shop to seven locations and sold it. He now runs wilsonklee.com, where he publishes real numbers and playbooks for food and beverage owners, and he hosted the speaker interviews at Workstream's On the Clock 2026.