José E. Cil

President and CEO, Restaurant Brands International

Tim Hortons was launching IN THE FIRST WEEK OF MARCH 2020, our annual Roll Up the Rim campaign. As most Canadians know, this involves unrolling the top of a coffee cup — sometimes using your teeth — to see whether there is a prize offer printed on the inside. But in the midst of a public health emergency, a program that required people to hand over a chewedup coffee cup to claim a prize was out of the question. We made the difficult (but correct) decision to adjust the contest. Over 72 sleepless hours in a windowless Toronto boardroom, we redesigned the campaign to be almost entirely digital. We were already on a path to digitize many of our activities, and the pandemic accelerated those plans.

Effective communications are critical in a crisis. We established a daily video call with our leaders from around the world. Every subject matter expert we had was on these calls, representing all of our teams — food safety, quality assurance, health and safety, HR, operations, marketing, digital, communications, government relations, legal and franchisee relations. The group quickly grew to more than 60. Through the spring of 2020, we led the restaurant industry in the level of support we made available to our restaurant owners. To support their immediate liquidity challenges, we deferred rental payments and in many cases absorbed rents outright, negotiated custom-tailored bridge-loan programs with the banks, deferred many capital investment programs to future years and pulled forward various credits by almost a year, helping owners put cash into their bank accounts to pay team members and keep their restaurants open. It is tempting to lose sight of how much was at stake and how frightening the situation was in the spring of 2020. For so many people, the simple act of showing up at work was an act of bravery.