Success: Companies change, expand to meet demand
promotes itself as a “morning drink stop” alternative to convenience stores.
“Our view of our customers is they really do crave the differentiated food, but they’re also willing to pay more for innovative flavors, particularly in premium categories such as chicken, ice cream and the fountain differentiation that we offer,” Hudson said.
The drive-in chain also has steadily increased its advertising profile after pulling back in the wake of the 2008 recession. Sonic said surveys of its ads put the brand second only to McDonald’s in awareness among the general population for quick-serve restaurants.
“The last three years in particular, the national media piece has had very positive impact on that, and in the process driving average unit sales and average unit profit, and in turn really picking up the development activities of our company,” Hudson said.
Sonic is developing new version of its app for smartphones that will let customers pay directly from their phones and integrate with video menu boards at certain stores. The app currently only allows customers to reload and manage gift cards and receive special offers.
“We want to continue to focus on customization and quality of food and yet positively impact the customer in terms of affordable for everyday use, but avoid achieving that by simply having cheap food every day,” Hudson said. payroll and human resources applications as an online service for companies, is growing rapidly. The company had more than 1,460 employees at the end of 2015, up from about 1,000 a year earlier.
Paycom, which started in 1998, has more than 40 sales offices across the nation. The company had a public offering in 2014, so last year marked its first full year on the New York Stock Exchange. Paycom was the top-performing company in The Oklahoman’s ranking of publicly traded companies in 2015.
Chad Richison, Paycom’s president and CEO, said his company has seen several business cycles and isn’t dissuaded by an energy downturn in Oklahoma and Texas markets.
“We’ve been doing this for 18 years,” Richison said in a January conference call with analysts. “This is going to be a year for us. Next year is going to be a year. And we’re going to continue on. We’re in our own lane here, and we’re going to continue to do our business.”
Paycom added clients in health care, gaming and retail markets in the fourth quarter of 2015. Among them were a rehabilitation center with nearly 8,000 employees; a casino with 2,300 employees; and a grocery services company with about 2,000 employees in 48 states.
The new customers were previously using what Paycom describes as a “legacy provider” for payroll processing such as ADP or SAP. Paycom said its single database platform saves customers money and manpower.
“Each of these three clients enabled multiple Paycom applications, continuing the trend of new clients taking greater and greater portions of our solutions suite,” Richison said.
With payroll and human resources becoming more complicated by regulations and new laws, Paycom said it is more than just a technology company.
“We are providing a very valuable service, and no one should be doing the payroll by themselves. No one,” Richison said. “We never converted a payroll of someone doing it in-house that was correct, ever. And I’ve been doing this a long time. I don’t believe that’s going away.”
He said the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, has helped Paycom sales teams open conversations with new customers.
“Any time you get an opportunity to talk to a client about additional complexity coming down the pipe, that’s a positive for us,” he said. “And whether it’s reciprocity law, lived in/worked in, states changing labor laws, overtime laws or what have you, that gives us an opportunity, and so ACA has done that. It’s provided us an opportunity.”