Crafting a Culture

When CST Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Hal Adams entered the working world after graduating from the University of California, Santa Barbara, he expected to pursue what he considered his calling and become a teacher. Instead, he started on a different career path by chance and is living out a different calling to this day.

“I took a job as a night manager, which was a nice title for graveyard clerk,” he said. “I did it while I was deciding my strategy on how to find a job out of college, and never looked back.”

After just three months with Stop N Go convenience stores — a subsidiary of a company later acquired by CST Brands predecessor Diamond Shamrock — Adams was already a store manager and eventually worked his way up the chain while discovering he had an interest in merchandising and a knack for making stores look appealing.

Today he’s a c-store industry veteran, yet two years since Corner Store spun off from Valero Energy, Adams is just getting started in many ways.

Prior to the spinoff, “we were a small portion of a large company. Our goal was simply to help the refining company move fuel,” he said. Today, “everything we do matters. Particularly everything we do inside the store matters because as we grow our organization, we want the store, which represents stability and growth, to be the growth engine of the company.”

Adams regularly wakes up at 4:45 a.m. to hit the gym before arriving in the office by 7 a.m. Approximately 30 percent of his time is spent on the road, making visits to operations ranging from New York to Montréal to CST’s home operations in and around San Antonio.

“I’m a fanatic about being in the stores. So, as much as I can be in a different market, that’s good for me,” he said.

THREE STEPS TO SUCCESS

Adams’ duties during the day fall into what he envisions as three concentric circles: running the business, growing the business and strategic leadership.

On a given morning, he might meet with the “well-seasoned” category management and merchandising teams, “[discussing] what’s coming up in the future or any specific issues or challenges they may be facing for the business. We might look at the forecast for what our business looks like in the coming month and the coming quarter, and we might make some adjustments to what the current business looks like.”

Current plans for growing the business involve developing the company’s store of the future, which is intended to serve as a prototype for the next 10 years. The company is also at the end of a yearlong study of the Corner Store brand centered on creating a new value proposition for what the company wants the brand to stand for.

“What’s the personality that Corner Store is going to have in the future?” Adams asked. “What do we want customers to think of us, and how do we want to behave?”

These questions are part of creating a new culture for a new company post-spinoff, he explained, something Adams fully supports. When CST was part of Valero, the culture was more formal and cautious, but retailers are able to make quicker decisions and take more risks than refiners. He also credits CEO Lubel with pushing for a more casual Corner Store-branded dress code, as well as regular team bonding.

“We may not celebrate with black-tie dinners and champagne, but we have kolaches for breakfast with each other once a month,” Adams said. “They seem like really frivolous and fluffy things, but they’re very strategic in putting a large company like ours together in who we want to be and what we want to stand for.”

The newness of the company is also one reason why all internal and external communications fall within Adams’ purview, which he acknowledges is somewhat unusual for a marketing officer. By keeping the message and tone consistent, it reinforces Corner Store’s culture of clear and direct communication. Adams and other executive team members make a point of avoiding multipage memos and keep in mind that if they can’t say what they want to say in less than one or two paragraphs, it’s probably too complicated.

“When you have over 13,000 employees out in the field, it’s important to communicate below the store manager. We need to get targeted messages to them,” he said. “The more we connect directly to the people that are serving our customers, and the more we let them know how important they are, the better engaged those employees are going to be.”

FORGING CONNECTIONS

As Corner Store enters its third independent year, Adams is excited about crafting the future of the brand. His operations and merchandising teams work closely together on implementing programs and providing constant feedback on what works well and what needs improvement.

While many of the company’s ideas cross regional boundaries, he estimates that around 15 percent apply only to certain areas — such as poutine, which is a required item in CST’s Montréal footprint but virtually unknown in California.

“We need regional people in those markets to tell us about those and to slap our hands when we forget,” Adams said with a laugh. “Having those local folks on the ground keeping you honest is really important for a centralized organization.”

The executive team will also be piloting some new initiatives in response to the brand study, which provided new insights on how consumers view Corner Store.

“What we found people were looking for was this connection with a human being,” Adams said. “Although Corner Store didn’t have really broad awareness at the beginning, when Corner Store was visited, we had much higher than normal retention rates. People came back to us much more often and we have begun to realize it’s because of our great people in our stores and the way they treat our customers.”

One somewhat surprising result was the fact that while millennials have an image of being too busy to care about their interactions with store employees, they rated among the highest of those who want to be noticed and have a connection with someone inside the store. These “connected enthusiasts,” as well as food seekers who want to try big tastes and new things, are among the customers Corner Store is targeting with a test program that adds numerous grocery fill-in items at several stores.

The biggest opportunity that Adams and the rest of the Corner Store team faces is growth, as CST goes from status quo to an organization focused on expanding through acquisitions, organic growth and increasing same-store sales. Adams is looking forward to tackling bigger goals at a faster speed than ever before — and fixing whatever mistakes are made along the way.

“Every once in a while, we have to remind ourselves, ‘Hey, we’re not in the old culture anymore. This is a new culture.’ Eighty percent but fast is probably better than 98 percent and slow,” he said. “We can adjust perfect. We can never recoup time we’ve lost, so let’s move faster.”