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Unlike the previous two installments of Businesses I Like, this one isn’t inspired by a specific recent experience but rather by a continuous positive impression over time.

I’ve always liked Chipotle Mexican Grill. Their food is tasty and fresh, reasonably inexpensive, and very filling. Their restaurants are clean and slick-looking, and they seem like a good company with a commitment to the environment and a sense of humor.

What I really like about Chipotle, though, is how earnestly they’ve taken to heart a simple truth: you can’t be good at everything. This is a lesson that every human being comes to understand at some point in his or her life, yet somehow, when these enlightened humans come together to form a business, the whole manages to be dumber than the sum of its parts. Stories abound of businesses that failed because they tried to be all things to all people, and today we interact with businesses all the time that seem to do everything under the sun but nothing well. These businesses feature devilishly complicated product and service offerings in the name of diversity or completeness, leaving the customer to wonder what exactly these companies are good at, if anything.

Chipotle is exactly the opposite. For all intents and purposes, they make one product. Sure, there are a bunch of variations — burrito? taco? bowl? — but everything on their menu is a combination of a relatively small number of ingredients. The customer only has to make a few choices in succession to get from the front of the line to the register.

You can tell that Chipotle realizes what a huge differentiator this is by looking up at their menu. The font size of the text on that menu must be five times the fast food industry average — it’s like they are saying to you, “this is supposed to be easy.” Just make a few simple decisions, and when you’re finished, there’s no waiting — you have your food!

There are a lot of advantages on Chipotle’s side, too. First of all, their inventory is much easier to manage because it contains such a small set of ingredients. Quality assurance is correspondingly simpler. Employee training is easier and faster, because there are relatively few different tasks that one needs to learn to become a fully effective Chipotle employee.

Moreover, similar to Subway, structuring the ordering process as a series of steps rather than a single ordering event followed by a wait for your food serves to pipeline the ordering process. The impact of this pipelining is that it increases the restaurant’s throughput — the number of customers it can serve per unit time — and also reduces the customer’s perceived latency — his wait time — since his food is ready for him as soon as he gets to the end of the line to pay. All this makes for greater revenues and happier customers.

Above all, the simple fact is that if you only do one thing, it is very easy to do it extremely well. This benefits Chipotle, because they can minimize the effort required to achieve their desired result, and it benefits you and me, because we can feel confident that we’ll get great food every time we set foot in any of their restaurants.

And to think this place used to be majority-owned by McDonald’s!

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What food service businesses (large or small) do you like? Chime in with a comment!