August 11, 2025 • 13 mins
In 1960, two brothers scraped together $900 and bought a failing pizzeria in Michigan, launching what would become a cautionary tale about sales incentive programs gone wrong. Within months, one brother traded his half of the business for a beat-up Volkswagen, leaving Tom Monaghan alone with his ambitions.
By 1965, with three stores under his belt, Tom faced a naming crisis. He couldn't legally keep using the original name, DomiNick's, so an employee suggested "Domino's." The logo? Three dots, one for each store. Tom figured he'd add a new dot for every location.
After opening store number five, he wisely reconsidered that plan.
Because what happened next wasn't just growth—it was an explosion that would teach sales leaders everywhere a crucial lesson about the double-edged sword of powerful incentives.
How One Sales Incentive Program Nearly Destroyed a Billion-Dollar Company
Here's what America looked like in the early 1980s: Microwave ovens were revolutionizing kitchens, Federal Express was making overnight delivery an expectation, and Americans weren't just eating faster—they were living faster.
Domino's fit perfectly into this new rhythm, but Tom Monaghan wanted more. In a move that bordered on dangerous, he made a promise so simple it would define the company for decades:
"Pizza Delivered in 30 Minutes or It's Free."
It wasn't just about pizza. It was about certainty. And America bought it—literally.
Within a year, sales exploded. From 200 stores in 1978 to over 2,500 by 1985. Over 5,000 by 1989. Every store became a speed factory with slimmed-down menus, cookie-cutter layouts, and drivers who might as well have been sitting behind the wheel with engines already running.
Competitors couldn't keep up. But here's the brutal truth about speed: you don't see the danger until it's too late.
The Hidden Dangers of Performance-Based Compensation
Here's what every sales leader needs to understand: Powerful sales incentives, pushed too far, create unintended consequences that can destroy company culture. This principle, that when metrics become targets, they cease to be good metrics, would prove devastatingly true for Domino's.
At first, the cracks were small. A delivery driver rolling a stop sign here, a speeding ticket there. But this wasn't a system built to reward patience—it was built to reward speed at any cost.
Inside Domino's stores, the pressure wasn't subtle. Drivers were expected to race the clock. If they missed the 30-minute mark, some franchises made them pay for the order out of their own pockets. The message was clear: make it fast, or make it up yourself.
Rolling stops became running red lights. Neighborhood shortcuts turned into risky maneuvers through heavy traffic.
What customers didn't see—and what Domino's executives refused to acknowledge—was that they'd created a ticking time bomb. Speed wasn't just a business model anymore; it had become a way of life that determined every employee's behavior, and smart sales leaders understand this connection between incentives and culture.
By the late 1980s, insurance companies raised Domino's premiums by 15-20 percent. Reports surfaced of accidents tied to delivery drivers rushing to meet the 30-minute window.
Then came the story that changed everything: A Domino's driver in St. Louis ran a red light, colliding with another vehicle. Inside that car was Jean Kinder, whose life was permanently changed. The jury awarded her $78 million in punitive damages.
In 1993, Domino's officially ended the 30-minute guarantee in the United States.
Here's what most sales leaders get wrong about incentives: they don't just shape what people do—they shape who people become.
Sound familiar? It should. Because this same pattern plays out in sales organizations every single day.
5 Warning Signs Your Sales Incentives Are Backfiring
Take Wells Fargo's aggressive cross-selling goals in the mid-2010s. Supervisors told bankers to open more accounts,
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
This is the Sales Gravy Podcast.
Hi. I'm Jeb Blunt, best selling author of
fanatical prospecting, objections, sales EQ, and inked, and
I'm here to help you open more doors,
close bigger deals, and rock your commission check.
It's Jeff Blunt Junior, and thanks for listening
to Money Monday. We took a short summer
break, and following that break, we're gonna catch
(00:23):
up on some recordings for Money Monday. In
the meantime, we're gonna introduce a new podcast
style for you to enjoy. Those new Monday
Monday episodes will be out very, very soon,
so keep an eye on the feed. And
remember, Sales Greyby live is happening in September
and November. Our team will be in Atlanta
with a fanatical prospecting boot camp, which is
a two day intensive for those that wanna
take their sales game to the next level.
(00:44):
Very few tickets remain for that September date,
so go to salesgravy.com/live.
That's salesgravy.com/live
for more details.
In this week's episode, please enjoy thirty minutes
or less, the high cost of fast pizza,
a story about how a single guarantee propelled
Domino's to success, but nearly destroyed the company
in the process.
(01:07):
If you're a sales leader or anyone who's
ever set big goals for a team, what
you are about to hear matters more than
you think. Because as most good ideas do,
it started with $900
and a half big plan.
It was 1960,
and America was changing fast.
Suburbs were expanding, families were getting busier, and
(01:28):
convenience was starting to become a kind of
religion. And amid all of that, their two
brothers, Tom and James Monaghan,
they spotted an opportunity.
They scraped together some cash and bought a
pizzeria called Dominic's in Michigan. Two brothers, one
store, and really big dreams.
At first, they planned to split the work.
But within a couple of months, James had
(01:49):
decided that he liked driving Volkswagens
more than he liked making pizzas, and he
traded his half of the business to Tom
for a beat up Beetle.
And then Tom Monaghan was alone
and free to dream even bigger.
Because by 1965,
he'd expanded to three stores,
enough to cause a problem. He couldn't actually
legally keep the Dominick's name, and an employee,
(02:11):
probably between deliveries, suggested a brand new name.
You know that name as Domino's,
and it stuck.
The logo was three dots, one for each
store. Tom figured he'd add a new dot
for every new location, but after opening store
number five, he wisely reconsidered his plan because
Domino's didn't just grow, it exploded.
(02:32):
By 1967,
the first franchise opened. And by 1978,
there were over 200 Domino's stores.
Tom Monaghan
wasn't just building a pizza company. He was
engineering a delivery empire. And Tom wasn't just
obsessed with pizza.
He was obsessed with time.
Every decision Domino's made, from the way they
(02:52):
designed their stores to the way they trained
their drivers was aimed at shaving seconds off
of every single delivery time.
Single sized pizza doughs for consistency,
a menu stripped down to the bare essentials,
and delivery routes mapped out like military campaigns.
Because Domino's wasn't just selling food, it was
selling urgency.
And then,
in the nineteen eighties, came a promise that
(03:13):
would define Domino's and its entire legacy.
Pizza
delivered in thirty minutes or it's free.
He was bold. He was brilliant, and he
was just a little bit crazy.
This
is the story of how a single guarantee
propelled Domino's to dominate the pizza world and
how it almost,
almost
destroyed the company in the process.
(03:33):
The wrong incentives
pushed too far don't just change behavior.
They change everything.
Picture America in the nineteen eighties.
Microwave ovens were revolutionizing kitchens. The Federal Express,
today known as FedEx, was turning overnight delivery
into a cultural expectation, and Americans weren't just
eating faster,
they were living faster.
(03:55):
Domino's
fit perfectly into this new rhythm.
In 1978,
Domino's was still a scrappy underdog with just
200 stores tucked away in college towns and
sleepy suburbs, but Tom Monaghan had a bigger
dream, and he made a decision that changed
everything.
A promise so simple that it bordered on
completely dangerous.
If we don't deliver your pizza in thirty
(04:16):
minutes or less,
it's free.
It wasn't just about pizza. It was about
certainty.
If you order a pizza, you knew that
in thirty minutes, you'd have something hot and
ready on your dinner table. Or if it
wasn't there, your dinner and your night was
free, and America bought it. Within a year,
sales exploded.
Domino's wasn't just making pizza. They were manufacturing
(04:38):
momentum.
Every store was a speed factory, slimmed down
menus, cookie cutter layouts, ovens built for blitzing
orders, and drivers who might as well have
been sitting behind the wheel with the engine
already running.
From 200 stores to over 2,500
by 1985
and over 5,000 stores by 1989,
5,000
stores.
(04:59):
Competitors scrambled.
Pizza Hut, Little Caesar's, they just couldn't keep
up. Domino's owned the delivery lane. Every commercial
hammered the same message, fast, cheap, and reliable.
But something else was happening too.
Domino's wasn't just feeding people faster. It was
feeding a growing American impatience.
There was an expectation that whatever you wanted,
(05:21):
food,
service, success should arrive not just fast, but
immediately.
And here's the thing about moving faster.
You don't always see the cracks forming beneath
your feet.
At first, the cracks were small. Hairline fractures
beneath a glossy surface, a delivery driver rolling
a stop sign here, a speeding ticket there,
(05:41):
a pizza arriving a little too cold or
a little too late.
But this wasn't a system built to reward
patients. It was a system built to reward
speed.
And inside Domino's stores, the pressure wasn't subtle.
Drivers were unofficially expected to race the clock.
If they missed the thirty minute mark, some
franchises made them pay for the order out
of their own pockets.
(06:01):
Others docked bonuses, and the message was clear.
Make it fast or make it up yourself.
Rolling stops became running red lights. Neighborhood shortcuts
turned into risky maneuvers through heavy traffic. And
yet, for a time, the system kept humming.
What customers didn't see and what Domino's leadership
didn't want to see was that risk was
(06:23):
compounding in the background.
Speed wasn't just a business model anymore.
It had become a way of life, but
speed comes with consequences.
By the late nineteen eighties, insurance companies started
raising Domino's premiums by 15 to 20%,
and reports surfaced of accidents tied to delivery
drivers rushing to meet that thirty minute window.
(06:44):
At first, Domino's executives dismissed these incidents as
the cost of doing business, an unfortunate side
effect of their winning formula.
But then came the media.
Local news outlets started connecting the dots. Domino's
delivery accidents,
rushed drivers, and tragic outcomes.
One story out of Saint Louis caught the
nation's attention. A Domino's driver ran a red
(07:06):
light, colliding with another vehicle. And inside of
that other car was someone named Jean Kinder,
a woman whose life was permanently changed.
In the courtroom, the story wasn't just about
one accident. It was about the corporate culture
that seemed to value speed over safety,
and the jury agreed.
They awarded Kinder $78,000,000
(07:27):
in punitive damages,
and that was loud enough to echo all
the way down to Domino's corporate headquarters in
Michigan.
And suddenly,
the cracks,
they weren't just visible. They were undeniable.
Because in 1993,
Domino's officially ended the thirty minute guarantee in
The United States.
Publicly, they cited concerns for driver and customer
(07:47):
safety, but privately,
they knew the truth. The incentive that once
fueled their rise had become too risky to
survive.
And here's the thing about incentives.
They just don't shape what people do. They
shape who people become. And Domino's wasn't the
only company that had to learn this lesson
the hard way. Let's take Wells Fargo for
(08:08):
instance. They were once hailed as one of
the most stable banks in America. And in
the mid twenty tens, it began pushing an
aggressive cross selling strategy.
Supervisors
told bankers to open more accounts, sell more
products, and hit quota, or else.
Employees did exactly what they were told. They
opened fake accounts, forged signatures, and enrolled customers
and services they didn't want or even need.
(08:30):
But Wells Fargo didn't create fraudsters.
They created an incentive system that made fraud
feel like survival,
and they paid a heavy price.
$9,000,000,000
in fines as of 2025
with multiple CEO resignations
and the reputation that's still in tatters.
And then there's Uber,
whose early days were fueled by what they
(08:50):
called quests. These were incentive programs that rewarded
drivers for hitting trip targets within tight time
windows.
It sounds motivating. Right? Until you realize that
it pushed drivers to skip breaks, ignore traffic
laws, and stay on the road much longer
than was safe.
And some cities pushed back. Regulators stepped in.
Writers began to notice the cost of a
company that rewarded hustle with blinders on.
(09:13):
Or let's take a look at Amazon warehouses,
for example. For years, Amazon tracked workers with
minute by minute productivity metrics, scan times, and
time off task rates, and they rewarded those
who performed at robotic levels.
But it became
a cost. Workers skipping bathroom breaks, there were
reports of injuries, and there was turnover rates
so high that they had to rebuild entire
(09:35):
teams every few months.
When incentives become mechanical,
people do too, and there's a name for
this. It's called the cobra effect, named after
a well meaning British policy in colonial India.
Officials offered a bounty for every dead cobra.
The idea was to reduce the cobra population.
But instead, people started breeding cobras. When the
(09:55):
program ended, they released them, and the problem
was even worse than when it started.
The lesson? When a metric becomes a target,
it ceases to become a good metric. That's
Goodert's law. It applies everywhere, in sales, in
leadership, operations, and marketing.
If you create the wrong goal, you will
still get results,
just not the ones you want.
(10:17):
Domino's
had learned what happens when powerful incentive plans
run unchecked.
But unlike many companies,
they didn't bury the story. They didn't just
tweak the marketing.
They changed course entirely.
In the late two thousands, Domino's made a
stunning move. They publicly admitted what customers had
been whispering for years.
They said,
(10:37):
our pizza just isn't very good.
That line came from a national campaign that
was launched in 2010. They showed real customer
complaints. They didn't sugarcoat the reviews, and they
took the hits, and then they got to
work. A new recipe, a new crust, new
sauce, they completely overhauled product marketed with transparency
and with humility. And it worked because Domino's
(10:57):
stock, which had hovered around $8 in 02/2008,
claimed over $300
within the decade.
But they didn't stop at the product.
Domino's rebranded itself as a tech company that
just happened to make pizza. They rolled out
GPS driver tracking, voice ordering via smart assistance,
and they even tested delivery by robot and
drone. They flipped the script.
(11:18):
Less about speed at all costs and more
about control, transparency,
and user experience.
It's not that Domino's abandoned incentives altogether.
It's just that they learned how to build
better ones, incentives that reward the right behaviors,
incentives that can evolve. In sales, leadership, and
business, this is the real takeaway.
It's not that incentives are dangerous,
(11:39):
but that they are powerful.
What we measure shapes how people act, and
that's true for delivery drivers, it's true for
bankers, It's true for you, and it's true
for me. When speed becomes the only target,
we start to cut corners. When volume becomes
the only metric, we lose sight of trust.
When incentives go unchecked, they become a silent
operating system rewriting how people behave without ever
(12:01):
announcing the upgrade.
So ask yourself,
are your incentives pushing people toward excellence
or just toward activity?
Are they driving sustainable growth or just temporary
wins? Are they aligned with the mission or
quietly
undermining
it? Because whether you're running a sales team
or delivering pizzas, the principle is the same.
If you want better results,
(12:23):
build better incentives. And if you don't want
to build a legacy, do what Domino's did.
Don't just move fast, learn when to hit
the brakes.
And when you're tired, ready to go home,
and the day is over, remember,
make one more call.
Hey. It's Jeb Blunt Junior here. I know
(12:44):
you just listened to me, and if you
made it to the end, thank you. My
team and I spent several weeks writing and
producing this. It's a limb that we're walking
out on, and I hope that you enjoyed
the story. If you have feedback or wanna
share your support, please send us a DM
on LinkedIn letting us know what your honest
feedback is. And don't forget to subscribe, follow,
like, and review our podcast on your listening
(13:04):
platform.
It helps a ton. And remember, Sales Gravy
Live is happening in September and November. Our
team will be in Atlanta with a fanatical
prospecting boot camp, which is a two day
intensive for those that wanna take their sales
game to the next level.
Very few tickets remain for that September date,
so go to salesgravy.com/live.
That's salesgravy.com/live
(13:24):
for more details, and we'll catch you next
time on the Sales Gravy Podcast.
This is the Sales Gravy Podcast.
Hi. I'm Jeb Blunt, best selling author of
fanatical prospecting, objections, sales EQ, and inked, and
I'm here to help you open more doors,
close bigger deals, and rock your commission check.
It's Jeff Blunt Junior, and thanks for listening
to Money Monday. We took a short summer
break, and following that break, we're gonna catch
(00:23):
up on some recordings for Money Monday. In
the meantime, we're gonna introduce a new podcast
style for you to enjoy. Those new Monday
Monday episodes will be out very, very soon,
so keep an eye on the feed. And
remember, Sales Greyby live is happening in September
and November. Our team will be in Atlanta
with a fanatical prospecting boot camp, which is
a two day intensive for those that wanna
take their sales game to the next level.
(00:44):
Very few tickets remain for that September date,
so go to salesgravy.com/live.
That's salesgravy.com/live
for more details.
In this week's episode, please enjoy thirty minutes
or less, the high cost of fast pizza,
a story about how a single guarantee propelled
Domino's to success, but nearly destroyed the company
in the process.
(01:07):
If you're a sales leader or anyone who's
ever set big goals for a team, what
you are about to hear matters more than
you think. Because as most good ideas do,
it started with $900
and a half big plan.
It was 1960,
and America was changing fast.
Suburbs were expanding, families were getting busier, and
(01:28):
convenience was starting to become a kind of
religion. And amid all of that, their two
brothers, Tom and James Monaghan,
they spotted an opportunity.
They scraped together some cash and bought a
pizzeria called Dominic's in Michigan. Two brothers, one
store, and really big dreams.
At first, they planned to split the work.
But within a couple of months, James had
(01:49):
decided that he liked driving Volkswagens
more than he liked making pizzas, and he
traded his half of the business to Tom
for a beat up Beetle.
And then Tom Monaghan was alone
and free to dream even bigger.
Because by 1965,
he'd expanded to three stores,
enough to cause a problem. He couldn't actually
legally keep the Dominick's name, and an employee,
(02:11):
probably between deliveries, suggested a brand new name.
You know that name as Domino's,
and it stuck.
The logo was three dots, one for each
store. Tom figured he'd add a new dot
for every new location, but after opening store
number five, he wisely reconsidered his plan because
Domino's didn't just grow, it exploded.
(02:32):
By 1967,
the first franchise opened. And by 1978,
there were over 200 Domino's stores.
Tom Monaghan
wasn't just building a pizza company. He was
engineering a delivery empire. And Tom wasn't just
obsessed with pizza.
He was obsessed with time.
Every decision Domino's made, from the way they
(02:52):
designed their stores to the way they trained
their drivers was aimed at shaving seconds off
of every single delivery time.
Single sized pizza doughs for consistency,
a menu stripped down to the bare essentials,
and delivery routes mapped out like military campaigns.
Because Domino's wasn't just selling food, it was
selling urgency.
And then,
in the nineteen eighties, came a promise that
(03:13):
would define Domino's and its entire legacy.
Pizza
delivered in thirty minutes or it's free.
He was bold. He was brilliant, and he
was just a little bit crazy.
This
is the story of how a single guarantee
propelled Domino's to dominate the pizza world and
how it almost,
almost
destroyed the company in the process.
(03:33):
The wrong incentives
pushed too far don't just change behavior.
They change everything.
Picture America in the nineteen eighties.
Microwave ovens were revolutionizing kitchens. The Federal Express,
today known as FedEx, was turning overnight delivery
into a cultural expectation, and Americans weren't just
eating faster,
they were living faster.
(03:55):
Domino's
fit perfectly into this new rhythm.
In 1978,
Domino's was still a scrappy underdog with just
200 stores tucked away in college towns and
sleepy suburbs, but Tom Monaghan had a bigger
dream, and he made a decision that changed
everything.
A promise so simple that it bordered on
completely dangerous.
If we don't deliver your pizza in thirty
(04:16):
minutes or less,
it's free.
It wasn't just about pizza. It was about
certainty.
If you order a pizza, you knew that
in thirty minutes, you'd have something hot and
ready on your dinner table. Or if it
wasn't there, your dinner and your night was
free, and America bought it. Within a year,
sales exploded.
Domino's wasn't just making pizza. They were manufacturing
(04:38):
momentum.
Every store was a speed factory, slimmed down
menus, cookie cutter layouts, ovens built for blitzing
orders, and drivers who might as well have
been sitting behind the wheel with the engine
already running.
From 200 stores to over 2,500
by 1985
and over 5,000 stores by 1989,
5,000
stores.
(04:59):
Competitors scrambled.
Pizza Hut, Little Caesar's, they just couldn't keep
up. Domino's owned the delivery lane. Every commercial
hammered the same message, fast, cheap, and reliable.
But something else was happening too.
Domino's wasn't just feeding people faster. It was
feeding a growing American impatience.
There was an expectation that whatever you wanted,
(05:21):
food,
service, success should arrive not just fast, but
immediately.
And here's the thing about moving faster.
You don't always see the cracks forming beneath
your feet.
At first, the cracks were small. Hairline fractures
beneath a glossy surface, a delivery driver rolling
a stop sign here, a speeding ticket there,
(05:41):
a pizza arriving a little too cold or
a little too late.
But this wasn't a system built to reward
patients. It was a system built to reward
speed.
And inside Domino's stores, the pressure wasn't subtle.
Drivers were unofficially expected to race the clock.
If they missed the thirty minute mark, some
franchises made them pay for the order out
of their own pockets.
(06:01):
Others docked bonuses, and the message was clear.
Make it fast or make it up yourself.
Rolling stops became running red lights. Neighborhood shortcuts
turned into risky maneuvers through heavy traffic. And
yet, for a time, the system kept humming.
What customers didn't see and what Domino's leadership
didn't want to see was that risk was
(06:23):
compounding in the background.
Speed wasn't just a business model anymore.
It had become a way of life, but
speed comes with consequences.
By the late nineteen eighties, insurance companies started
raising Domino's premiums by 15 to 20%,
and reports surfaced of accidents tied to delivery
drivers rushing to meet that thirty minute window.
(06:44):
At first, Domino's executives dismissed these incidents as
the cost of doing business, an unfortunate side
effect of their winning formula.
But then came the media.
Local news outlets started connecting the dots. Domino's
delivery accidents,
rushed drivers, and tragic outcomes.
One story out of Saint Louis caught the
nation's attention. A Domino's driver ran a red
(07:06):
light, colliding with another vehicle. And inside of
that other car was someone named Jean Kinder,
a woman whose life was permanently changed.
In the courtroom, the story wasn't just about
one accident. It was about the corporate culture
that seemed to value speed over safety,
and the jury agreed.
They awarded Kinder $78,000,000
(07:27):
in punitive damages,
and that was loud enough to echo all
the way down to Domino's corporate headquarters in
Michigan.
And suddenly,
the cracks,
they weren't just visible. They were undeniable.
Because in 1993,
Domino's officially ended the thirty minute guarantee in
The United States.
Publicly, they cited concerns for driver and customer
(07:47):
safety, but privately,
they knew the truth. The incentive that once
fueled their rise had become too risky to
survive.
And here's the thing about incentives.
They just don't shape what people do. They
shape who people become. And Domino's wasn't the
only company that had to learn this lesson
the hard way. Let's take Wells Fargo for
(08:08):
instance. They were once hailed as one of
the most stable banks in America. And in
the mid twenty tens, it began pushing an
aggressive cross selling strategy.
Supervisors
told bankers to open more accounts, sell more
products, and hit quota, or else.
Employees did exactly what they were told. They
opened fake accounts, forged signatures, and enrolled customers
and services they didn't want or even need.
(08:30):
But Wells Fargo didn't create fraudsters.
They created an incentive system that made fraud
feel like survival,
and they paid a heavy price.
$9,000,000,000
in fines as of 2025
with multiple CEO resignations
and the reputation that's still in tatters.
And then there's Uber,
whose early days were fueled by what they
(08:50):
called quests. These were incentive programs that rewarded
drivers for hitting trip targets within tight time
windows.
It sounds motivating. Right? Until you realize that
it pushed drivers to skip breaks, ignore traffic
laws, and stay on the road much longer
than was safe.
And some cities pushed back. Regulators stepped in.
Writers began to notice the cost of a
company that rewarded hustle with blinders on.
(09:13):
Or let's take a look at Amazon warehouses,
for example. For years, Amazon tracked workers with
minute by minute productivity metrics, scan times, and
time off task rates, and they rewarded those
who performed at robotic levels.
But it became
a cost. Workers skipping bathroom breaks, there were
reports of injuries, and there was turnover rates
so high that they had to rebuild entire
(09:35):
teams every few months.
When incentives become mechanical,
people do too, and there's a name for
this. It's called the cobra effect, named after
a well meaning British policy in colonial India.
Officials offered a bounty for every dead cobra.
The idea was to reduce the cobra population.
But instead, people started breeding cobras. When the
(09:55):
program ended, they released them, and the problem
was even worse than when it started.
The lesson? When a metric becomes a target,
it ceases to become a good metric. That's
Goodert's law. It applies everywhere, in sales, in
leadership, operations, and marketing.
If you create the wrong goal, you will
still get results,
just not the ones you want.
(10:17):
Domino's
had learned what happens when powerful incentive plans
run unchecked.
But unlike many companies,
they didn't bury the story. They didn't just
tweak the marketing.
They changed course entirely.
In the late two thousands, Domino's made a
stunning move. They publicly admitted what customers had
been whispering for years.
They said,
(10:37):
our pizza just isn't very good.
That line came from a national campaign that
was launched in 2010. They showed real customer
complaints. They didn't sugarcoat the reviews, and they
took the hits, and then they got to
work. A new recipe, a new crust, new
sauce, they completely overhauled product marketed with transparency
and with humility. And it worked because Domino's
(10:57):
stock, which had hovered around $8 in 02/2008,
claimed over $300
within the decade.
But they didn't stop at the product.
Domino's rebranded itself as a tech company that
just happened to make pizza. They rolled out
GPS driver tracking, voice ordering via smart assistance,
and they even tested delivery by robot and
drone. They flipped the script.
(11:18):
Less about speed at all costs and more
about control, transparency,
and user experience.
It's not that Domino's abandoned incentives altogether.
It's just that they learned how to build
better ones, incentives that reward the right behaviors,
incentives that can evolve. In sales, leadership, and
business, this is the real takeaway.
It's not that incentives are dangerous,
(11:39):
but that they are powerful.
What we measure shapes how people act, and
that's true for delivery drivers, it's true for
bankers, It's true for you, and it's true
for me. When speed becomes the only target,
we start to cut corners. When volume becomes
the only metric, we lose sight of trust.
When incentives go unchecked, they become a silent
operating system rewriting how people behave without ever
(12:01):
announcing the upgrade.
So ask yourself,
are your incentives pushing people toward excellence
or just toward activity?
Are they driving sustainable growth or just temporary
wins? Are they aligned with the mission or
quietly
undermining
it? Because whether you're running a sales team
or delivering pizzas, the principle is the same.
If you want better results,
(12:23):
build better incentives. And if you don't want
to build a legacy, do what Domino's did.
Don't just move fast, learn when to hit
the brakes.
And when you're tired, ready to go home,
and the day is over, remember,
make one more call.
Hey. It's Jeb Blunt Junior here. I know
(12:44):
you just listened to me, and if you
made it to the end, thank you. My
team and I spent several weeks writing and
producing this. It's a limb that we're walking
out on, and I hope that you enjoyed
the story. If you have feedback or wanna
share your support, please send us a DM
on LinkedIn letting us know what your honest
feedback is. And don't forget to subscribe, follow,
like, and review our podcast on your listening
(13:04):
platform.
It helps a ton. And remember, Sales Gravy
Live is happening in September and November. Our
team will be in Atlanta with a fanatical
prospecting boot camp, which is a two day
intensive for those that wanna take their sales
game to the next level.
Very few tickets remain for that September date,
so go to salesgravy.com/live.
That's salesgravy.com/live
(13:24):
for more details, and we'll catch you next
time on the Sales Gravy Podcast.
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