An 11-unit McDonald’s franchisee, Vicki Chancellor also chairs the brand’s Operators National Advertising Fund.
Unlike many franchisees who dream of entrepreneurship for years, Vicki Chancellor did not know she wanted to be a business owner. In fact, she didn’t even know if she wanted to go to college. Her journey to becoming a multi-unit McDonald’s franchisee—and the first person of color elected by her peers to chair the McDonald’s Operators National Advertising Fund—was anything but ordinary.
After losing her mother at the age of 10, Chancellor’s 18-year-old brother raised her and they lived in a few different homes. While attending West High School in Rochester, New York, she had a teacher, Mrs. Schwartz, who saw her potential. “Probably more potential than I ever could have believed in myself,” Chancellor reflected. “It’s good to have someone who can see through the rough edges.”
Mrs. Schwartz became a strong mentor for Chancellor, and because of her influence, Chancellor began her career as a teacher. “I always had an interest in empowering young people to get to their ideal position,” she said, “whether it was a professional position or just in general so they can turn out to be the best people they could.”
At one point, Chancellor was thrust into substitute teaching for a business class, which piqued her interest because of the potential to “hit goals and things that I never thought were possible.” She went on to work in the consumer-packaged goods and apparel industries, holding a variety of executive sales leadership roles at Sara Lee Sock Company, Hanes, Champion, Johnson & Johnson and more. Those experiences taught her the valuable lesson of effective marketing to consumers and the power it can have for a business, she said.
Then Chancellor’s husband, David, purchased a McDonald’s restaurant in Atlanta in 2004, and asked her to put together marketing plans. Wanting to learn more about the business, Chancellor began working in the restaurant for a couple weeks and decided to put in an application for the McDonald’s registered applicant program, which she completed in less than a year.
“If you’re going to choose a franchise, my mind goes to, choose the one that’s the premier one in the industry,” she said. “You can’t pick a better opportunity than McDonald’s.”
Chancellor and David devoted 100 percent of their attention to their first restaurant, located on the iconic Martin Luther King Drive. Chancellor was there at 5 a.m. each morning, and her husband was there from 3 p.m. to close, since it wasn’t a 24-hour restaurant at the time. “We knew every one of our crew people and their families, and got to know a lot of our customers,” Chancellor noted.
Now, she and her husband operate 11 restaurants, and still make a point of getting to know each of their general managers, shift managers and the majority of their crew, she said, adding that they still work in their restaurants on a weekly basis.
“The difference I would say is, the volumes have grown in our restaurants, so we have to be able to juggle things a little more to make sure that we are meeting our customers’ needs to use us as a quick-service restaurant,” Chancellor said. “We have more items than we did 18 years ago.”
But the biggest difference Chancellor sees in the franchisor since 2004 is the commitment to advancing the employee value proposition, with tuition assistance programs such as Archways to Opportunity and the free college education offered to employees through the Colorado Institute. In Chancellor’s restaurants, employees who are enrolled in any of those college programs are even paid for their study time. Chancellor is also part of a pilot program that partners with a company to provide free childcare for the day if a staff member is sick, which can also be used if a staff member’s parent needs a caretaker.
“My obstacles helped to shape how I view the world and how I view my personal ability to give back to my communities and to my employees,” she added. “At 10, such a young age, I learned how to not be bitter but figure out, yes, bad things will happen to people, but how do you turn those things into a success and not dwell on them and move yourself to a better place.”