Wingstop won the Stevie® Award for Best Overall Company with more than 2,500 employees, as well as Best TV or Cinema Ad Campaign, in The 2008 American Business Awards.

What makes a company great?  According to Jim Flynn, CEO of Richardson, Texas-based Wingstop Restaurants, Inc., it means doing one thing better than anyone else.  At Wingstop’s aviation-themed restaurant chain that means chicken wings.

Wingstop was the first to move the chicken wing from appetizer to center-of-the-plate. In the lifespan of most restaurant concepts, there is a move to branch
out from the original focus in hopes of attracting a larger audience. Wingstop has never veered from its mission of doing one thing, chicken wings, better than the rest, and last year Wingstop surpassed the billion-wings-served milestone.

In an economic environment where companies are announcing disappointing financials everyday, Wingstop continues to announce very impressive sales and growth figures.  The chicken-wing chain’s comp store sales grew over fifteen percent in 2007, and it had achieved twenty-one consecutive quarterly comp store sales increases by September 2008.

Wingstop’s system-wide sales increased by 35 percent to reach $206.6 million in 2007, and the company’s new store openings grew by 18.5 percent from 2006 to 2007, opening 281 units by year end 2006 and 333 units by year end 2007.  The rapidly growing chain expects to open an additional 80 stores in 2008.

Since 1994, the chain has sauced and tossed hot, fresh, made-to-order wings and sold them to hungry customers in groups of ten, twenty, and even up to one-hundred. Today, Wingstop serves chicken wings to customers spanning 32 states.

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by Pamela Weinsaft, Managing Editor, The Glass Hammer

The Glass Hammer won the Stevie Award for Blog of the Year in the 2008 Stevie Awards for Women in Business, presented in New York this month.  Following is a recent article from their site.

Getting a plum expat assignment overseas is a sure sign you’re on your way to making it. Your company will likely give you an orientation to that new country—the “do’s” and “don’ts”—to make sure that you fit right into your new, albeit temporary, home. You immerse yourself in a different culture and possibly different language, noting all those things that are different and surprising things that are the same. But what happens when it comes time to return home?

The transition may not be as smooth as one would expect. So says Irenee French, an Irish woman from London who just returned to the United Kingdom after 17 years of living and working in Northern California.  When she spoke with The Glass Hammer recently, Ms. French quickly listed many things that have challenged her upon her return, including the relative lack of space in both her apartment and the overcrowded Tube line that serves her neighborhood.
 
But more than the superficial differences, it was the cultural differences that threw her for a loop.  She was shocked at the change in work culture in the years she’s been away, and in particular at the brashness that seems to have permeated the office. “I can’t believe what these girls in suits are coming out with: vulgarity, baseness.  They’re cursing up a storm and talking in detail about their sex lives.  That’s something they definitely would have been written up for in California.”

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Sales Partnerships, Inc. won the Stevie Award for Best Outsourcing Sales Team in the 2007 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. The firm provides complete sales outsourcing solutions to large enterprise and middle market clients.

We recently spoke with Fred Kessler, President of Sales Partnerships, about what the company does and how it got its start, and why the trend to sales outsourcing is projected to accelerate.

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Blogs, or web logs, are all the rage these days. Each month in this space we'll point you to several blogs that we think might be of interest to you.

Risky Biz : Suffering withdrawal from the US elections? Let the race for the Oscars fill the gap!
Agency Spy : News and gossip about what's happening in the world of advertising.
ESP Game : This site is not just a fun game, it's also used to train computers to solve problems.
Gene Expression : Fascinating facts on population genetics.