How One Student's Business Plan Became Reality

As a junior at Patrick Henry College, Meredith Monroe (EBA, ’19) wrote a business plan for opening a Chick-fil-A restaurant in her hometown of Turlock, CA.

“In my mind, when I submitted that business plan, it was just a school assignment. However, through a long chain of crazy events, word got back to me that Chick-fil-A’s headquarters had seen it. Now, they’ve built the Chick-fil-A ahead of the major cities around us, in the same town and the same shopping center that I suggested.”

Read more to learn how this happened.

Meredith Monroe was at PHC the first year that the Business Methods & Entrepreneurship class was offered. “We were the first ones to go through the Harvard case studies and the class material, and get the big compendium of information: it was an excellent class,” Meredith said.

Then, a 30-plus-page business plan was one of the major assignments for the class as well (now it’s the final exam in Financial Analysis). Meredith’s idea for her business plan came from the Chick-fil-A that had opened right across the street from the college.

“That was a fun experience: seeing the grand opening of the restaurant. Everyone who was from the East Coast knew about Chick-fil-A from the South, so they were all raving about it. I am from California, and at that time, we didn’t have many Chick-fil-A’s out there.

So, I was like, ‘Okay, this is working really well here in Purcellville, and obviously, it's very successful all over the nation. What would it look like to bring a Chick-fil-A franchise to my hometown?’ And so that's where the idea started.”

After a semester of hard work, research, and planning, she turned it in and won the EBA business plan award for her class. Then the business plan was out of her mind.

But, a few weeks later, her dad, then a pilot for United Airlines, called her saying, “You will not believe the conversation I had today!”

At a United Airlines training session in Denver, a man named Gary approached him unexpectedly and asked, “Do you have a daughter named Meredith?”

“Yes. What did she do? How do you know her?”

Gary then told Meredith’s father all about her Chick-fil-A business plan. He said it was so strong and detailed that people at Chick-fil-A headquarters had even wondered whether she had hacked into their system. Someone there had reviewed the plan, liked it so much, and mentioned it to Gary, who later remembered enough to share the story with Meredith’s father.

“That’s when it came all the way back around to me. I'm still not sure what happened in all those steps between,” Meredith said.

She soon learned that Scott Payne, then the operator of the Purcellville Chick-fil-A (now a Chick-fil-A operator in New York), who helped Meredith with the finishing touches on her business plan, had played a part in it.

“I sent him a printed hard copy of it as a ‘thank you.’ Unbeknownst to me, he sent it to Chick-fil-A’s headquarters.”

Now, eight years later, a Chick-fil-A is opening in Turlock ahead of other potential Chick-fil-A locations in the area, in the same location she proposed.

“Maybe this was something they were already working on, and my business plan just happened to match it, but all the coincidences make me think that my plan actually had an influence,” Meredith said.

 Patrick Henry College exists to glorify God by challenging the status quo in higher education, lifting high both faith and reason within a rigorous academic environment; thereby preserving for posterity the ideals behind the "noble experiment in ordered liberty" that is the foundation of America.