Recently, Chick-fil-A reached its self-imposed goal of $1 billion in sales by 2001. Year-end 2000 system-wide sales reached $1.086 billion. The milestone passed quietly, in typical Chick-fil-A style.

The brand has been steadily and carefully growing for fifty-three years. During that time, Chick-fil-A has remained moored to its core values: ethical and spiritual tomes extolled by the company’s founder, S. Truett Cathy. In every application of its business objectives, from children’s meal premiums to franchisee agreements, Chick-fil-A strives to live up to its corporate purpose. That corporate guidepost is perhaps most visibly demonstrated by the company’s "Never on Sunday" policy. "We feel that is a very special day, a divine day, a day that is set aside for the family and to worship if you choose," says Cathy. Cathy has never yielded to external pressures to abandon his "Never on Sunday" policy or any other of his sometimes unorthodox business practices.

Of all of his business accomplishments, Cathy is most proud of Chick-fil-A’s scholarship programs, which have awarded more than 14,000 $1,000, no-strings-attached scholarships in the last 53 years.

In more recent years, Chick-fil-A has had a group of bovine ambassadors to thank in part for their success: the "Eat Mor Chikin" cows. "The customers just love those cows," says Jimmy Collins. "When the agency first presented them, we thought, ‘this is a clever idea.’ But we never dreamed that customers would become so enthusiastic about the cows." At the end of 2000, Chick-fil-A had 959 locations in 34 states and South Africa. Recently, QSR Magazine talked at length with Chick-fil-A president James (Jimmy) L.S. Collins and briefly with founder S. Truett Cathy to discuss the history, growth, and future of Chick-fil-A.

Chick-fil-A set its billion-dollar goal in 1989. What is the next goal for the company?

Jimmy Collins: I feel at this point that we have reached a certain degree of momentum. And our expectation is that we will continue on this same path. We don’t intend immediately to set another goal of dollars and cents for a certain date. During the process of this, in the early stages, we got very far behind on this goal. A lot of people frankly got very discouraged, [thinking] that we never would meet it. But what we set about to do was fulfill a challenge that Truett Cathy, our chief executive, had given us: Why not focus on getting better, not just bigger? We believe it was that focus on getting better that actually resulted in the additional sales. We found that we were creating a lot better same-store sales increases. We would have never been able to get good same-store sales increases [without that focus]. Just on the new restaurants we were building, it was not enough [to achieve the billion-dollar goal].