including Italy and Spain, and
the president of the APMEA
region became lead for the high-
growth group.
Easterbrook then made
delivery a global goal, creating
a cross-functional “fast action”
team of executives whose
specific regional experience
could now be tapped and
extrapolated globally across the
organization. “It’s incredibly
energizing,” Easterbrook says.
The CEO also supercharged
McDonald’s plans for selling
its company-owned stores to
franchisees. When he took over,
the goal was to sell 1,500 restau-
rants this way annually. Easter-
brook shifted that to 4,000 and
gave the company until 2019 to
do it. His plan, as it turned out,
was insufficiently ambitious.
McDonald’s crossed the thresh-
old nearly a year ahead of sched-
ule. This was realized, in part,
thanks to a blockbuster deal
struck in August to sell roughly
2,740 restaurants in Hong Kong
and mainland China to the
state-owned Citic and privately
owned Carlyle Group, creating
the company’s largest franchi-
see outside the U.S. Working
through this deal, McDonald’s
hopes to open 2,000 more
restaurants in China over the
next five years to take a huge
bite out of the country’s $125
billion fast-food market.
The result of these sales:
In just less than three years,
McDonald’s increased the per-
centage of its franchised stores
from 81 percent to 91 percent,
with the goal of being 95 percent