Success Quote by Jim Cantalupo

Cantalupo’s line has the blunt, back-office clarity of someone who’s watched price hikes get wasted in real time. The premise is simple: raising prices is not a strategy; it’s a lever. Pull it, and you either convert that extra revenue into profit or you discover how porous your operation really is. His choice of “fritter it away” is doing the heavy lifting here. It frames margin not as an accounting abstraction but as something fragile, easily squandered by sloppy processes, bloated overhead, and a culture that treats new revenue like found money.

The subtext is almost accusatory: if a price increase doesn’t show up “to the bottom line,” the problem isn’t the market, it’s management. “The way you’re running the business” shifts responsibility from external forces (commodities, labor costs, competitors) to internal discipline (labor scheduling, supply chain efficiency, waste, incentives). He’s warning that price power can mask incompetence, letting a company look healthy while its systems quietly leak.

Context matters: Cantalupo led McDonald’s during its early-2000s reset, when the brand had to recover from operational drift and strategic overreach. In that era, “disciplined approach” wasn’t a motivational poster; it was a survival tactic. The quote reflects a specific corporate ethic: margins are earned twice, first at the cash register, then again in the execution. Raising prices is the easy part. Keeping the organization from spending the gain before it’s even realized is the real test of leadership.