At Taco Bell, a weeklong trip to Hawaii is more than a perk for top-performing managers — it’s part of the company’s growth strategy.
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The chain’s annual Golden Bell awards, held this year in mid-March, recognize its top 150 general managers and are as much a management retreat as they are an awards show. Taco Bell brings its top GMs to Maui, where they get a week of recognition, excursions, and a chance to compare notes with company leaders and one another.
Like many companies, Taco Bell uses retreats and recognition to reward top-performing managers. However, what sets the taco chain’s approach apart is the continued bet that its general managers — not solely its menu or marketing — are a key competitive edge, even as other companies scale back middle management.
In its fourth quarter, Taco Bell delivered 7% same-store sales growth, outpacing the industry, and the company says Golden Bell winners were a big part of that performance. The company said its award-winning restaurant leaders grew sales 19% in 2025, often running high-volume locations with annual sales volumes of $2.5 million to $4 million and beyond.
Michelle Beasley, Taco Bell’s US chief operating officer, told Business Insider that the award process is built around a small set of business metrics tied to the brand’s goals.
Winners are selected from three categories: highest transaction growth, the company’s “Supreme” operational-excellence measure, and guest reviews. Beasley said Taco Bell is intentionally focused on consumer-facing metrics because those are the measures the company believes most directly drive performance.
She also stressed that the company is thinking about how to scale good habits across the system, and sees the event as a way to spread winning traits beyond the 150 honorees. The leaders who rise to the top, Beasley said, tend to be the ones who “lead from the front,” communicate clearly, and take care of the team around them.
“Culture is fueling our results,” Jamie Harrison, Taco Bell’s global chief people and culture officer, told Business Insider. “We’re a people-first culture, and we see that when we pour into our teams, like with Golden Bell, they also have a chance to do that for their teams, too.”
Kimberly Hairrell, Taco Bell’s GM of the Year, who received her second Golden Bell award this year, told Business Insider that her path to the top was shaped by 50-hour workweeks as she battled a cancer diagnosis, and a team that refused to let her carry the burden alone.
“My team is what made it happen,” she said. For Hairrell, the award was less about personal recognition than about proving that “you can still achieve things that you set your mind to.”
Noah Starkey, who won his first Golden Bell this year — his second year being the manager of his own store — described a similar mindset. He started as a crew member in college and worked his way up to GM over five years, and said the key to winning was not simply sales growth, but focus on customers, employees, and consistency.
Both Hairrell and Starkey shared a competitive nature, already setting their sights on achieving Golden Bell status next year.
That kind of internal competition is exactly what Taco Bell is trying to create: a system where top performers raise the bar for everyone else.
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