For those of us living outside California, Arizona and Las Vegas a visit to In-N-Out has become a ritualistic requirement when visiting the southwest. I had the opportunity to once again bite into burger perfection this last week while on a golf vacation to Phoenix. Is there a fast food chain with a bigger cult following?

What makes In-N-Out a game changer is their constant pursuit to not be like the other fast food joints. Burger King, McDonald’s, Wendy’s they all play the market share game. If Wendy’s has a spicy chicken sandwich then Burger King and McDonald’s add one. What entails is a bloated menu of choices without a clear direction. Side Note – Carl Jr.’s/Hardees also thought the market share game played by the big 3 was a losing proposition. A few years ago they rebranded themselves as where you go for over-the-top, enough fat intake for two days in one burger and it has worked.

The first thing that sets In-N-Out Burger apart is the menu. There aren’t a bunch of crazy choices from salad to tacos. You get three combo choices a couple different drink choices, but thats about it. The beauty is in the simplicity, this is industrial engineering at it’s best. Everything at In-N-Out is made to order so building in efficiencies to the order/delivery process is very important. Advanced computer systems and algorithms developed by In-N-Out are rumored to actually predict 70-80% of the orders before they happen.

These slight enhancements only help speed up and deliver product sooner without sacrificing quality.

The easy lesson here – less is more. Less allows you to focus on what’s important to the customer (quality), focus on something and do it right, don’t worry about the 3% who want a salad, don’t let feature creep happen. Ask what can be taken away not what can be added.

The 500 Mile Rule. In-N-Out limits its expansion to 500 miles from its distribution center. This ensures each restaurant is getting the highest quality ingredients possible. In-N-Out doesn’t truck frozen patties across the country. They don’t truck frozen fries either. Everything made at In-N-Out is fresh. You can watch the employees slicing potatoes whole, preparing things like tomatoes and lettuce in front of you. With everything made fresh to order the company has made a decisive statement within the industry. You know exactly what you’re about to get when you visit an In-N-Out burger and I like that.

The Secret Menu. One of the easiest ways to build a cult following is through exclusivity. Not only do you have to be in one of three states but you can also order things not on the menu if you know what they are. The secret menu at In-N-Out is really not that secret. They post it on their own website and many fan websites list the options. But by offering a Flying Dutchman or Animal Style, In-N-Out creates a feeling of insider knowledge within their customer base. It never ceases to amaze me how excited people will get because they ordered something off the menu. This empowerment of the customer creates evangelists that help spread the company lore.

For these reasons and many more In-N-Out helps define Change the Game strategy. They break out of bloody market share battles and create their own green pastures. They focus on quality and simplicity when the others focus on speed, price and multiple choice. They empower the consumer, they rely on word-of-mouth, they create an air of exclusivity.

In-N-Out Burger is 50+ years old, but in my book they are a New Revolutionary.

While channel surfing last week I came across an hour long TV show on the Food Network called Chefography. The episode chronicled the success of Mario Batali and was actually quite interesting. As I watched I became more and more impressed with how far ahead of his time Mario is. There are so many lessons that can learned from his successful formula for any startup business.

The first thing that jumped out at me was his epiphany of simple things. From 1989-1992 Mario apprenticed in a small Italian village that led him to change everything he believed about food. In the documentary he says, “The most significant thing I’m sure I learned while in Italy was less about what to put on the plate and more about what not to put on the plate. The food was so simple it really implied absolute confidence in the ingredients. It was less about the cook’s white noise, what was rattling around in my head, and more about the peas being perfect, the papadelli being perfect and the cheese being perfect”.

You could easily switch out the food references with ’software’ or ‘product’ and get the same effect. It was less about what to put in the software/program/product and more about what not to put in the software/program/product. And he was coming to these conclusions back in 1992. A simplicity formula that would make 37signals proud.

And it still remains at the core of what Mario does. His first cookbook was title Simple Italian Food, 250 recipes containing Mario’s belief in the power of simplicity. The guy really does get it. He’s full of insightful quotes, “If you try to build something for a group of people you will never succeed, so you have to build it for yourself”, sounds a lot like some of the most popular websites. Built for the needs of a few people that caught on with a larger audience…sometimes for a different reason – think myspace, facebook, flickr. » Read more: The Mario Batali Formula