When Charlie Morrison became the president and CEO of Pizza Inn Inc. at the end of 2008, he was taking over a company that needed a compass.
Between the 1960s and ’80s, Pizza Inn was a major player in the industry. The company once rivaled Pizza Hut in terms of size, topping out at 800 restaurants across the country.
But over the past quarter-century or so, Pizza Inn — which generated $43 million in revenue for the fiscal year ending June 2009 — had lost its way. The company focused on food distribution over restaurant operation and franchising, losing more than half of its locations along the way, falling to a little more than 300 restaurants by the end of 2009.
“We had gone backward for the course of a good 25 years,” Morrison says. “We had lost a little bit of focus on support of the franchisees.”
Morrison learned some lessons along the way as he put Pizza Inn back on the right track.
Smart Business spoke with Morrison about how you focus your business on what made it great in the first place.
Consult your experienced team members. First and foremost, you need to listen to your employees and the people around you. There are a lot of people around you who have a lot to say about the business. In many cases, those people are around the front lines of your business. They’re waiting on customers, [so] they have a good perspective of your business that you don’t have. The perspective of someone on the store level or franchise level is important to have.
Then, you have to take that information, synthesize it and present it in a way that sends it back to them for validation. That’s also a big deal.
In my first 90 days on the job, the first thing I did was sit down with the best and most experienced people in the company, which happened to be some of our most experienced franchisees. Many of these folks had been around the brand for as many as 30 to 40 years, they had operated restaurants, they had seen all of the different management teams that had come through, they knew what all of the challenges were. So who better to ask what is wrong than them? They really focused their attention around dealing with the issue of growth.
I asked them, ‘Why won’t you build any new restaurants?’ And they told me the biggest issue was credibility among the management team running the brand. They wanted to see the company develop a restaurant concept that works, put it in place and demonstrate it. I asked them, ‘What do you like in the concept today, and what would you change?’ So we spent about three days in a room where all I did was ask questions and search for answers. Through that, we constructed what we believed to be the right concept for the future.