How a Restaurant Industry Veteran Became a Multi-Unit Mountain Mike's Pizza Owner After decades in the restaurant industry, Jim Smith saw an opportunity to make both a profit and a positive impact through Mountain Mike's franchises.

Jim Smith has been in the restaurant industry for decades, and held key positions with Taco Bell, Jack in the Box, Starbucks, Mimi's Café, and Tava Kitchen. But he'd never been a franchisee until he saw the opportunity to buy a Mountain Mike's Pizza in southern Oregon in 2017. Now he's got four stores open and more on the way. We asked him to share his story:

What's your background?
I started my restaurant career as a sophomore in high school, working as a dishwasher. I continued to work part-time in restaurants through college, and then spent about 20 years in field operations in positions ranging from assistant manager all the way up to regional manager. Then I spent 10-plus years in the corporate environment. Some of the brands I've been involved with over the years include Taco Bell, Jack in the Box, Starbucks, and Mimi's Café.

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How did you get involved with Mountain Mike's?
I was working with a group of people developing an Indian concept in the Bay Area, Tava Kitchen, and when that got sold I was looking for the next great opportunity. I got approached to help evaluate the pricing on a Mountain Mike's franchise in southern Oregon whose owners were looking to sell it and retire. As I looked into it, I told them, "You probably need to find someone else to give you a value,
because I'm gonna make an offer." I closed the deal in September 2017, and have just fallen in love with the brand since.

What drew you to open your first franchise with Mountain Mike's?
They know how important it is to understand the franchisee's business model, their economics—and probably most importantly, that the franchisee is a neighbor to the people they do business with. I talked to franchisees who've been with the brand for 30-plus years, and they said how proud they are to be a place for their community to gather, whether it's for birthday parties, celebrating a win, or disputing a bad
sports call. So, there's these core values around community involvement and being a good steward for your neighbors that struck a nerve with me. But that particular store wasn't doing really strong sales when you purchased it.

How did you turn it around?

Yeah, I think in the 12 months prior to me taking over it did around $567,000 in top line sales. And then a year later, we were doing around $1.1 million. That first year, what I focused on most was driving people into our lunch buffet. Traditionally in the pizza world, lunch is a very slow day part, because not many people have time to come in and order, wait for their pizza, and then eat it. But with the buffet, you get the value of immediacy. It also gave guests the opportunity to come in and experience our very high-quality product at a low entry-level price, to get them hooked. Then when they're making decisions about where to order pizza Friday night, we're top of mind. So every ad I ran for a year was about the lunch buffet, and we went from around 10 to 15 lunch buffet customers a day to 100-plus. The other thing I did to drive revenue was purchase all my own delivery cars and put full wraps on them. So I had these brightly colored moving billboards driving through neighborhoods, and countless times per day we would get calls saying, "Hey, I didn't know you delivered to my neighborhood. I just saw your car. Let me order from you."

Did you always intend to be a multi-unit owner?

Not at first. I just thought there was great cash flow in this brand, and I could use it to fund whatever other projects I want do to. But I would talk to out-of-town customers in my first Mountain Mike's every day, and they'd ask, "When is this coming to my city?" And after hearing that maybe a hundred times, I thought, Why don't I open more of these? So now corporate has brought me on as a development agent for the
state of Oregon. I have four open now, number five is under construction, and we're on our way to 20-plus.

But you didn't totally give up on other projects?
Right, I bought an 8,000 square foot commercial building in Roseburg, Oregon, and put in a Mountain Mike's along with Cascades Coffee House, which is a startup passion project. And I just love the synergies of how those two concepts play together. You've got the coffee business, which is really heavy in the morning, and then Mountain Mike's which has the lunch buffet and then a very busy dinner time.
We also wanted Cascades, like Mountain Mike's, to be a critical part of the community, so it doesn't have a drive through. There are three drive-through coffee places with a half mile, but there was zero place for our neighbors to sit down and connect and share stories.

What are some of the challenges of owning multiple restaurants?
I think a multi-unit operator has very similar challenges to a single-unit operator, just at a different scale. All my successes come with heartbeats. It's the people within the organization that help you achieve your goals, so you need to spend a lot of time putting the right people in the right place to drive your business forward. As a multi-unit owner, instead of focusing on line-level staff—who's answering the phone and who's making the pizza—you're thinking about who are my restaurant leaders, and what's important to them. It's having the right culture and the right talent to get things done the way you need them to be done when you're not around.

What are the benefits?
As you grow, you have the cash flow to do additional things without driving a lot of additional debt, which is exciting. You also have the opportunity to be more connected to broader communities. It gives me the chance to be involved in the right community events, because I'm not so worried about the impact on my margins.