People

After visiting with Guillermo Perales five years ago, perhaps the most pointed question to ask him today is, "What have you not been up to?"
When last we spoke with the country's largest Latino restaurant franchisee, he was holding steady at around 140 units across five brands. Today, following two recent mega-deals with Arby's and Burger King, he's flirting with 400 units, making him the fourth largest franchisee in the country. Perales has more than doubled the size of his company by adding both new units and new brands (Del Taco, CiCi's Pizza, T-Mobile, and Arby's) to his holdings, which still include Popeyes, Burger King, and Golden Corral.
"We're in growth mode, yes," he says, in typical understatement. "With Arby's pushing to refranchise many of its locations, it was a good move for us...

Michael Knobelock has always been in sales. As a 14-year-old growing up in Houston, he sold newspaper subscriptions and was a top salesman, earning between $400 and $500 a week in the 1970s. After high school he sold ads for the Yellow Pages where he was again a successful bell-ringer. But the real twist of fate in Knobelock's sales life came when a friend approached him about purchasing a convenience store.
"My parents loaned me $10,000 to purchase a closed-down convenience store and reopen it," says the 50-year-old Knobelock. It turned out to be a life-changing move. For the next six years he made the store more profitable than it had ever been, and in the process realized that he knew how to run a business. Of course, after making it successful, he turned around and sold the store for a hefty profit...

How do you feel when a valued employee gives notice? Are you shocked? Disappointed? Do you feel like you've been jilted? Do you have the uncomfortable feeling it was somehow your fault? If so, you are probably right.
The #1 reason really good people leave is because they are dissatisfied with their relationship with their immediate supervisor or manager. You may have heard the old saying, "People join companies, but they leave their managers."
While that great employee probably told you the reason was "for more money," a study of more than 19,000 employee exit interviews by the Saratoga Institute found that only 12 percent of employees left their jobs in pursuit of higher-paying positions. On the other side of the equation, nearly 90 percent of employers think the #1 reason workers leave is for higher salaries, but only because that's what they're most often told...

When we heard Frank Bonanno had been named 2012 Vetrepreneur of the Year by the National Veteran-Owned Business Association, we had to catch up with him to find out what else he's been up to since we last profiled him in this magazine 2 years ago (3rd quarter 2010).
Bonanno, now 70, says he was honored to receive the annual award, which recognizes the finest role models in the veteran-owned business arena. And though he admits to "slowing down a little," Bonanno says he has no plans to exit the business quite yet.
How could he? His business has grown to include 47 franchised locations employing more than 700 in the Las Vegas area. That qualifies him as a "dominator" by any standard. His brands include Nathan's Famous restaurants, Häagen-Dazs, Johnny Rockets, and four Bonanno's New York Pizzeria restaurants, just to name a few...

Ed Doherty has a passion for his business and growth.
His roots in the restaurant business trace back to his youth when he worked after school and college to help his mother run a deli. "She worked so hard to provide for me and to put me through college. I got my work ethic and my determination from her," he says.
After college, he went to work for Marriott Corp. where he eventually became vice president and general manager of the Big Boy division. He took a big step himself in 1985, leaving that job to become a Roy Rogers franchisee, buying 19 Connecticut restaurants for $1 million. He turned the losing restaurants around in five years and grew the company to 28 stores.
Doherty and other Roy Rogers franchisees had a rude awakening in 1990 when Hardee's bought the concept from Marriott, he says...

The Summer Olympics reinforced my respect for world-class athletes of all nationalities.
At a recent gathering of international franchisees, I had a similar sense of admiration, this time for remarkable customer experiences being created around the world by companies outside the U.S. The occasion was the annual convention of Crestcom International. While many franchise organizations today have global reach, Crestcom was founded 25 years ago by Hal Krause with the explicit mission to bring state-of-art management training to the world.
Crestcom's video-based management skills workshops are conducted by franchisees in more than 50 countries and 25 languages. Their recent information-sharing regarding customer service around the world was full of nuggets I want to share with you...

When Pam Wolfe began operating Papa Murphy's Take'N'Bake Pizza franchises 15 years ago you could almost always find her in the company kitchen, kneading, chopping, and shredding the fresh ingredients made daily for the pizzeria, known for its take-and-bake, made-to-order concept.
"It's a great day when you can make pizzas all day long," says Wolfe, 46. "That is the fun part." However, she adds, "Papa Murphy's is very physical. We make our own pizza dough and cookie dough and everything else at the store. It is a labor-intensive business, but sometimes people don't think about that. You can't get into Papa Murphy's and assume someone else will run them and you will make a lot of money."
Wolfe still loves to cook--at home--but these days she has left the pizza-making to others to focus on running the company with her husband Jim...

Cathy Amato expects to do $30 million in combined sales for 2012. That's a far cry from the less than $250,000 her company did when she first started two decades ago. Amato, and partners Martha Jordan and Rick Riley, collectively owns and operates 55 Subway restaurants in San Antonio and Austin, along with 1 Mooyah Burgers & Fries, and 3 Ruby Tuesday locations.
She has come a long way since her first job at 14 as a busboy and dishwasher (by hand) at the Highway Café in La Vernia, Texas. "I never had any aspiration or skill set that would necessarily help me be successful in the restaurant industry," she says. "I started at the ground floor and through hard work and applying myself I've been able to move up the ranks. But also, I have been able to go out on my own and build a substantial company...

Some multi-unit franchisees take it to the limit. They're not content with one or two or even a handful of units. They want to rule the roost in their markets, their territories, and their brands. We like to call them Dominators.
So once again we've lined up six top multi-unit operators--one of them approaching the 400-unit mark--to talk shop and share their stories with us. They've learned the ropes of franchising and aren't afraid to take calculated risks in the name of growth. After all, no risk, no reward.
With this group of dominators we've uncovered six more remarkable tales of discovery, transformation, and bare-knuckle expansion. Their stories reveal savvy operators willing to share some of their strategies, philosophies, and personal approaches to building and running a franchise organization...

If you've played, coached, or watched a sport on the University of South Carolina (USC) campus, there's a good chance you've eaten a Firehouse Sub from Judy and Charlie Divita.
The Divitas operate six Firehouse Subs in the greater Columbia, S.C., area, including one nestled in the heart of the USC campus. They made their competitive mark by developing a proprietary customer database catering to visiting college sports teams. Their blueprint has evolved over the years to include a commitment to all facets of educational life and the communities their restaurants serve. This synergy between business smarts and higher learning is a natural for the Divitas, winners of Multi-Unit Franchisee magazine's 2012 MVP Innovation Award.
The couple, both quality specialists, are now knee-deep into their second career and are making the most of it...

Leaders by their very nature are under pressure to have advanced intellectual and emotional intelligence. In today's economy, they better add one more - VQ, The Vision Quotient.
The pace of change is speeding up. Each and everyday, the competition grows a bit smarter, and more of them from all over the world, extend into your territory. New technologies come on the market and mutate the foundational ways that organizations connect with prospects and complete transactions. Governments tax, regulate, dictate interest rates, and prosecute, and each time they do, the playing field changes. The more accurately you can see into this future, the more prepared you can be when we get there. This is just logical, however...
Sadly, we have bred a generation of leaders who are very execution focused and for whom the term "future" simply means the next quarter...

As is always the case, I learned a lot at the annual Multi-Unit Franchising Conference this year. Most interestingly, while more and more franchisees are using social media to connect with existing customers and attract new ones, more than 90 percent of those I polled are not using these tools to also connect with present and/or potential employees. If you are part of this non-users group, I think I understand why.
First, there's no sense of urgency. Employee turnover is low and there's an overwhelming response to every job opening that does occur. Secondarily, many feel they do not have the time to learn how to use and manage these yet-to-be-proven digital tools. I suspect some reluctance may also be the normal, human aversion to change and perhaps a bit of technophobia...

When Kevin Osterfeld's "dream job" as a stockbroker didn't turn out so dreamy, he decided to switch things up.
"When I was a stockbroker, I would eat at Philadelphia Steak & Subs in downtown Cincinnati. I loved the food, so I decided to buy the restaurant, which would become a Penn Station East Coast Subs restaurant," he says. "I knew nothing about the restaurant business. I knew nothing about franchising. I didn't really even know how it worked, but I was young and reckless and thought I'd figure it out."
Twenty-five years later, it's clear that Osterfeld did "figure it out." Recipient of Multi-Unit Franchisee magazine's 2012 MVP Influencer Award, he now owns 18 Penn Stations in Ohio. He also is an active participant in charitable ventures and franchise organizations and a busy family man...

When Edwin Sarkissian and his family emigrated from Iran to the United States in 1996, he was a young boy who longed for a computer.
"When we arrived in America, we didn't have much. I remember being so excited to go to Best Buy and look at computers. I couldn't afford one. My mom tried to get a credit card, but because we hadn't been here that long she was declined. I was so sad that day," recalls Sarkissian, now 28.
Fortunately, a church member donated an older computer to him. "It had a lot of problems, but just moving the mouse made me so happy," Sarkissian says. "Now, my laptop and electronic devices are in perfect condition. I take good care of them because I learned how to appreciate everything I have."
To earn money for a bike, the young Sarkissian rode the bus to work at McDonald's...

Ed Doherty knows how to "wow" people. In fact, he has command of the word and he knows how to use it. He uses "wow" as an adjective, as in the "wow factor," and he uses it as a noun, as in "that's a wow." But he most often uses it as a verb. "We want to wow our guests every time. We want to wow our employees and our suppliers. And an okay is not a wow," he says.
Doherty, now the 12th largest franchisee in the U.S., jokes that he wishes he'd trademarked his use of "wow," because it was part of his company's mission statement long before it became everyday language.
That passion, partnered with the success of his 97 New York- and New Jersey-based restaurants (five brands, including Applebee's and Panera Bread), garnered Doherty Multi-Unit Franchisee magazine's 2012 MVP Spirit of Franchising Leadership Award...

It's probably true that most people who work with us will never care as deeply as we do about building our business and serving our clients. If they did, they'd probably be working for themselves.
Yet there's a great deal we can do to raise the level of their commitment and inspire them to peak performance. The operative word in the preceding sentence is inspire. You can demand that people who work for you be punctual, or that they perform at a certain level of output, or even that they do things reasonably well. Yet real commitment can only be inspired. And, inspiring people is what great leaders like John F. Kennedy and Lee Iaccoca did best.
How do great leaders such as these inspire others to commit themselves to their goals? It's not just that they have charismatic personalities, or that they give a lot of high-powered motivational talks...

A conversation with mega-franchisee Ed Doherty is invariably sprinkled with a lot of "wows." He uses "wow" as an adjective, as in the "wow factor," and he uses it as a noun, as in "that's a wow." But he most often uses it as a verb. "We want to wow our guests every time. We want to wow our employees and our suppliers. And an okay is not a wow," he says.
Doherty, now the 12th largest franchisee in the U.S., jokes that he wishes he'd trademarked his use of "wow," because it was part of his company's mission statement long before it became everyday language.
That passion, partnered with the success of his 97 New York- and New Jersey-based restaurants (five brands, including Applebee's and Panera Bread), garnered Doherty Multi-Unit Franchisee magazine's 2012 MVP Spirit of Franchising Leadership Award...

On Cathy Amato's first day as a Jack in the Box management trainee in the early 1980s, her trainer questioned whether Amato was up for the rigor ahead--changing grease vats, scrubbing floors, and crazy hours.
"He was really like, 'Real girls don't want to do this kind of work,'" Amato remembers.
He didn't know Amato, who along with partners Martha Jordan and Rick Riley, collectively own and operate 55 Subway restaurants in San Antonio and Austin, along with Mooyah and Ruby Tuesday brands. The winner of Multi-Unit Franchisee magazine's 2012 MVP Role Model Award truly believes she is in a business that rewards hard work with opportunity.
"I never had any aspiration or skill set that would necessarily help me be successful in the restaurant industry," she says...

If you've played, coached, or watched a sport on the University of South Carolina (USC) campus, there's a good chance you've eaten a Firehouse Sub from Judy and Charlie Divita.
The Divitas, operators of six Firehouse Subs in the greater Columbia, S.C., area, including one nestled in the heart of the USC campus, made their competitive mark by developing a proprietary customer database catering to visiting college sports teams. Their blueprint has evolved over the years to include a commitment to all facets of educational life and the communities their restaurants serve. This synergy between business smarts and higher learning is a natural for the Divitas, winners of Multi-Unit Franchisee magazine's 2012 MVP Innovation Award.
The couple, both quality specialists, are now knee-deep into their second career and are making the most of it...

They say everything is bigger in Texas. Eric Werner seems to believe the legend as he continues building his empire in the Lone Star State.
We last visited with Werner in 2008 when he had just signed a deal with the up-and-coming LA Sunset Tan franchise. He had just become one of the brand's first franchisees and an area developer for the Dallas area. He's quite familiar with the Texas market because he's been operating dozens of Subways there for almost 20 years. When we checked back with him recently to see how things were going, his vivacious response was, "Of course everything is going very well!"
He currently operates 56 Subways, with plans to open three more this year. Sales, he says, have been up dramatically the past 3 years thanks to the 'Any $5 Footlong' promo and solid operations...