Franchise leaders take pride in industry’s upward mobility

Though national voting Tuesday brought the midterm election cycle to a close, it likely will not dampen the degree to which several issues will continue to be debated, including one of the biggest of the past few years: income inequality. But for many industry leaders — franchisor and franchisee alike — the issue of providing upward mobility and battling the stigma of low-wage jobs is one they have faced proactively for years. They also agree that franchising in particular is well-suited to giving people a path from crew member to owner. Aziz Hashim, founder and chief executive of Atlanta-based NRD Holdings, said franchise leaders who do not lift up their high-potential employees into high-level management — or, as he has done through his “Own It” program, into franchise owners running their own stores — ultimately would limit their own growth via the loss of top talent. “I could pay somebody a high-six-figure salary and that would be great,” Hashim said, “but it would be much better for them, their family and their legacy if that salary were organized in a way that part of it belonged to them as equity and led to their own business. It gives me a lot of personal satisfaction. That’s a metric by which I measure success: How many people have I helped put in business? How many entrepreneurs have I created?” He has tried to provide opportunities in franchising in several different ways, including endowing with his wife the Aziz and Farahnaz Hashim Faculty Position in Franchise Entrepreneurship at the Cecil B. Day School of Hospitality Administration. That school, part of Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business, now will have more resources to expand its graduate and undergraduate curriculum to teach more students about franchising as a career field. But Hashim has had an even more direct impact on the next generation of franchise owners through NRD’s “Own It” platform, in which the company divests restaurants by selling them at manageable terms to its own executives and team members. One such NRD alumna to become a business owner after operating restaurants for Hashim is Shana Gonzalez, whose own franchise career included a job as a cashier at Taco Bell in college and a steady climb up the ladder at Checkers* & Rally’s to a unit general manager position before she came to work at NRD Holdings in 2003. After learning how to manage and grow a franchise business at the highest level, she was able to acquire four Checkers locations in Atlanta from Hashim. In the past two years, she has grown her locations’ total revenue by double-digit percentages, and she credits her people-focused management style for that success. “I grew the business by investing in people and ensuring that I had the right talent on board that cares about the business as much as I do,” Gonzalez said. “One of the most important things for me is to make sure that there’s a good leadership team in place.” She added that she hopes to add more restaurants to her business, as many as 10 locations over the next five years. Marco’s Pizza is another brand rapidly opening new units and investing in its people capability. Similar to NRD’s Own It program, the Toledo, Ohio-based pizza brand has begun accelerating an apprenticeship program that trains promising employees to work their way up to the general manager level and eventually to be a franchisee, president Bryon Stephens said. The brand will open this month a state-of-the-art training facility, where candidates will be drilled on management and leadership skills before a stint in a training store as a manager.Marco’s plans to train candidates in that manner for six months, at the end of which the trainee will be ready to assume command of a store as a general manager. “We wanted our own feeder system to give our team members the tools they need to be successful in the big leagues and not go through a steep learning curve at the store level,” Stephens said. “This will really allow us to enhance results at the store level and those managers’ career aspirations.” If those aspirations include one day owning and running their own stores, apprentice program graduates will have the chance to make an impact as general managers immediately, Stephens added. “After they run a store for 24 to 36 months, those GMs should have proven themselves as potential owners, and when they demonstrate that, the banking community can bankroll them,” he said. “That’s how the program becomes the final step on the ladder and can enhance their quality of life and earnings.” Stephens credited similar management training programs that featured paths to ownership he saw firsthand in franchise organizations like Harman Management with informing how he developed the program for franchisor Marco’s Pizza. “Those programs allowed them to become some of the largest franchisees in the country,” he said. “Their people never had to go anywhere else because their career paths were taken care of. Emulating that success is the best way for us to grow. … We’re in the people business; we just happen to sell a great pizza.”