Gareth Davies is helping Papa John’s franchisees earn their crust

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Gareth Davies came to play such a pivotal role in helping Papa John’s franchisees thrive and the American pizza giant reach consumers across western Europe. After all, having worked in kitchens since he was a teenager and having spent decades helping rising brands firm up their franchising, Davies is one of Britain’s true pizza pros and the perfect man to help spread ‘Papa’ John Schnatter’s franchise even further.

Born in Leamington Spa, Davies spent much of his young life moving from place to place because of his father’s catering career, something he feels gave him a good grounding in the entrepreneurial mindset. “Obviously moving around and changing schools on a regular basis gives you the opportunity to learn to be flexible and adaptable in different circumstances,” he says. However, this doesn’t mean that Davies wasn’t raised with a consistent work ethic: from around the age of ten, he worked back of house in his parents’ restaurant, making him Britain’s youngest kitchen porter at the time. But while his father was a fantastic chef, Davies learnt as much from his failures as his successes: Davies senior struggled to systematise the business, ultimately leading to the company folding. And this is a lesson that Davies makes sure he imparts to franchisees to this day by helping them access robust systems.

Having whet his appetite for business at such a young age, it wasn’t surprising that Davies felt more at home in a kitchen than a classroom. “I confess I was never the most academic of individuals,” he says. “I was always attracted to action and so academia was never really the right environment for me.” Leaving school at 16, Davies signed up for a computing course at a local college in Stratford-upon-Avon and took a part-time job working at the local McDonald’s just to make ends meet. But while his keenness to study coding quickly ebbed away – in 1985 much of computing was still driven by impenetrable maths – before long he found he thrived in the process-driven world of food franchising. “What I found at McDonald’s was working with people was my great passion,” says Davies. “Additionally the structured environment was something I could really relate to: there’s a very clear definition of what a good job looks like and if you follow the rules you get a strong positive outcome.”

Developing a taste for this combo of people and processes, Davies was soon sold on the world of food service, meaning that when the time came to move on from McDonald’s he decided to join another brand that was very much on the rise. “There was a Pizza Hut opening up in the town and some of my pals and I decided that we would get a job there while we thought about what we wanted to do with the rest of our lives,” he says. But while Davies may have initially viewed working for the pizza brand as a stop-gap, it quickly became his vocation: he soon worked his way up from the kitchen team to area manager. “I remained employed by Pizza Hut for the next 20 years,” he says. “So I’m either the most indecisive person in the world or I found my calling by accident.”

But while pizza became Davies’ passion, he didn’t make his first foray into the world of franchising until 2000, when he was offered the chance to help Pizza Hut’s master franchisee expand his operation in the Emerald Isle. And this experience confirmed to him how important it is in business to blend careful organisation with ambition and vision. “Eddie Johnston who was the master franchisee for Northern Ireland at the time was very entrepreneurial,” he says. “We ended up creating a very good partnership where we combined my functional skills and his entrepreneurial spirit.” Over the following four years, their complimentary skill sets enabled Davies and Johnston to triple the size of the Irish network. And Davies feels this experience working on the other side of the fence has proven invaluable. “For me that was a very transformational step in my experience as a leader,” he says. “It really taught me the need for shared goals and ambition between franchisee and franchisor.”

And without a doubt this was insight that Pizza Hut sorely needed. With Davies’ eldest daughter set to begin high school, his family decided to move back to the UK and, after a stint helping to reinvigorate Pizza Hut’s Express food-court concept, he was brought in to help roll out the brand’s domestic franchising operation. “Quite honestly the business didn’t really know what to make of these franchisees,” he says. “We were used to making decisions in a very top-down fashion, whereas of course in franchising the absolute key is respect for the goals of the franchisee.” Working more closely with franchisees that had recently joined the network, Davies began tweaking Pizza Hut’s franchise model to more closely align the franchisor’s interests with theirs. “It was about being the bridge between what the franchisee and franchisor were hoping to achieve,” he says. “I needed to guide them in those areas where they had limited insight but also learn from the fresh energy, ideas and challenges they brought into the business.”

While this kickstarted significant growth in Pizza Hut’s franchise operations, the company had begun to receive some stiff competition from a new entrant into the market: Papa John’s. A recent migrant from the States, the brand had begun its life decades before, when a 15-year-old Schnatter landed a job at local pizza restaurant Rocky’s Sub Pub. “While he started working as a pot washer, he worked his way across onto the pizza production line and found something he felt very passionate about,” says Davies. And this meant that in 1984, upon discovering that his father’s tavern, Mick’s Lounge, was on the brink of bankruptcy, Schnatter had the perfect plan to help the business up its game. “He thought ‘actually if I could sell some pizza from here, this would be a great opportunity to increase the turnover in the bar’,” Davies says. “So the bar’s broom closet was knocked down, an oven was installed and the first Papa John’s pizza outlet was created.”

Not only did the launch of Papa John’s help reverse the fortunes of Mick’s Lounge but Schnatter’s enthusiasm for fresh ingredients clearly tickled Kentuckians’ tastebuds. “John’s passion was to be able to deliver a pizza that he’d be proud to serve to his family and friends: that was his driving force,” says Davies. “And obviously that meant it snowballed pretty quickly.” However, in order to capitalise on the business’s momentum and rapidly expand, Schnatter knew he would need some outside help. Fortunately franchising provided the perfect way to bring people on board. “John’s a very ambitious person and, realising the potential of a pizza-delivery business, he was keen to keep growing,” Davies says. “Ultimately you either have deep pockets and a large amount of capital to grow or you bring in business partners and franchisees as a way of expanding.”