Chris Bright
TITLE: president, Zpizza
HEADQUARTERS: Irvine, Calif.
UNIT COUNT: 98
ANNUAL SALES: $50 million
BIRTH DATE: Sept. 18, 1962
EDUCATION: B.S. business,
University of Southern California
KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
co-founding Fransmart, where he helped launch franchising efforts at Five Guys Burgers and Fries and Qdoba Mexican Grill
PERSONAL: married, three children
FAVORITE SAYING: “The numbers in the stores are more important than the number of stores.”
HOBBIES: guitar, basketball,
running, travel
Chris Bright, president of the 98-unit Zpizza chain in Irvine, Calif., learned his restaurant financials before his operations — a career start that could have had a very different outcome had he not been so tenacious.
In 1992 Bright was opening his first Chesapeake Bagel Bakery franchise. It was 4:30 a.m., and while baking 1,400 bagels, he had a weighty realization.
“You hear people talk about wondering whether that first employee will show up to make the coffee, and the eerie feeling that follows when they don’t,” said Bright, whose pre- restaurant experience was in corporate finance and business valuation. “But customers come anyway, and you’re running around trying to get things done despite that.”
And the fun did not stop there, he recalled.
“I’m going crazy with the knife, cutting bagels and waiting on customers, and I cut my finger,” he said. “A customer sees blood dripping off my finger, looks at me, and just turns around and walks out the door.”
He added, “I realized quickly it was a lot easier to be in a clean office picking someone else’s numbers apart. What’s harder is meeting labor, keeping your cost of goods down and pushing the sales needle every day.”
Bright kept at it, though. During his 20-year career, he has proven his acumen in several realms, including helping others grow — something he did as co-founder of Fransmart, and hopes to continue with a new development fund targeting three- to five-unit restaurant concepts.
Sharing the vision
As Bright and business partner Dan Rowe opened more stores, they recognized a new opportunity: helping other burgeoning restaurant companies to become franchise-able concepts.
Believing most operators needed operational and franchise sales help, the two founded Fransmart in 1994. The pair eventually landed clients that would become some of the industry’s hottest chains, including Qdoba Mexican Grill and Five Guys Burgers and Fries. Fransmart bought in when the burger chain had only five units and sold its interest when it reached 200.
“It’s rewarding to find a concept that’s at that three- to five-unit stage, proven and working,” said Bright, who discovered Zpizza in Newport Beach, Calif., where he lives. The pies were good, and their healthful ingredients interested Bright enough to lead Fransmart to buy in with founder Sid Fanarof in 2002. At that point Zpizza had four units. Fanarof now oversees Zpizza’s international expansion.
Bright’s ability to recognize winners such as Qdoba, Five Guys and Camille’s Sidewalk Café, which Fransmart helped grow to 100 units, is partly a gift, but mostly an outgrowth of his numerically governed approach to business, said Rowe.
“He’s exceptionally smart ... and he has the ability to take something complicated and boil it down to something simple,” Rowe said. “The pragmatic approach of a financial analyst that he brings to the table is something rare in this business. Most don’t really know about the numbers until it’s too late.”
A ‘quiet confidence’
Bright was a successful high school and junior college athlete whose “quiet confidence kept him from being brash or egotistical. He just had a mellow personality,” said Bright’s father, Dave Bright.
A successful entrepreneur himself, Dave said he shared just two basic business lessons with Chris: “That it all comes down to integrity … and that if someone says it can’t be done, just keep looking for ways around the obstacles,” he said.
Brian Murphy, president of Athletes First, an agency representing professional sports players, said Bright’s creativity sets him apart. The two met through the Young Presidents’ Organization, a professional network. Murphy said Bright has a knack for “creating a clear vision and defining the steps you need to achieve a goal. He’s very creative and thinks outside the box.”
He dresses that way, too, said Amir Sabetian, a three-unit Zpizza franchisee and the chain’s vice president of operations.
“He’s always in the office in shorts and T-shirts; it’s just that south Orange County, laid-back mentality,” said Sabetian. That relaxed mind-set adds to Bright’s openness to suggestions from his four vice presidents. The five-member team makes up Zpizza’s entire corporate staff.
“Everyone can comment and have input, which is unusual [compared with] most companies, where you have executives jockeying for attention with the boss,” Sabetian said. “No one’s trying to impress him that way. We’re all working toward the same goals.”
As a one-unit Zpizza franchisee, Bright tests all new products, marketing and technology in his store before rolling them out to the rest of the system. That not only demonstrates his willingness to innovate, said Brandi Babb, the chain’s vice president of training, it shows his commitment to taking the lumps and bumps of being first in on a new initiative.
“That gives us a great opportunity to test new options and get them right,” said Babb. “Since he’s a franchisee, too, he can speak to other franchisees from a perspective of authority. They know he’s knowledgeable.”
Now Bright wants to share that knowledge with others in the industry by starting a development fund for three- to five-unit restaurant concepts. Instead of spreading units to far-flung markets as he did with Fransmart, Bright and his future partners plan to buy a minority share of a promising concept and develop it in its original market only.
“When you can grow within a tight market, you’re able to leverage the heck out of local relationships and control your costs better,” said Bright, who sold his interest in Fransmart in 2010 to free up time for his new venture. “If we can take our expertise and help fund them to the next level of 15 to 20 restaurants, we’re then setting the table for private-equity involvement. We believe that’s where the deals get done.”
