Building Community and Connection in Business with Carl Comeaux

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:16)
Welcome back to the show everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach with my co-host, Mike Liwski, and our special guest today is our first show of 2026 So we're going to kick it off with a fun one here. So when businesses start to scale, many leaders struggle to maintain the sense of connection that made their company special in the first place. Customers want more than convenience, employees want more than a paycheck, franchise partners want more than a system. They want belonging, they want connection to something special. Today, we're exploring what it really means to build community and connection in business and how leaders can design growth without losing their soul. Mike, introduce our guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (0:56)
Oh, Stephen, I would be delighted to. So our guest today is Carl Comeaux. You may know him as the CEO of Crust Pizza Co. Now Carl has led the brand from a single neighborhood pizza concept into a fast growing franchise system. Really that's rooted in culture, community and connection, which we know is very important to our show and that we love to talk about. Now, under his leadership, Crust has expanded across multiple markets while maintaining a strong commitment to local engagement, team development and really giving back, which we're going to really want to dig in to today. So Carl, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast.

**Carl Comeaux** (1:39)
Yeah, thank you all for having me. Happy New Year.

**Stephen Sakach** (1:42)
Happy New Year, yes.

**Mike Liwski** (1:44)
Yeah. Now, a question for you, Carl, maybe when we were looking at the topics that we were going to discuss, why was community driven growth? Why did that feel especially relevant to you and especially now?

**Carl Comeaux** (1:58)
Yeah. That's our number one value is commitment to giving back to the communities that we're in. So whenever I was reading through the different topics you guys had, that hit home for me.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:12)
Yeah. I love talking about it too, especially with franchises because you've got this weird relationship of being headquarters but also trying to be local at the same time.

**Carl Comeaux** (2:21)
Yeah.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:23)
Carl, community can sound like this abstract thing until you experience the difference it makes. When you look back at your journey with Crust Pizza Company, when did community and connection move from being that nice idea to really that core leadership priority?

**Carl Comeaux** (2:41)
Yeah. I guess we could get started with our sites. We like to be in the local grocery anchored centers in the neighborhood.
When I learned whenever we were expanding, we started from a few stores to now 38 locations, we had to really define where do we belong in the market? And doing research on why Crust, why are we expanding? It really came down to our sites or community focused. We like to be around the neighborhood. We like to be in the neighborhood. And then looking at our success, we realized that our success is coming from being connected into the communities with schools and churches and nonprofit organizations, and making sure that we're impacting the community around us. And the more we give, the more we receive, but we have to make sure that our site locations are within the community. And so that's whenever really, when we were doing research on why do we exist, we really learned that. We were doing it, but it just became a bigger emphasis once that light bulb went off in our head.

**Mike Liwski** (4:03)
Definitely understand how that became a priority. Maybe digging a little bit deeper into that, Carl, around the idea of building community and connection. Now, you operate in an industry where really margins, systems and consistency, all those things really matter. And at the same time, you're also having, as you mentioned, you're building neighborhood gathering places in a way. So, how do you perhaps balance the operational disciplines, discipline that you have to have in order to run a successful business with still maintaining that genuine human connection?

**Carl Comeaux** (4:41)
So, it starts with picking the right franchisees, right? So, it's very important that we find and we only award franchisees to franchisees that have the same value that we're talking about.
And so, they have to have the value of wanting to be community-focused, because at the end of the day, we have great pizza and we pick great sites, but if the franchisee isn't 100% sold on the idea of community first, then it'll never be. And as we scale, that's important to have the right operators that believe in our values. And that kind of goes into culture. How do you have a strong culture? You have to have people that are aligned with the same values, or it's going to be an absolute chaos. Yeah. That's how we start. We make sure that we pick the right franchisees, and then from there, then they're going to pick the right general managers, and then the general manager is going to pick the right team that are all synergistic and unified with this idea and message of the more you give, the more you receive. And then that trickles down to what we do on a local, regional, and national level. And so I know we're probably going to get into that more, but that's really how you build that foundation that takes an idea and makes it a reality. At the end of the day, that idea is great, and a lot of people talk about it, but are you actually doing it? And I think what takes the idea and makes it become a reality is you have to have the right people in the right seat to make that happen.