Peter Wright: Stop Chasing New Customers

**Josh Kopel** (0:00)
What are you doing this month to make sure your business grows? Do you mind if I make a suggestion? This month's free Restaurant Marketing Master Class is about one thing, using AI to create an unfair advantage. And not by replacing what makes your restaurant special, but by helping you move faster on the work that actually drives growth. I'm taking my proven tactics, tools and strategies, and showing you how to use AI to sharpen your marketing, speed up execution, and turn good ideas into action without getting buried in the details. You'll be working with me personally to build these strategies into your business in real time. And because of that, space is limited. But you can sign up for free today by going to restaurantbusinessschool.com.
Again, you can sign up for free today just by going to restaurantbusinessschool.com. I'll see you there. Now, here we go.

**Peter Wright** (0:53)
Your regulars have a dramatically outsized economic impact on your business. And you need to understand that. I have seen brands where they've made financial decisions for the business that made sense to somebody in a conference room, that the first thing it did was alienate their most loyal customers.

**Josh Kopel** (1:13)
Welcome to FULL COMP, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restauranteurs, thought leaders and innovators. Served up on the house.
What if the biggest risk in scaling a restaurant isn't the market, but the people you trust to grow it? Peter Wright spent decades inside brands like Starbucks and Panera and now Jollibee, building systems that scale through people. But what he's learned is simple. Most operators focus on experience and capital, while the best brands optimize for something far less obvious. In today's conversation, we get into how to identify franchise partners who will actually protect and grow your brand, why humility beats a track record, and how values move from posters on a wall to decisions on the floor. If you're thinking about scaling through people, this is the filter you didn't know you needed.

**Peter Wright** (2:15)
I've been in and around the food and beverage and restaurant business since my days in college. Early in my career, I joined Starbucks Coffee when it was a pretty new business, less than a thousand stores. I got involved in their food service business, as well as multi-unit licensing.
I had a great experience there, but at a certain point in my career, I was looking for a new challenge.
I ended up, based on a cold call, at Panera Bread. At Panera, I led multi-unit franchise development for a number of years through really the heyday of Panera's growth. I love doing it. It was being in the restaurant business, helping a business grow, creating new partnerships with franchisees so they could build businesses, help them achieve their goals, and creating that joint value was just a lot of fun. And I love the people I was getting to know. It's a very diverse group of people out there that are successful entrepreneurs looking at multi-unit restaurant development as an opportunity. I then got recruited back to Starbucks after working for a couple of other small brands and development roles. And it was a similar job that I had originally, but had grown by an order of magnitude at that point. I had an opportunity to join a company and get back into the multi-unit restaurant development world with Jollibee. So that's how I got here.

**Josh Kopel** (3:44)
I have a question. Working with franchisees and scaling that up, that's a very different animal than scaling up Starbucks, which is corporately owned.
What was the difference between the two?

**Peter Wright** (3:55)
At Starbucks, we were doing licensing. So essentially almost half of the Starbucks units operated in the United States are licensed locations. So it's not Starbucks operating. It's a licensee, very similar to franchising.
So what was important is that you had the right partners to operate, the right qualifications, resources and so forth. And then most importantly, they were aligned with corporate values, the company values. And it's very similar in franchising. It's a little bit of a different audience and who you're doing deals with.

**Josh Kopel** (4:27)
Is that your secret sauce? The idea that you're able to tell if somebody would be a successful operator or not. I think that's one of the big hurdles in our industry, right? Is trying to figure out which dogs can hunt.

**Peter Wright** (4:40)
It absolutely is. And it's not unlike trying to really discern how a new employee is going to work based on...

**Josh Kopel** (4:47)
Absolutely, that's why I ask...

**Peter Wright** (4:48)
.the best face forward in an interview, right? So I've done a lot of work over the years trying to improve the effectiveness of franchise recruiting. And I did a lot of this work when I was at Starbucks. One of the things I did was I asked all of our franchisees to identify who were the best franchisees in our system and why did you say that? And then I was able to put together this attribute profile that we could then use as part of our selection process for future franchisees. And the real learning that came out of it was this. First of all, there's an ante just to be in the game. You got to have the financial resources. You got to have the operational chops, the leadership, being able to build teams. We want people that have that expertise operating in the market where they're going to develop because that local knowledge is what we don't have and they have and that's a big advantage to the relationship. But ultimately, it was things like maturity in the franchise or franchisee relationship. And it was other kinds of attributes that we weren't necessarily selecting for that we then started to select for. And this isn't magic or a secret, but it really comes down to aligning with our corporate values and really understanding what the partnership is about. Because somebody could be qualified and maybe even approved to become a new franchisee. But at the same time, they've never operated a Panera or they've never operated a Jollibee. And so they're in the room because of their experience and operational know-how.