Marco’s Pizza promotes Bryon Stephens to COO

Marco’s Pizza has promoted Bryon Stephens to the newly created role of chief operating officer. 

Since joining Marco’s in 2005, Stephens had been vice president of development. He is now responsible for growing the Toledo, Ohio-based brand’s unit count and average unit volumes in his new position. 

His nearly 30 years of restaurant industry experience also included development positions at Yum! Brands Inc. and Yorkshire Global Restaurants, the parent company of A&W and Long John Silver’s.

“[Stephens] has the same values I want our company to have: serve a quality pizza and work with our franchisees as partners,” chief executive Jack Butorac said in a statement. “Bryon will continue to lead the development with additional focus on increasing the profitability of our franchise community. Marco’s unit economics are strong, and with Bryon’s focus will become even stronger.”

Stephens noted that his effort to expand Marco’s beyond its current 355 units in 29 states is already underway, with commitments for more than 1,400 units in the franchisor’s pipeline.

“We’ll be focused on facilitating the efforts of our franchise partners, finding and securing the appropriate real estate in each market, vetting the properties properly and keeping capital available to our partners,” he said.

A major step in supporting the community of Marco’s franchisees is to be “a continual learning organization,” he added. Marco’s will gather sales information from all its operators and publish quarterly benchmark reports so that franchisees will know what the top quarter of their peers are achieving on several metrics like sales, profit margins, and food and labor costs.

“They can compare their profit-and-loss statements against these benchmarks and understand where they’re making or losing money in their operations,” Stephens explained. “Then with our support they can put specific action plans into place to bring their stores into focus. Our business model is what’s steering our growth, and having everybody know what the model is and what the benchmarks are — that awareness factor will drive results.”

Marco’s would look to grow average unit volumes in the near term by doing a better job advertising its specialty pizzas, he added. “We know we can tweak the menu mix toward selling more and more of those specialty pizzas, which will build average check and provide greater margins at the franchise level,” Stephens said.

New systems that provide franchisees better analytics concerning couponing and discounting, as well as food and labor costs, are part of Marco’s sales growth plans, he added.

Marco’s officials said the brand is on pace to open more than 100 units by the end of 2013.

Contact Mark Brandau at [email protected].
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