Profit or perish... There are only two ways to make money: increase sales and decrease costs.
Fred DeLuca
When we first started the company, I didn't have any thoughts of franchising. We just had company-owned stores.
We have salads, some other beverages. But in reality, it's still fundamentally the same business. The most likely thing the next person will buy is a sandwich and a soft drink. After a half-century of glacial change, we're still pretty much the same business.
You have to be able to communicate the vision to the people in your organization so that they know where and how they should direct themselves on a day-to-day basis.
If someone wants to eat healthy, they can do that and get the sandwich exactly right. I'm so pleased we're able to influence so many people and their eating habits.
I went to school because I was supposed to. I did pre-med because my mum thought it was a good idea.
It's tough for people to get into business, especially a small business.
I made the first sandwich before entering college.
If I were in charge of the government, I would index the minimum wage to inflation, so that way, everybody knows what they can count on.
Even if you set a long-term goal, that doesn't mean it's a straight-line journey. Often, there are problems and obstacles along the way.
Higher unemployment generally bodes well for franchising. People are looking for a new opportunity, and people who have jobs are a little less confident they'll always have a job.
I don't have any interest in cashing out or leaving the business or doing something else. I just love Subway, and I want to keep focusing on the company for the benefit of all our franchise owners. So I'm kind of like married to the job.
Subway is a real point of pride. We have influenced the way people eat.
Six months after we started, in 1964, there was a day when we sold only seven sandwiches. If we'd taken all the money from the register, we couldn't have paid an employee, much less the food or the rent or all that. It could have been a turning point. We could have given up.
Everybody eats three times a day; it's only a question of where they choose to eat. The longer-term trends are people eat out more often.
From my point of view, what I really like, what I think is really terrific about my work, is that the company's had the opportunity to train literally thousands and thousands of brand new franchisees to successfully run their very first business.
We give great value for our franchisees: They can build a store for well under $200,000. And we have extremely simple operating systems. The preparation is mostly done in front of the customer. That simplicity is really what attracts our Subway franchise. You see it, and you can do it.
A lot of stuff happens daily when you're running a company like Subway. If you get too happy about some things or too unhappy about others, you get worn out. It's best if you can pace yourself a little bit more.
Everybody who goes through the business will make mistakes. The big question is how big will the mistakes be? How fast will they learn from the mistakes, and how quickly will they get the business in the correct direction?
You start a business, and you really don't have much of a budget.
In the U.S. and Canada, we have one store for every 12,000 people.
We have always had many more franchisee candidates than available locations.
There's huge access to information. If you need to learn something, you can go on the Internet and learn very quickly. You can reach across miles and miles to find companies that can assist you.
After 39 years of business, I'm still learning. I go through this every year -identifying new strategies that are extremely important.
In some markets, we don't have a lot of room to expand. We've done studies of store density and essentially found our more dense markets have more than one store per 15,000 people.
I tell everybody there are only three things that we do. We build sales at the store level, we build profits at the store level, and we build more stores. The first two things go in tandem, of course. It's pretty tough to build profits without sales.
I know a lot of people at some point in their business careers decide they'll just cash in and do something else, but for some reason, I've never had that feeling.
We're very much in the people business in that there are two important groups you have to work with: customers and employees.
I don't think I ever dreamt of going into business. No one in my family was in business.
If you treat people nicely, and you allow them to fulfill a role that is satisfying for them, they'll accomplish a lot, and they'll enjoy their work.
In 1974, we began franchising. We didn't have any big thought process except that, 'OK, franchising will help us get to our goal of 32 stores and help us run stores farther away from home.'
I don't have much of a bucket list. I don't have a lot of needs and desires.
Most of the people we sign on as development agents commit to goals they don't believe are possible.
Every time I come across learning items of interest, I'll send distribution voice mail to the appropriate group in the organization.
You could have everything right but be in the wrong place. You think your business is no good, but really, the problem is your place is no good.
I watch 'Shark Tank,' of course. It's very entertaining. I think it's actually good to help people think about the business they might start, and sometimes you get encouraged by looking at someone going into business and saying, 'Hey, I could do that.'
You have to realize that the customer really is king. People who go into more established businesses probably have to be careful not to be casual about that. When you have a brand-new business, and nobody knows who you are, you know you have to work really hard for your customers.
Back in the early days of international, everybody wanted to customize the menu for every place.
For a franchise system to work well, you really need people with an entrepreneurial mind-set because, while you have a large, overarching system that everybody has to work with, a lot of local issues have to be handled.
I guess that's one of the benefits of being sick. Your wife lets you have a big-screen TV in the living room.
In a typical situation, it's going to take pretty close to a year to get your location in, get your permits, and then get open.
There are so many ingredients that are approved for use. You can't be an expert on all of them.
When I started in the business, the minimum wage was $1.25. I've seen an enormous number of wage increases. Basically, it applies evenly to everyone in the business.
The people who come to work deserve to be paid properly, and there's no excuse. I could understand someone making a small error, but sometimes people make systematic errors, and that's not right.
The payroll tax is affecting sales. It's causing sales declines.
The United States is a huge market, and once you get rolling, you can replicate that model over and over pretty easily. Your supply lines are taken care of. You don't have technicians to deal with. You've got your customer base.
When you're invested in your own business, you're going to run it better. When people are financially responsible for whether their store succeeds, they're going to have that kind of entrepreneurial spirit that's harder to get if headquarters is running things.
If you have company-owned stores, you make 100 percent of the profit from each one, but you have less entrepreneurial spirit.
There may be a perception that, with franchises, they're all the same, so that limits the ability to experiment. But that's not true. We've always kept two slots open on the menu of each Subway franchise - slots that franchisees can use to come up with their own sandwich ideas.
We find that no matter what country we're in, if we hit the right economic notes and appeal to the mass market, we're able to build the business very, very rapidly.
