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Dec. 3, 2021 - The Charlie Kirk Show
36:08
Better Ingredients, Better Pizza, Better Podcasts—A Conversation with Papa John Schnatter
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Thanking Charlie And Supporting The Show 00:02:39
Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk show, my conversation with Papa John, the founder of Papa John's Pizza.
Great guy.
We talk about his adventures through corporate America and so much more.
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Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
With us today is a name and a voice you will recognize, and that is the founder of the wonderful company, PAPA John's.
With us today is John Schnader.
I say that right Schnader, Schnoder.
Uncovering Corporate Ill Intent 00:08:21
Well, there you go.
It's close.
Um, we're all within the same region.
Uh, thank you for joining us today.
Been an admirer of your company for quite some time and uh, look forward to diving into it.
So I guess the first question is, a lot of our audience um, remembered some drama or controversy uh, regarding your uh departure from PAPA John's.
Walk us through what happened there and kind of some how it ties to some of the trends we're seeing in our country still today.
Well, I think you go back to it started in the earnings call Back in November 17, where I criticized leadership, Roger Goodell in particular, about not solving the situation to the owners' employers' satisfaction.
And that Roger didn't like us calling him out, telling him to get his act together and fix the problem.
So he had a friend that actually, coincidentally, owned an agency that was representing Papa John's, a gentleman named Casey Washerman.
Casey was referred to Roger as his big brother.
Roger used to watch Casey's kids.
So Roger Goodell used Casey Washerman, as kind of one of his hitmen, his cronies, to kind of paint a false narrative in a false light on me being a racist on something that I really didn't say.
Yeah.
And so then I remember the headlines after that, and we're no fans of Goodell here, trust me.
So you're a hero in our book.
And they said that you said a racial pejorative, which you didn't say.
You were using it in a different context.
And then there was all of this kind of backlash that ensued.
But then you've come out recently and said you were set up by other members of your board.
Is that right?
Well, whether the board was actively or passively complicit, it's unequivocal that Laundry Service, the agency that we paid millions of dollars to enhance the reputation of not only the brand, but myself, maliciously tried to get me to say something that could hurt me and set me up.
The board of directors of Papa John's, whether they were weak, they panicked, they couldn't take the heat, didn't do a proper investigation, violated Delaware law, and overreacted and did tremendous damage to the board, to the franchisees, to the suppliers, and to the company by not following a proper protocol.
So Goodell was the kind of puppet leader here.
Washerman, who owned Laundry Service, his CEO, Jason Stein, who's the CEO of Laundry Service, they were kind of the cronies.
They were the puppets to do the dirty work.
And unfortunately, at the time, I had a very weak board.
They went sorry on me, went sorry on the situation, and they overreacted and did a tremendous amount of damage to the employees and to the franchisees.
Yeah.
And so then you resigned.
Do you regret resigning when this coup was kind of posed in front of you?
Well, I resigned as the chairman to kind of help the board out and settle the situation down.
One of the directors, Sonia Medea, said, Thank God you did what you did because you saved the company.
So I was acting in the best interest of the board, the brand, the franchisees, Papa John's International, but I didn't know that we had a few board of directors that were working with Goodell and Washington to try to get rid of me because they wanted to run the company.
They wanted me out so they could run the company.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
I just wish you wouldn't have resigned.
You did nothing wrong.
And the report that came out last year showed you did nothing wrong, right?
That shows that you had no racial, you know, and I know you have your own dynamics you have to deal with.
I just, I'm afraid it just made these cancel culture people more powerful.
Yes.
You always have to fight.
You always have to fight for what's right.
And you look at the position they put me in.
You have a board of directors, of which two, the CEO, Steve Ritchie, and the head of governance, Mark Shapiro, they wanted to run Papa John's.
And at the time, Papa John's EBITDA was over $200 million a year.
Wow.
But when you're making that kind of money, people get greedy.
And Shapiro and Stephen Ritchie work hand in glove with Jason Stein, the CEO of Laundry Service, per Washerman's direction to find a way to get me to say something or to do anything.
They really couldn't find anything in the tape that I said because everything I said, the tape was anti-racist.
It was the way I was raised: that you treat everybody with respect and kindness.
Problem is, they taped it, reversed the meaning and the intent, took it out of context, took it out of contrast, and went to Forbes.
Forbes wrote part of what I said, but not the whole thing.
Again, they took it out of context.
And the rest of the media, as you know, they did a media frenzy.
They didn't do their homework.
And this exploded into a false narrative that did a lot of damage to me and Papa John's and the franchisees.
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Yeah, I remember it.
And there was a lot of people that were ready to defend you in that.
And so is there any chance you could try to come back into the company you founded?
Because this is your baby, right?
You started this and then you get ousted from what you started.
Is there any vectors of that or is that ship sailed?
Well, the three things in life: the sun's going to come up, the sun's going to go down, and the truth's going to come out.
So we've been very patient.
It's been three years.
Karma is a real thing.
It's good or bad.
And fortunately for me, I have the truth.
They left the tape running after I hung up.
And after that, they told on themselves what their true motives were.
They said things like, he won't have a job by Sunday.
He'll be effing out the pasture before you know it.
So their intent, which was ill intent, became obvious.
But fortunately for me, I have the truth.
I have a tape.
And I feel very lucky that we had somebody turn in that tape so that we have evidence and proof that, in fact, Roger Goodell with his henchman, his crony, Casey Washman, set me up and painted me in a false light as a racist.
What's amazing is we paid Washman millions of dollars to do just the opposite of what they did.
Can you imagine hiring an agency, a purveyor, a supplier, and you're paying them millions of dollars and they're kind of going behind the scenes to undermine the face, the namesake, you know, that's synonymous with the success in the brand, not only in NFL, but, you know, throughout the country.
As far as coming back, the first 20 months, I wanted to come back because the product quality had gotten so bad.
NFL Franchisees Face Heat 00:14:41
And running the business on the fundamentals every day is like working out.
It's very difficult, very arduous, very hard work.
And once those fundamentals slip, it takes a year, year and a half to get the system to get back in shape.
But those that timeframe has passed.
They did do one thing that was really beneficial to the company, and they fired Steve Ritchie, who was the interim CEO in 1718 when the stock went back to, I think, as low as $28.
So when I left in 2016, the stock was almost 90.
Mr. Ritchie and his team took it down to below 40.
And then COVID came along first of 19 and really saved that company with people being trapped at home with a captive audience and also people having free money to spend and stay at home and order online and Amazon and Papa John's and you know Grubhub, et cetera.
So right now, to answer your question, franchisees are doing well.
They're making a lot of money.
Their sales are good.
Things are really good for the franchisees.
And until sales turn negative and cheese goes to, say, 230 or 240 a pound, Papa John's franchisees will be in good shape.
But that hasn't happened yet.
So God bless them.
And I talked with franchisees lately and I said, hey, just enjoy the ride.
Enjoy the ride while you got it because all commodities are up except cheese is right at a 10-year normal.
I mean, that's lucky, but hey, it is what it is.
Yeah, well, you've built an amazing company.
Let's talk about that.
So you started this from nothing, right?
So you're, you are, Papa John.
Tell us the story.
Something with your father's tavern and selling your car.
You know, tell us about your Oni in America story.
I always loved making pizzas since I was 15 because I graduated from washing dishes to making pizza at Rocky Subpub in 1978, 77.
And then I made pizzas up in college at Greeks Pizzeria.
So I had a love for pizza early on, and I liked everything about it.
I liked the fact that it was a high-priced ticket, you know, nine, $10 to pie.
You could run really good food costs below $30,000.
It brought friends and families together.
You could build at the time a Papa John's restaurant for $100,000.
So you had a cheap LA of capital.
You could do high volume of sales and make good margins and bring friends and family together.
So I felt really good about the pizza business, and it was, you know, my first love.
Yeah, so tell us kind of just the story of scaling, though, right?
Outside of starting with one location and a couple, you know, when did you decide to either take outside money, invest your money, borrow money, or did you never?
Were you just always cash flow positive and you had more money than you knew what to do with?
Every entrepreneur has that moment where you had to decide: do I want to be a local phenomenon or do I want to really grow?
Tell us about that.
Well, the Lexington, Columbus, Ohio, Louisville corridor is all about franchising.
If you look at the magnitude of franchise that was the genesis was in that part of the country, Long John Silver's rallies, Chi Chi's, Donatos, White Castle, Bob Evans, Texas Roadhouse, Papa John, Kentucky Fried Chicken, the list, Jerry's restaurants.
The list goes on and on.
So that is really a great place to start a franchise restaurant.
So we had our eyes on franchising early on.
Founded the company in 84, first restaurant in 85.
And by 87, we were franchised and franchised in the business.
So that was part of our DNA from the get-go.
We never really had a capital issue until after 93.
Up until 93, we did have capital constraints.
We took Republic in 1993, some 250 restaurants.
And after that, capital was no longer an issue.
Our Achilles heel was management capability, management competence.
So we could only grow the mothership, the corporate restaurants, as fast as we could manage them in a confident way.
And when I left, we had like 600 U.S. stores and 50 stores abroad.
So even after 30-something years into it, we only had the capabilities to run about 600 corporate restaurants.
Wow.
So talk about, you know, the franchising model is an interesting one, right?
Starbucks has stayed away from it.
Other companies have done really well with it.
How are you able to maintain high quality while also wanting to grow aggressively and recruit new franchisees?
Yes, that's the current CEO, Rob Lynch.
At times, I gave him a hard way to go, but that's my way of motivating the guy.
He's, you know, he doesn't like to be challenged and he doesn't like to be questioned.
He's got a little bit of a kind of a little guy complex.
And so he gets angry.
So the way I motivate him is I kind of get him a little angry.
Two years ago, the product quality was really bad.
And the way to get his Napoleon complex to kick in is to challenge him and point that out.
Now, the last six months, the product quality has actually gotten a little bit better than it was, but it's not consistent.
And incongruity in our business breeds mistrust.
As Ray Croc said, your quality is only as good as your consistency.
So moving forward, I think Rob Lynch's two biggest issues are: if that cheese goes to 230, 240 a pound, and those comp sales go to negative, he knows, A, I'm going to be breathing down his back.
And C, that's going to be $100 stock, which got to understand in 2016, we're at 89.
So, what, 11% increase in almost five, five and a half years?
And the second issue he's got is the franchisees at Papa John's, love them to death.
Very difficult to work with.
Yeah, it's kind of like trying to manage a wolf holding its ears.
It's, you know, you can kind of do it from time to time a little bit, but just the slightest little mistake and they will turn around and bite you.
So he's got a very, very tough job ahead.
I'm a shareholder.
I've bought stock in the last six months.
It's done quite well.
He's made a lot of people a lot of money.
So I hope Robbie Lynch and his team continue to do well, but they're going over some incredibly difficult numbers.
And so far, everything that's been out of his control, our control as a franchise has been to our benefit.
And sooner or later, you know, things don't always go your way.
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Well, so you're still investing in the company, and you're right.
I think COVID and people staying at home basically saved the company.
It was an unintended bailout.
Um, and the stock price, I think, is near record highs, if not if not there.
So, we were in, we were in default of our loans December of 18.
That's how bad, that's how close this was to me getting back in charge and getting a hold of it.
That's why Jeff Smith got such a sweet deal.
But in all fairness, um, you know, I can handle three capacities right now, really four.
I mean, I can be Papa John anytime I want to be Papa John because I'm Papa John right now at 130 bucks a share with a really tough labor market, supply chain issues, the political divide in our country.
I don't want to be Papa John right now.
I want to be a bystander.
I could be a employee, I could be a Rob Lynch.
I don't want to have to wake up and deal with what he's dealing with every day.
I could sit on the board of directors of other companies.
If I had enough stock, I could sit back on the board of Papa John's.
I don't want to sit on a board right now, it's too much exposure.
Or three, I could be a shareholder.
Well, we'll talk more about this, but with the government printing money, that system makes the super rich super richer.
That's right, two trillion or three trillion or four trillion to get ready to pump into the market.
It's just going to help the ultra-rich get richer.
And it breaks my heart because it hurts the middle class.
So, the place you want to be right now is be a shareholder and enjoy that ride, let the dust settle with the supply chain, the labor market, and then we'll see down the road if and when I want to get back involved with the mothership, Papa John's.
Well, there's a uh, I think they're going to need you at some point because you have just pinpointed some of the big issues regarding the Papa John model.
So, I'm curious: in Papa John's, what percentage are corporate-owned versus franchise?
Are you just all franchised?
You have like maybe five or six restaurants that are owned by corporate, yeah, give or take a little bit.
We have a corporate corporate restaurant of about 600.
Okay, so my math wasn't totally right at 2,000 international, and we have right at 5,600 total.
So, that's 3,000 U.S. franchisees.
So, that's the portfolio.
Yeah, and so therefore, you're very dependent on all these different personalities, geographic changes, and shifts.
How many of your franchisees own multiple locations?
Well, that was one of the reasons I called Goodell out is Papa John's at the time was a company of small business owners, and they were giving me a lot of heat that hey, you know, the NFL is our biggest spend, and they're actually hurting our sales.
When NFL season started up back in 16 and 17, we expected sales to go up, it actually went backwards.
And so, the NFL property, which was once a great asset, the Papa John small business owner became a liability.
I.e., that's why I had to call Goodell out and get it resolved.
Now, a couple of the owners called me.
They wanted to get rid of Goodell for other reasons.
And I refused to get in the middle of that situation because Goodell didn't work for me.
If they want to fire him, they're the owners.
They can get rid of Goodell.
I just wanted the situation resolved to the owners' and players' satisfaction.
Yeah, and that makes sense.
So, the NFL is a mess, and a lot of people are upset at them right now for a variety of reasons.
But the NFL used to be a stimulus for you, right?
When I grew up, you know, better ingredients, better pizza, Papa John's.
It was everywhere, every other commercial.
And yet, what you're saying, though, is that the NFL is not giving the same ROI for advertisers it once was.
I think that is correct.
And again, I think Goodell has been on the hit list for several of the owners for some time.
When the two of the owners called me, Jerry Jones with the Cowboys and Dan Snyder with the Redskins, the night before the earnings call, they said, you know, Goodell's got to go.
You got to help us get rid of Roger Goodell.
Snyder said he's a moron.
You know, I could get into some of the Snyder's comments.
He's pretty derogatory towards Roger.
And I said, hey, listen, fellas, the guy works for you.
I don't really want to get in the middle of your all's little personal battle.
I just want the problem resolved to the owners and players' satisfaction.
Unbeknownst to me, to your question, is Papa John's was the number one sponsor by far with revealance, likability, association.
So now you've got two of the most powerful owners hammering on Goodell to get rid of him, and you got the number one sponsor hammering on Goodell to fix the problem.
So, you know, Rogers, I'm always when you disagree with him or you come at him, he destroys you.
He did it with trying to do with John Gruden, did it with Jerry Richardson.
That's just his pattern that you can't question what he's doing.
And if you call him out, and in this case, he used Casey Washerman as the hitman to hurt me and to set me up.
And unfortunately, I had a weak board and went along with it.
Yeah.
And so let's just talk more broadly.
You mentioned this, some of the dynamics of growing and scaling the company.
The good news is Papa John's is already established and it's already a brand and it already has many generations of brand trust and of infrastructure and all sorts of different things.
Would you be able to start Papa John's in the current economic climate that we see today?
I don't think so.
And when I left in 16 or 17, we had 5,200 restaurants.
Over, what, 30 years?
That's 170 restaurants a year.
Since 2012, we're up to 5,600.
So in what, four or five years, six years, we've grown 400 restaurants.
So the momentum and the product quality and the point of differentiation and the better ingredients, better pizza promise, they've diluted that a lot.
And it's showing up and they lost the ACSI two years in a row.
We haven't, that's never happened since when I was running the company.
It didn't happen at all, but since we founded the company, we're not growing restaurants.
Why You Need Express VPN 00:03:00
Last quarter, with all the goodness with COVID lockdowns and stem list packages and cheese being cheap, we closed 48 restaurants last quarter.
Wow.
48.
I mean, we closed 48 restaurants.
And those are all franchisees or corporate?
Franchisees, maybe one or two corporate, but mostly franchisees.
And the entrepreneur, you know, he walks with his pocketbook.
So I think what you have at Papa John's, you have a group that are real successful, a group that are hanging on, and you've got a big part of the franchise system that's very unhealthy that's kind of getting hidden or not getting called out because of the law of averages.
The comp sales look good on averages because the really good ones are doing well and the really poor ones are not doing so well.
And if this does take a turn, i.e., comps turn negative and cheese goes to 250 a pound, the dynamics of this whole thing changes.
And we're hoping that doesn't happen.
But, you know, sooner or later, what goes up comes down.
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Talk a little bit about how inflationary pressures actually can help the richest people.
Inflation Hurts Small Business Owners 00:03:14
If I were to venture a guess, Papa John's expanded their balance sheet last year.
You guys probably borrowed money, not because of any issues, but because money was so cheap.
Almost corporate borrowing went up by $600 billion last year.
And because corporations aren't dumb, if there's 7% to 8% inflation, the money's almost free.
Is that if the inflation rate is above the interest rate of your previously agreed upon note, then you're playing with house money.
Talk about how the government creating money actually benefits the wealthiest people and crushes your franchisees or middle-class workers.
Well, it doesn't hurt the big franchisees at first, or at least not yet.
It does hurt the small business owner.
And as you know, we have an administration that is anti-small business.
Yes.
Papa John's, and this is not to my liking, and I disagree with this.
They want to get rid of all their small franchisees.
And they, you know, you take the Hinkle, who was, you know, the top first five franchisees, Cox, Roloffs, Willoughby, all the good operators that have been here 25, 30 plus years, they're getting out because the company is anti-friendly to small franchisees.
My concern with the big franchisees is if they're not successful, or if any of the franchisees aren't successful, the mothership's not going to be successful.
And right now, they don't communicate with the franchisees.
We're not transparent.
You know, this new logo they introduced, you know, there's been no test markets on that, no censor analysis on that.
You know, they just kind of knee-jerk.
And, you know, we'll take Texas, they just sold the state of Texas to a potentially new franchisee, which is problematic in several ways.
One is the guy signed up for 100 stores by 2029.
If you just run the math, that's a store a month for the next eight years.
A store a month.
And this guy has no pizza experience and never run a Papa John's and has never been in the pizza business.
To open a store a month, you got to have 20 stores in the pipeline.
Three getting ready to get it open, four or five in the middle, four or five to start construction, another six or seven leases signed.
You know, and so it's a fictitious number.
You know, the number they put out for Philadelphia, I think, two years ago, 49 stores in seven years or whatever.
And that franchisee won't make 20 stores in 10 years.
So it's again, it's a PR maneuver to make things look better than they are.
But the franchisees, large or small, right now, have really no say in the business.
You know, there's no transparency.
Things are hidden.
The numbers aren't shared.
So I think we can get along with get away with that as long as the sales and the profits are good.
But as soon as things turn south, I think you've got the analogy with the wolf by the ears.
Yeah.
And so also you have to deal with rising rents, right?
Because you have more dollars, therefore, real estate is going up.
So you have all these different dynamics at play.
Transparency Is Crucial For Franchises 00:04:11
Let me ask you in the couple minutes we have remaining.
We have a lot of young entrepreneurs watching.
What's your advice to a young entrepreneur?
What did you learn along the way?
I mean, you've created one of the most amazing companies, a multi-billion dollar company from nothing.
What would your advice be to a young entrepreneur listening to this right now?
Well, you got to find something you love to do, and you got to find something you're good at.
And you got to have a good team around you.
You got people you can trust that are loyal.
You take care of them.
And loyalty is a two-way street.
They take care of you.
But really, I don't care if you're a dentist, architect, you do podcasts, do media, if you do pizza, just find something you love to do and work it to the bone.
You'll be good at it.
You'll have all the success you want.
Well, and a lot of young people say, well, should I find what I love or what I'm good at?
What's your balance?
Follow the skill or follow your heart.
I hear that.
I just don't know how you're not good at something if you don't love it.
And I just don't know if you love something, how you're not good at it.
It's kind of the chicken and the egg.
But I think I had to pick, I find something I love.
I find something I love and I'd start from there.
I wouldn't, the reason I don't want to jump back in the pizza business right now is I'm not sure I want to be in the processed food business.
You know, I'm working on some organic farms and some really fresh stuff that's really healthy, you know, that betters people's lives and betters their health.
I get more enjoyment out of the gardens and exploring organic farms and the nutrients and the science and how we got away from the farm and the health of the farm and the communities of the farm and got into the centralized farming kind of structure that we have.
But I'm really enjoying the organic farm and making people better, making people healthy.
Well, that's terrific.
In closing, the country's going in a terrible direction.
Just talk openly about that.
What do you think needs to be done to get the country back that you grew up in?
I think Lincoln hit it on the nail.
I mean, the house divided cannot stand.
The biggest problem we got is we're divided.
And, you know, the right has to own their part in this, but the left, mainstream media, and the elitists who are running the country with the media, they'll scorch the planet.
They'll scorch the earth for power and control.
The things they do to humanity are, you know, they're just horrid.
And when the electorate sees this negativity in this division, they get scared.
There's fear.
There's hate.
There's animosity.
There's jealousy.
And once you get your consciousness from a place of kindness and love and respect and mutual respect and kindness, and you pull that down to bitter shame, guilt, hate, you're going to look at the world completely different from this lens down here versus this lens up here.
This lens up here is collaborative.
This is where you want your conscious.
So if you're operating from up here, you're going to see a situation like this.
And if you're scared and fearful and jealous, you're going to look at it from down here.
I don't like the way the mainstream media is pulling people's level of consciousness down to where they see the world in a way that it's, you know, it's bickering, it's hatred, it's attacked the other person.
It's tear things up.
So it's the division that the left mainstream media is doing that is creating a terrible dynamic with the hearts and souls of the American public, which I think are, you know, when you get down to it, are just good, hardworking, loving people.
Well, I agree with that.
Well, Papa John, thank you so much for joining us today.
And we'd love to meet you in person sometime soon.
Deeply appreciate it.
Thank you.
Talk to you soon.
Thanks.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to get involved with AmericaFest, it's tpusa.com/slash A-M-F-E-S-T.
God bless you guys.
Speak to you soon.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.
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