Earning
a crust BY josh russell / photography by emilie sandy
Thanks to a lifetime spent adding a little sauce to large-scale pizza brands, Gareth Davies is the perfect person to ensure Papa John’s franchisees in the UK and western Europe are seeing their businesses thrive
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erhaps it’s no surprise that Gareth Davies came to play such a pivotal role in helping Papa John’s franchisees thrive and the American pizza giant reach consumers across western Europe. After all, having worked in kitchens since he was a teenager and having spent decades helping rising brands firm up their franchising, Davies is one of Britain’s true pizza pros and the perfect man to help spread ‘Papa’ John Schnatter’s franchise even further. Born in Leamington Spa, Davies spent much of his young life moving from place to place because of his father’s catering career, something he feels gave him a good grounding in the entrepreneurial mindset. “Obviously moving around and changing schools on a regular basis gives you the opportunity to learn to be flexible and adaptable in different circumstances,” he says. However, this doesn’t mean that Davies wasn’t raised with a consistent work ethic: from around the age of ten, he worked back of house in his parents’ restaurant, making him Britain’s
youngest kitchen porter at the time. But while his father was a fantastic chef, Davies learnt as much from his failures as his successes: Davies senior struggled to systematise the business, ultimately leading to the company folding. And this is a lesson that Davies makes sure he imparts to franchisees to this day by helping them access robust systems. Having whet his appetite for business at such a young age, it wasn’t surprising that Davies felt more at home in a kitchen than a classroom. “I confess I was never the most academic of individuals,” he says. “I was always attracted to action and so academia was never really the right environment for me.” Leaving school at 16, Davies signed up for a computing course at a local college in Stratford-upon-Avon and took a part-time job working at the local McDonald’s just to make ends meet. But while his keenness to study coding quickly ebbed away – in 1985 much of computing was still driven by impenetrable maths – before long he found he thrived in the process-driven world of food franchising. “What I found at McDonald’s was working with people was my great passion,” says Davies. “Additionally the structured environment was something I could really relate to: there’s a very clear definition of DECEMBER 2017 | elitefranchise
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11/12/2017 17:51