Fred DeLuca Quotes
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Back in the early days of international, everybody wanted to customize the menu for every place.
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By and large, we're a bread-eating culture. People like sandwiches. We don't really over-think that one.
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After 39 years of business, I'm still learning. I go through this every year -identifying new strategies that are extremely important.
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I guess that's one of the benefits of being sick. Your wife lets you have a big-screen TV in the living room.
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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.
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The franchisees are uniquely in touch at the local level. They see what's going on in their communities in a way we couldn't ever imagine.
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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.
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In the U.S. and Canada, we have one store for every 12,000 people.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When we first started the company, I didn't have any thoughts of franchising. We just had company-owned stores.
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Because the stores worked, franchisees wanted to build more stores. If your model works, folks who are happy with it will buy out the ones who aren't happy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Back when we started, people didn't even know what a submarine sandwich was. The product was only sold in a few markets.
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From my point of view, my job is just to work hard for our franchisees, so they can maintain the position they're in, and to grow market share.
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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.
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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.
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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.