I was lucky enough to spend some time with DPP CEO Nils Gornall and FD, Edward Kacyrz this week. The new management team have been in place since July 2022 and Dec 2022 respectively and are already having a big impact on the performance of the business. If you have not looked at the company for a while, now would be a great time to revisit the story. Here are my notes from my time with them.
Nils is a Domino’s Pizza man through and through. He started work in a Dominos aged 15, opened his first store aged 22, owned 20+ franchises in Australia, including half of the top 10 performing stores, and opened up a new Dominos market in Croatia generating strong store profits. He has taken on the franchise of a number of underperforming Dominos stores in his time and turned them all round to be very profitable.
The history of DPP starts in 2010 when the company listed on AIM with the Polish master franchise for Dominos but without any stores open. It was run by an entrepreneurs with excellent coffee experience but no Dominos experience. Then came bankers and restauranteurs with dine-in Italian style pizza experience. The appointment of Nils Gornall as CEO marks the first time that DPP has been run by someone with in-depth knowledge of running Dominos stores successfully. Simply, he knows what it takes to run a successful pizza delivery operation and has experience turning around underperforming Dominos stores and making them supremely profitable.
The DPP board has also been refreshed with proven Dominos experience. Andrew Rennie, previously the European CEO of Dominos Pizza Enterprises (the largest Dominos franchise co outside of the US) joined as a non-exec in the middle of 2022 and David Wild, the ex-CEO of Dominos UK joined as Chair in Jan 2023.
Pizza has proved popular the world over and the Dominos franchise has proven to be one of the best franchise models globally. Once scale is achieved, Domino’s franchisees become strong and consistent cash generators wherever they have been rolled out around the world. The only thing that has stopped Domino’s being a success is when it has not been run correctly. That’s been the case in Poland in the past, but with new management in place with operational experience the company is now being run properly for the…
