Two brothers founded Jacksonville-based Firehouse Subs in 1994 and the chain has grown from one store along San Jose Boulevard to more than 488 restaurants in 28 states and Puerto Rico.
Chris and Robin Sorensen, sons of a fire captain and former firefighters themselves, created a venture that now has 29 company-owned restaurants, a testing and catering center, and a franchise operation that has taken the Firehouse Subs brand cross-country.
With 7,000 employees throughout the system, and 55 at the Kori Road headquarters, the family run company continues to grow in size and reputation.
Last summer, it was ranked at the top of the food chain in a Consumer Reports survey of sandwiches and subs.
Firehouse Subs also ranked No. 5 in the 2010 Zagat Survey for service among large chains in the United States, based on a vote from more than 6,500 food surveyors.
The Sorensen brothers along with their parents, who have been divorced since 1979, two sisters, brother and Chris’s son all work in the office. City Council President Stephen Joost is a partner, board member and adviser, having joined early on.
The Daily Record interviewed Chris and Robin Sorensen for “First Coast Success,” a new segment on the award-winning 89.9 FM flagship First Coast Connect program, hosted by Melissa Ross.
The interview is scheduled for broadcast this morning and the replay will be at 8 p.m. on the WJCT Arts Channel or online at www.wjctondemand.org.
This is an edited version of the full transcript.
If you had to give one key to your success, what would it be?
Robin Sorensen: If I had to say one, I would say that it was frugality from a business standpoint.
Of course we had to have the idea in the beginning, but there’s no question that we built our whole company through the lenses of frugality, and we’ve been very, very careful how we managed money and the decisions we’ve made.
In the beginning it wasn’t a matter of choice. We were that way by nature, because we didn’t have any money.
Chris was just cheap.
And you grew up in Jacksonville.
Chris Sorensen: I worked for the fire department and I didn’t have a whole lot of money with three kids at home and a wife. It just kind of developed. My dad’s that way. He just taught us if you want something, you’ve got to go out and get it, and we wanted this. We didn’t have the money, but we had the passion and drive to do it.
Why Firehouse Subs?
Robin: Chris and I were both firemen. Our father was a fireman, and we have several members of our family in the fire and police departments around the country.
We looked at other things. We’ve gone through the car-washing phase. Chris used to have a nickname, “Hot Job.” He was willing to do anything for money. We even had a short run at trying to grow Christmas trees in Florida.
But you start thinking, what am I really going to do? What do I enjoy doing? We both have this entrepreneurial drive and spirit from our father. Growing up, he was a fireman and a business owner, and the two things I loved were business and food. We just kind of put it together.
That’s where we were really the happiest.
With Firehouse, it was never about money, it was never about growing a chain. It was just about opening one store. We spent a couple of years researching and trying to set ourselves apart from competition, and we felt like, when we opened up, we could be better than everybody in town, we felt like we had a unique offering, whether it was the theme, the concept, the experience when you come in.
We focused on those things and those things only, and we never really looked at whether we would make money at it, which is backwards. But we do a lot of things that way.
Chris: It was about two years of research, if not more, not to mention growing up and just loving food and having both sides of our family, mom and dad, that were great cooks.
We’d tried a lot of different things. We like to create things, we’re creative people, we like to come up with the names, the food. We studied a lot of our competition.
There were sandwich shops, but the sub business was really taking off everywhere, and we felt we should stay mainstream in that, but we could do a much better job than everybody else.
There’s a lot of competition in the industry and especially in the sub category. How do you keep focused in that?
Robin: In the restaurant business, we follow the fast casual segment, so our direct competitor’s not necessarily a Subway or Quizno’s, even though they are competitors.
Our customers, if they’re not eating at Firehouse, they’re looking at Five Guys, or Panera, or Jason’s Deli, and Qdoba, and Chipotle, etc.
Go back 25 years ago, and that entire segment was not even here. It comes back to what we have always been about at Firehouse, and that’s just about being different, and having bigger portions, and greater quality.
Chris and I always feel like we’ve done a good job of putting the concept together and all the key elements to it, and now it’s just a matter of injecting the right people.
To this day, we still interview every applicant that wants to buy a franchise. Every other week, we have dozens of people that come in, and they’ve been vetted at one level or another at that point, but we interview them.
We are in the business of doing deals, but at the same time, we basically are looking for you to convince us why we should let you open, wherever it may be.
Another part about Firehouse that is different from our competitors is our foundation, Firehouse Subs Public Safety Foundation.
We’ve raised just over $5 million. Chris and I are the largest donors. About half the money comes from the restaurants, the other half comes from us and vendors, and our franchisees’ employees.
Every quarter we meet, and we give it away by buying life-saving equipment for fire departments and police departments — over 328 departments over the country, including Jacksonville.
What’s great about our foundation is it ties into who we are, our heritage, our company, the brand.
What are your goals?
Robin: Our goal is to have 2,000 restaurants by the end of 2020. It sounds crazy, but we’re 482 restaurants today. We easily could have had probably 1,500 to 2,000 today if we had just really kind of opened the floodgates and let everybody buy a store. But it’s doable.
The facts are the facts. We’re going to hit those numbers. And we open here in three or four weeks in California. We’ll be coast-to-coast for the first time.
How much does it cost to get into a franchise?
Robin: The franchise fee is $20,000. Right now the range is $250,000 all in, that can vary.
What are some of your other keys to success?
Robin: First off, we’d like to start out with a little joke: No education, no experience, no money, now let’s go build an empire.
We knew a little bit, but basically for the most part, we had no idea what we were getting into when we opened the first store in 1994. We were just driven strictly on complete passion for doing this.
That’s very important. I meet people that work for us, and they’re just wound up, they’re so excited, they’re working harder than anybody else, store looks great, talking to every customer, and you know, they just need some direction, or they need some money, or whatever it may be.
It’s just being committed to what you’re doing.
We’re not smarter than our competition, and we’re probably not smarter than anybody else, it’s just that we had a great work ethic, and common sense.
As you grow your business, and you start becoming successful, it usually comes down to how you manage your finances, assuming you have revenue coming in the door. It doesn’t take an accounting degree to figure this out.
A customer asked one time, or one of our employees, if we could have the service come in and put the blue water in the toilets, and we did it ourselves. We cleaned everything, we did everything.
There was no bill we had at Firehouse Subs that was not related to building our business somehow. There was no fluff, and we did everything ourselves.
Where was your first restaurant and is it still open?
Robin: It’s in Mandarin, at 10131 San Jose Blvd. We were actually in the very space next door, where we opened in 1994 until 2000. We built a new store, a bigger store, and moved over, but we still call it the mother ship.
Chris: It’s still there, but in the original store, even though it was small, 1,200 square feet, you could tell something was going on. It was packed, line out the door, not a lot of seats, but the food was great, the service was great, and it just had a magic about it.
Robin: We were so excited to do anything related to that restaurant, the first store, but we noticed that over the years, people aren’t willing to do a lot of times what it takes.
Another key is leadership. A lot of people think they’re good leaders, but I guess you can look at your own results, but if you can’t lead your people, and you’re not making good decisions, or you’re not getting good results, maybe you need to look in the mirror, or find somebody that can do better.
Chris and I have our own skill set, and we helped build this business from nothing, but we’re only here today because we brought in great people ourselves.
We promoted a CEO years ago, Don Fox, who’s been with us about eight years, and he’s just absolutely fantastic.
It can’t be about you, it can’t be about your ego. You’ve got to be willing to do that.
Chris: You can’t be afraid to admit that. When we didn’t have money, we got together money just to hire experts to help us in things that we knew nothing about. That’s key. When you don’t know something, get some counsel on it.
What’s it like being brothers in your business?
Robin: I would have never got in this business back then without him. He and I did this together, but I can remember he moved down south, when I was about 15, 16, to be a fireman in Melbourne. I was going down there on weekends to see him, but we kind of made this connection, and it was that connection and sharing love for food and business, all those things are what made it come together and made it work.
We both enjoyed opening that first restaurant, and I’ve said many times, that was like the best time of my life.
We were so excited to be there, and we’d debate with operators sometimes about putting so many hours in. We went home, I could barely go to sleep, and as soon as I got up in the morning, I was ready to go back to the store. Nobody had to tell me to work hard there. It was so exciting to be there.
You talked a lot about success. What were some of the lessons you’ve learned maybe the hard way?
Robin: We’ve had some locations in the early years that we picked that if we didn’t really go work on trying to repair some of the decisions we’ve made, it could really have been detrimental.
There are issues along the way when we selected the wrong people; earlier on, some wrong franchisees, some wrong staff sometimes, and it’s just life. You have to work through it, and in fact a lot of those people are actually great people, they just didn’t work where I needed at that time.
Bigger than staff and maybe some franchisees along the way is we really started having a little bit of setback when the economy turned.
In 2008, it was the first time we started experiencing negative sales, which we had never had in our history. It continued through 2008 into 2009. There were some sleepless nights, because you really start feeling the weight, that your responsibility as the owner of the company, you can feel the franchisees and 7,000 employees looking at us, going, hey, what’re we gonna do about it?
A lot of people are losing their jobs, a lot of competition is changing portion size, quality, their packaging, and doing more value meals, and there’s $1 and $2 sandwiches out there, and $3 and $4 sandwiches, and that’s not who we are.
We tried a few radical things, one of them being allowing our franchisees for a one-year period to not pay into the marketing fund. We wanted to put the money back into the hands of the franchisees.
We went around on a bus tour all over the country, and showed them the things they could do today, from sign waving to knocking on doors, to going out and trying to pick up catering business, we went and did it with them.
But that only got us so far.
Then we decided to hire a new agency, and they told us you need to double your (marketing) investment, and you need to do it on radio. At that time, we probably had a budget of about $4 million, and they’re telling us we need to spend $8 million, which we can’t force the franchisees to do.
We can make them pay us the $4 million, but we can’t make them double it. So we had to test it. And it absolutely worked.
I’ll tell you what it goes back to, is that frugality part.
We have been debt-free in our company since 2001. And we were in a great position not to get into a knee-jerk situation when the sales went down and make bad decisions. It really could change your brand and your image forever.
We went to franchisees and we would put money up if they would put money up. We led the way.
When we got through that, we all kind of looked at each other and said, ‘That’s why we’ve been saving our money all these years.’ If we had not been in that situation, we could have never executed.
How do you come up with your menu?
Robin: Well, 90 percent of everything you see in the restaurants Chris and I came up with before we opened the original store.
We’re really not in a position where we need to create new menu items on a daily basis. Now what we do is come up with limited time offers, maybe one or two a year.
Chris and I are heavily involved. There’s nothing that goes out of a restaurant, food, paper, straws — everything has to be approved by us.
But we’ve had a lot of things we’ve tested over the years, the majority of things didn’t take off.
We’re doing one right now that so far, the numbers say that it’s the most successful test we’ve ever done in our history, and it’s the King’s Hawaiian Pork & Slaw, and we’re doing it in Jacksonville, and up in Raleigh (N.C.), and we’re doing it over in Arizona. It’s a test, and if it works on the track it’s on now, we’ll do a systemwide rollout on it.
Robin: We have 55 employees at our office. We had four buildings and one of the buildings we rented, Steven Joost actually was renting a single office in one of the buildings we’re in, and it just was the three of us. And now we have 55, and there’s another probably 60 to 70 employees through the area rep network that are representing us and managing our franchisees all over the country.
We will continue to grow our office staff, and as Chris said, we’re going to probably be moving and getting a little bit larger space. It takes well over 100 people to manage what’s going on.
How are sales?
Robin: Last year we almost broke $300 million systemwide. This year we’re looking at about $370 million, $380 million. These numbers always make us laugh. The first 12 months we were in business, we did $347,000. And that was big. Man, we were jumping up and down. The first week we opened, we sold about 800 or 900 subs. Last week, we sold, systemwide, just over 800,000 subs.
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