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When American Builders Quarterly spoke with Jennifer Pecoraro-Striepling in 2022, she was vice president of design, construction, and facilities at Papa Johns. In the year since, she’s added franchise sales to her title and has even more to share about the pizza delivery company.
Pecoraro-Striepling is used to running multimillion-dollar global construction and renovation operations, but not like this, not in this environment, and not against so many odds. While it’s an experience she knows is shared by her counterparts across countless organizations, that doesn’t make it any easier.
“I was reading an article over the weekend,” the VP explains. “The thought was costs were going to level off by now. Materials might be starting to drop off a bit, but between the contractors and skilled labor, we’re seeing rates that are almost double what they were in 2021.”
That isn’t to say things aren’t going swimmingly at Papa Johns. In fact, they are. But that doesn’t make the challenges any easier to deal with for a VP who is knee-deep in global and stateside projects. Pecoraro-Striepling says that it has been imperative to build out a variety of vendor partners across the globe so should one come up short, another can pick up the slack.
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She lauds her international design project manager, whose previous experience in other brands and familiarity with international markets has made them able to scale out a talented list of vendor partners over the past year. “We’re talking about the UK to China to Korea to Uzbekistan,” Pecoraro-Striepling says. “We’ve spent the last year testing out vendors and figuring out who the right partner are as we continue our international expansion.”
But the US isn’t going unnoticed—far from it. Along with new builds, Pecoraro-Striepling’s team is currently blitzing the Orlando market with a whole slate of remodels. In 2023, they plan to finish at least 30 remodels in addition to new builds and new franchisee locations. Atlanta is also a hotbed for renovations and new builds.
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The challenging building climate has made evolution necessary.
“Given the current conditions, we’re always going back to look at efficiency and how we can see our designs in a different light,” explains the VP, who emphasizes the importance of relationships and negotiations with vendors. “The last year of testing has really pushed toward value engineering and how to be hyper-cognizant of every component that goes into a store.”
In February 2023, Papa Johns launched what has proven to be an already successful Development Services program for its extensive franchisee list.
“We kept hearing the same thing from our franchisees,” Pecoraro-Striepling explains. “They really wanted to build, but they just don’t have the time or the internal skill set. The more the development team thought about it, the more it made sense. We’re managing corporate projects, so maybe we could take the heavy lifting off our franchisees and increase our collaboration and partnership.”
The development team works with franchisees to ensure the restaurant location makes sense and the equipment layout complies with operational standards, while overseeing construction management and keeping franchisees abreast every step of the way. It’s a way for franchisees to utilize an established, successful process the team has done a dozens of times over.
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With the backdrop of the challenging building environment, the plan has made sense to almost two-dozen franchisees at present, and Pecoraro-Striepling expects that number to continue to rise.
Perhaps the most incredible part of the development team is that its success in adding this program was achieved without adding any additional headcount at Papa Johns. Given Pecoraro-Striepling is already stepping outside of her traditional purview, she offers up gratitude to the leadership support and the teams across the board for being able to manage so much.
“The opportunity to take on new leadership roles is a direct result of a fantastic team,” the VP says. “My director of design and equipment knows equipment like nobody else in the business. I have a senior design manager on the domestic side whose architectural skill is incredible, and it just runs that way across the entire team.”
It’s a tough time to be building for anyone, but Pecoraro-Striepling has found ways to grow Papa Johns business despite just about everything.
Since 1972, Nautical Furnishings has supplied restaurants, retail, hospitality, and theme parks with authentic decor, nautical artifacts, lighting, tabletops, millwork, and reclaimed building materials. Our design and production teams with talented artists create and fabricate custom decor, UL-certified lighting fixtures, and utilize our vast supply of reclaimed wood and materials to enhance interior and exterior spaces. We are proud to have received Papa Johns’ “Development Vendor of the Year” award in 2023. Visit nauticalfurnishings.com.
