February 2014
| Business World Magazine | 71
Mich. Still, it took an outside observation
to sharpen the approach to the one that’s
far surpassed those early advances.
“We had some pretty intense meet-
ings with Fred DeLuca (co-founder of
Subway), it ended up being a year-long
conversation, and he ended up advising
us that we needed to choose one or the
other,” McFall says. “We needed to have
corporate-owned stores or franchises, be-
cause, in his estimation, we weren’t do-
ing either one of them as well as we could
have.”
The Biggby team digested the counsel
and chose its path, selling all its owned
stores and committing completely to the
franchise concept – which, by late 2011,
earned it recognition from CNBC as the
fastest-growing coffee chain in the Unit-
ed States. It has since swelled to more
200 finished or planned locations in nine
states and has doubled its number of total
units every two years since 2000.
Corporate revenue in 2006 was $20
million. By the end of 2013, it was just
shy of $70 million.
The cable network used data from
Chicago-based Technomic Inc. and de-