Since the early stages of his 17-year career,
Adam Oldenburg aspired to one day assume the top leadership position at Whitewater-based
Toppers Pizza. That day came last month when the company announced Oldenburg as its next chief executive officer.
He succeeds Toppers founder
Scott Gittrich, who has stepped into the role of board chairman after 30 years as head of the company.
Over the past few years, investing in technology and rebuilding its menu with items such as gluten-free and vegan pizza helped Toppers hit its stride and track growth amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Now with 72 locations in 14 states, and growing, Toppers is poised for continued expansion under Oldenburg's leadership. He recently spoke with BizTimes Milwaukee associate editor Maredithe Meyer about his career journey and plans for the company.
The following portions of their conversation are edited for length and clarity.
BizTimes: How did you get your start at Toppers and eventually make your way to the top?
Oldenburg: “I started as a student at UW-Whitewater. I started delivery driving, just for some cash to, you know, be a college student, go to the bars and do fun stuff with my friends. Within six months of delivery driving, I wanted to become a franchisee for Toppers. I fell in love with the brand, I fell in love with the people that I was working with. I had this really awesome boss, Matt Martin was his name. And he totally got me drinking the Toppers Kool-Aid. And within a couple months, I told my parents that I wouldn't be going back to school that next semester, I'd be joining the management program at Toppers. So, little to say, they were bummed. I was basically a junior at that point. I was also studying occupational health and safety to be a full-time firefighter, and that wasn't panning out the way that I thought that it was going to.
“I entered the management program and was an assistant for two years before being asked to open our first company store in Milwaukee. I was the general manager of the store at 1903 East Kenilworth in Milwaukee, which serves UW-Milwaukee, MSOE and Marquette University. It immediately became one of our highest volume stores in the entire company. I won manager of the year at that location and moved on to become a supervisor of a big store market (Madison). I moved to Madison with my girlfriend, who's now my wife. It's like I met my wife at Toppers. She never worked for Toppers, but if I wouldn't have moved to Milwaukee for Toppers, that would've never happened, so it's part of the story. I oversaw three stores in Madison, a store in Stevens Point, DeKalb (Illinois) and Whitewater. ... I was later promoted to vice president of pizza people, where I had five supervisors, a training manager and a marketing manager, so seven direct reports and a team of about 550 people that were working across 28 locations. I did that for eight years. And at the same time, I own five Toppers locations with partners. And now, here I am.
"I spent a lot of time working with Scott (Gittrich) and a lot of time working with a CEO coach over the past two years to prepare me for this role, and I feel really good about where I'm at and how we're going to move forward.”
When did discussions of the recent leadership transition come about?
Oldenburg: “
The feeling was probably in the room at some point, where we were discussing future opportunities. (Gittrich) always knew my aspirations. He always knew the drive that I had. We had this conversation about two years ago and it was like, ‘Hey, I want to be prepared. I want to be prepared for whatever could come my way.’ He took a long time and sat down with me and said these are the things that I'd like you to do and start working through. A lot of it was just preparation and a lot of it was deliver the right things in your role currently. You can't just let that slide, but this extracurricular stuff is going to help you achieve what you're looking to do, which I wasn't shy about putting in the extra time and effort.
"I love business. My guilty pleasure is actually reading business books and trying to, you know, better myself. I actually don't read books that are fiction or nonfiction for enjoyment. I read business books for enjoyment. So that's nice to have and just kind of eyes open, ears open on how the industry's going and what's going on. That’s always something that’s been intriguing to me.”
[caption id="attachment_527830" align="alignleft" width="300"]
Scott Gittrich[/caption]
What are some of the things that you learned from Scott, from both a business operations and leadership standpoint?
Oldenburg: “Scott's been a life coach. He's the person who’s poured the most amount of time and effort into me in my life. I mean, I consider him like a second father. He doesn't replace my father, but he definitely was there to double down on certain areas. He's taught me values, he's taught me how to approach things and talk to people when it's uneasy and when somebody needs to have the hard conversation that you should be the one that takes charge. And if you really care for people, then you will tell them what they need to improve at. Don't do the opposite, don't hold it in, don't resent people, but actually be able to share with people how they can improve and they will, in return, deliver the things that you want and they want. That's the big thing in leadership for him, give back more to people than what you take in.
"I feel very grounded in the way that he's taught me in that area far more than when I started working for Toppers, to be honest. I was young, 20ish, and at that age you think the world revolves around you or something like that. In a lot of ways, it's so much more fun when you have teams of people that are doing stuff and you get to recognize those people over your own accomplishments.
"(Gittrich) was a pizza guy through and through the whole time. When it comes to the logistics part of the business, we'd make pizza together, we would dream, we would talk about an operational attribute and how it could improve our restaurants. We made full-on restaurant innovation changes. We redesigned our point of sale system, and I was with him every step of the way in those conversations. He's just awesome to have right there. I always felt like I had somebody's arm around me the whole time, which I'll take to the bank myself.”
You're taking the helm at a time of high growth. How are you going to keep Toppers moving forward with that momentum?
Oldenburg: “We've really established ourselves as a crave-worthy brand with very different and irreverent house pizzas and vegan options and different things that we bring to consumers. And we've doubled down in that area. We’ve come out with things on a quarterly basis, and we know if consumers love our product, then eventually consumers make choices to potentially be a franchisee, or to own a location. A lot of people who own Toppers locations were people that either worked for us or ate Toppers pizza in college and kind of went on and did their own thing, but they've got this kind of itch that they can’t scratch on what they want to do and be part of something special and we offer that at Toppers. It's a fun environment. It's a fun group of franchisees that we have running restaurants.
"We plan to double down on growth. We’re exceptional in college campus markets and there are tons of areas (for growth). Ames, Iowa, deserves a Toppers Pizza. Iowa City deserves a Toppers Pizza. Columbus, Ohio, deserves a Toppers Pizza, you name it. If you go to Mizzou in Colombia, Missouri, you should be eating Toppers. And at some point, there'll be a fit for us and for a franchisee that shares the values that we have, and the magic will start happening. We protect our culture a lot, so not everybody becomes a franchisee that comes through our door with an application. That’s an important part (of the company) for me and for the rest of the team that I work with to really guard that, those values. Money's money but having fun and doing something special is what it's all about.
Are there any new store locations in the works right now?
Oldenburg: “We just opened up (a location) in Bloomington, Indiana, a couple weeks ago, which serves Indiana University. We'll be opening up Muncie, Indiana, in the next coming months, which is Ball State University. We have one going into Dallas that's opening shortly. Another one in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood that will be opening shortly. We definitely have stores in the pipeline, and we plan to open 12 franchise stores next year and get those under commitment. Manhattan, Kansas, which is K State University, is another one. So, you can see kind of a theme here, which is university driven and then we tend to build around those staples in the states. For the Wisconsin market, it was Whitewater, Stevens Point, Eau Claire, Oshkosh, Madison, La Crosse, then Milwaukee, and now we're 35 stores in Wisconsin."
Do you view the Wisconsin market as pretty much saturated at this point?
Oldenburg: “
No. There are definitely (areas) that are available: Schofield, Wisconsin Rapids, Oconomowoc. We’re opening a store in Watertown in the next year, and surrounding cities. We just signed an agreement with a new franchisee for one Beloit store and two Rockford locations. We're going to get the most brand penetration in markets that are around us because people know about us."
Toppers has invested heavily in technology in recent years with the launch of your own point-of-sale and e-commerce system. Will that continue to be a focus of yours now as CEO?
Oldenburg: “We have our own proprietary software, called Pizmet (a combination of the words ‘pizza’ and ‘kismet’). About 20% of our team here at the headquarters office works in IT. We design our own website, we design our own point of sale. By point of sale I mean where people plug the orders in and take the orders. We love having the keys to the car when there are development things happening. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we were first to market with curbside pick up. We were first to market with contactless delivery. Those are some of the areas that we can easily pivot and do innovative things for customers and team members that make their jobs and lives easier.
“Technology is an endless pool of where you can spend resources. We know that people order (Toppers) on Amazon Alexa now, they order on their Apple watches. They order on RetailMeNot even. There's tons of avenues and tons of areas that we can put time and resources in IT, it's actually limitless. This is an area that we'll continue to be on the front edge of, so that we can stay relevant and at the customer's fingertips.
Labor continues to be a challenge within the service sector. How is Toppers navigating hiring issues at its corporate-owned stores?
Oldenburg: “It's never been more important to have great managers working for you, and great people at the helm. We've always said this, but over the past couple years it's been even more exposed that great people tend to have a great and full staff. That's the thing that we've honed in on. We've been more methodical about how we are working with general managers, how we're training them, how we are supporting them through their careers. I strongly believe that, like I said, what you put into people, they will give back.
"We have brought managers in and are doing formal reviews with them to ask, what do you want to do? What do you want to do with your career? What path do you want to see yourself on? We know that's been impactful for people because it helps us work with them as leaders to follow those paths in our company that are available and, in return, they feel very good about how they're getting poured into as humans and business leaders. That makes a big difference. And it makes a difference in how they perceive their work and, and their life and how they treat people at the restaurant. Happy people are fun to work with, right?
“Staffing is always gonna be a struggle if you put your emphasis on just the people that you're trying to get versus the people that actually make the big difference here, because people quit people. If you have a bad boss, you're going to leave the bad boss.”
Now that you’ve taken the reins, what are you most looking forward to about the future of Toppers? What gets you excited?
Oldenburg: “I always aspired to be the CEO at some point. Very early on in my career I was naive and said, ‘I'm gonna be CEO someday.’ And you don't understand how much work actually goes into doing that, but there's a path and when you create a path and are disciplined and follow it, you get the results that you want.
"I'm excited to grow the company. We want stores in Iowa, we want more stores in Nebraska, stores in Florida, more stores in Texas. I want people eating Toppers Pizza when they go on family vacations and to know that it's a Wisconsin company and all the fun that comes with that. I want to change team members' lives that go on to be franchisees that started out doing the same thing (I was). I want us to grow people into professionals and great leaders in our company and follow on some of the same path that I had the chance to follow.”
What’s your go-to Toppers order?
Oldenburg: “Buffalo chicken pizza, and taco sticks when they're on the menu. And ranch, don't forget to put ranch in there. Of course you have to have the ranch.”
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Toppers' Buffalo Chicken pizza[/caption]
