Gier, 53, is perfectly happy to be a normal guy. He started humbly at the bottom of the restaurant industry and worked his way diligently to the top. At age 15, he was mopping floors and making Peanut Buster parfaits at Dairy Queen. By 19, he was married to a woman he met in a McDonald’s parking lot. After that, an impressive string of jobs for Frito Lay, KFC, and Pizza Hut molded Gier into one of the top chief marketing officers in Dallas-Fort Worth. The restaurant business, you can say, has always been an integral part of his life.
‘We’re not curing cancer, we’re not putting people on the moon,’ Gier says. ‘What we do is pretty basic.’
“I always joke to my corporate friends, ‘Y’all sit around talking about someday you’re going to leave and go to a startup or you’re going to a turnaround… well, I got both! So I call it a twofer,” he says
Pizza Inn, formed when two brothers opened a first location near Southern Methodist University in 1958, is the one Gier refers to as a ‘turnaround.’ At the height of its success, the buffet concept had 749 locations spread across the globe. Today, there are about 300 restaurants located domestically and internationally—a far cry from its heyday. But Gier is hopeful, even though there’s only been one new buffet restaurant (not including express units) in the last two years. Starting with the Oak Ridge, Tenn., location, which opened this past July, Pizza Inn is slowly building its brand back up. And Gier is expecting more to come.
The CEO remains optimistic, despite the company’s released net income losses for the first quarter of the 2014 fiscal year. The $400,000 loss from this year, compared to a $100,000 loss from the same quarter of the prior fiscal year, is directly related to the difficult task of making sure Pizza Inn can appeal to a new generation of consumers, different from the old buffet crowd.
“In the last year, we’ve gone from six restaurants to almost 20,” says Gier. “We have a total of over 150 restaurants committed to being built over the next five years by our franchisees.”
All in all, Gier is certain that growth is the absolute trajectory for both pizza companies’ futures.
“We’re not curing cancer, we’re not putting people on the moon,” he says bluntly. “What we do is pretty basic. Our business isn’t complicated. It’s hard to execute consistently, but it’s great food, a warm atmosphere, friendly service, and affordable prices.”
Admittedly, Gier also agrees Pie Five and Pizza Inn could do a better job of conveying ingredient stories to their guests. But he’s quick to point out what his company is doing right. For him, it’s the “folks who love the restaurant business, [who] love serving people, and they come to work with a smile every day. Ultimately, that’ll be the backbone of what makes us better, different from the competition.”
Barely any credit is doled out to himself, a simple Midwesterner living in Dallas. He’s not a pizza snob, not any kind of snob, really. He’s a CEO who runs marathons and has to manage two very different companies with very different needs at the same time. To him, it’s no big deal.
“I’m just Randy. It’s just pizza.”