Love And Pies Joe 39;s Brother
Marketta Carucci
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Growing up in the rural Midwest, I never imagined I would someday find myself writing about something as "local" as Happy Joe's, much less in a newsletter about going global. Unless you're from the Midwest or have visited recently, you might be asking, "What's Happy Joe's?"
Happy Joe's Pizza and Ice Cream is an American restaurant chain that sprung up in the Midwest, and grew to become very popular back when I was a kid. It was founded in 1972 in Bettendorf, Iowa by a man named Lawrence Joseph "Happy Joe" Whitty.
Prior to founding the company, Joe was a former manager at another local pizza chain restaurant. But one day, he held a birthday party for kids at his former employer's restaurant, and was admonished for it. So, he left those meanies behind and started up his own business: Happy Joe's. He wanted to create a place where kids could have fun. Happy Joe's became synonymous with exactly that.
I've often purchased gift cards to Happy Joe's for friends and family with small kids back home. Everyone loves the brand, but it's especially popular with families and synonymous with fun. It's interesting to me how sometimes the origin of a brand and the founder's vision remains with it for decades and becomes a longstanding part of the company culture, well after they're no longer part of the company anymore. That's a legacy worth leaving.
This Happy Joe's creation became so popular across the Midwest over all these decades that it's now sold all over the place. Today, you can even buy a version of taco pizza at the local gas station of my hometown in rural Illinois (population: 2500).
Well, imagine my surprise when I learned that this "hyper-local" Midwestern restaurant chain is now popular in... the Middle East! I learned this thanks to Tom Sacco, Happy Joe's chief happiness officer, CEO and president. Tom posted recently about a couple losing their jobs right before the holidays. Given that I follow the ongoing tech lay-offs coverage, his post popped into my feed.
In 2022, Happy Joe's made its debut in Egypt in the Cairo suburb of Roxy, Heliopolis. The opening weekend saw families lining out outside the door. Today, their dining options not only include the traditional dine-in experience, but also include delivery, weekday buffets and weekend brunch. (Note: adapting your product offerings by local market is a best practice!) The franchise group has been adding more locations, and plans to take the brand across Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Dubai, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia in the years ahead.
Curiosity got the best of me. I could not resist reaching out to Tom directly to ask him, "Why Egypt?" and "Why MENA (Middle East and North Africa)?" Of course, I also gushed about being from the Midwest and growing up with Happy Joe's (local connections matter!)
"As I looked to expand Happy Joe's everywhere there were families and children, I had had previous experience bringing restaurant concepts into MENA. As a Perfect Storm would have it, Ahmed El Batran contacted me because after seeing an article In the African press 30+ years later about Happy Joe's expansion plans, he reached out to me.
Ahmed, his father, his sister, and his mother, opted to bring Happy Joe's back to Egypt. His father had worked for Happy Joe's back in the 1980's when he was in the US studying at University of Colorado Boulder. Magdy, the father, and his two brothers became franchisees in Egypt back then. When the brothers disagreed on the future direction of the brand in Egypt, they opted to close down. Now as a united family unit focused on bringing Happy Joe's back to Egypt, one additional condition that I wanted had to be met. I wanted to see Happy Joe's expand across MENA.
We agreed on a ten (10) country, ten (10) year Master Franchise development plan, and the rest is history. Happy Joe's is not only creating magical memories in Egypt now, but will soon be under development in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and Oman, with more to countries to follow serving great pizza and ice cream, creating "Happy Places", and magical memories still to come!"
Isn't this a Happy way to kick off this new chapter in the life of a brand? Aligned with the brand's core values, you can see how this geographic match makes a lot of sense. I am certainly going to love watching this "10 countries in 10 years" expansion journey unfold. Also, what a great opportunity to flag the following best practice that everyone can take away from Tom, and from Happy Joe's:
The trajectory of Happy Joe's in the Middle East actually reminds me of a personal anecdote from when I lived in Ecuador. One day, some local friends asked me if I'd like to join them at a "popular" American restaurant that had recently launched there called... Kenny Rogers Roasters.
I laughed! I had never even heard of this restaurant back in the USA, and yet apparently in Ecuador it was regarded as a popular American phenomenon. Here I was an American... surely I should know about it, right? But the average Ecuadorian knew more about Kenny Rogers Roasters than I did. I knew a few songs of his, but I had no clue he was involved with any restaurants. What a strange moment for me!
Today, I can only imagine something similar happening with Happy Joe's: American diplomats moving from the East Coast of the United States to Egypt, only to hear the local buzz about a new popular and "famous" American restaurant opening up in Cairo... called Happy Joe's. A brand they likely never heard of until they got to Egypt, unless they spent time in the Midwest.
It's an odd thing when your first experience with a brand from your home country takes place outside your home country. But it's not actually atypical as brands go global and evolve over time, just like Happy Joe's is doing now. I predict more of this to come in the future, as the world keeps getting more tightly connected, globally!
- Knowing where to expand is not always straight-forward. In this case, it wasn't about proximity to the Happy Joe's tried-and-true home market. It wasn't about selecting the easiest market to break into from a language or economic similarity perspective. It was about selecting the right local franchiser to team up with. Local partners know the market, and would understand the business opportunity and how best to position Happy Joe's locally. Partnering to go local is such a widely used strategy in B2C, but it works just as well in B2B spaces too!
- Figuring out when to expand is also critical. Chief Happiness Officer Tom happens to specialize in restaurant chains, and specifically, in turnarounds. I love a good turnaround story, but I love it even more when international expansion plays a part in it. The timing of this comes after Happy Joe's declared bankruptcy in order to reorganize its operations to get set up again for renewed growth. But it's also now expanding within the United States too, with a laser focus on both a new model (franchising) and pinpointing specific geographies (staying away from the coast where the cost of labor is higher and profitability would likely be at risk).
I had a great conversation with a well-known tech founder and CEO recently in which we both remarked that the entire idea of total addressable market (TAM) can be a bit of a joke, especially when talking about start-ups and fundraising.
I think the example of Happy Joe's above actually relates to this. What matters more than some enormous "boil-the-ocean" concept like TAM is actually pinpointing who you want to target and seeing if there are enough of those customers out there generally, but more importantly, when and where, just like Happy Joe's did with Egypt, specifically.
Coming from a market research background in which I ran a large market sizing exercise for a multi-billion-dollar industry, I can say there is a lot to know about this topic! And I have seen firsthand how confused both start-up founders and investors can become when discussing the TAM for a given market.
When getting a sense of which geo is most attractive in terms of market size, I often advise companies to look at other factors first, to determine where to focus. For example, do you have any partners that are leading you into a new market? This is often the case, even at early-stage companies. That doesn't always mean it's a good idea to follow the lead of a partner, but it can be helpful to look at that path as compared to others.
I talked about this topic in my Harvard Business Review article. But I go into it much more deeply in my new book, Take Your Company Global, where I introduce the MARACA model, a framework that enables you to look at three key areas when going global:
- MA (market availability). This helps you look more objectively at the opportunities in individual markets, which is what you really need to do. Looking at a geo is not the only way, of course. You can segment by industry, by company size tiers, and other criteria.
- RA (real-time analytics). This tells you what input you already have in your current metrics that can help you decide whether or not to lean into a market further and intensify your presence there.
- CA (customer addressability). This helps you understand if you actually have the ability to address local needs or not. So often, companies underestimate what it takes to move into a new market, so this is actually the most important piece, in my opinion.
Yet, most hiring processes are designed to predict how well someone can do a job, not how well they can adapt and fit into a new environment, contributing to the health of a team and a work culture.
Unless you're in a role where you rarely interact with others, a job is largely not just what you know or what you've done in the past; it typically comes down to how fast you can learn and how well you can work with others.
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