At Work With Dean And Sue Gonsior

The Virginian-Pilot:

What we really are is a quick-casual restaurant. We’re not a smoothie shack, where all they’re doing is selling smoothies. We’re selling a complete line of food items, including gourmet wraps, specialty sandwiches, fresh soups and salads. How we’re different is that we prepare all items fresh to order. That’s what really makes us unique. Food accounts for about 50% of our sales.

We’re planning to close out the market here at around 40 to 45 stores, because we’re not going to saturate the market. We want to make sure that the new franchisee that’s opening up a store is going to do well.

At the same time, we don’t want to cannibalize any existing locations. We don’t want to take a store that’s doing very well in sales today and then put a store a few blocks down the road and cut the original store sales in half. We want to make sure that they’re all very profitable. Read more.