Operations

Happy Joe's launches Operator to Owner Program

Provided

October 18, 2021

Happy Joe's Pizza & Ice Cream is creating a pipeline for career opportunities by providing longtime management with a path to entrepreneurship, according to a company press release.

Happy Joe's CEO Tom Sacco announced the company has developed a program that incentivizes long-term general managers' success by rewarding them with a franchise location. On Sept. 30, Happy Joe's awarded general manager Jeannie Radtke, and her fiancée Adam Clark, with the corporate-owned Maquoketa location through the new Operator to Owner Program.

"Jeannie and Adam have been with the brand for many years and have done an excellent job in Maquoketa and earned the right to become franchise owners," Sacco said in the release. "Jeannie has had unbelievable success growing her restaurant's sales and presence in her community, so we're proud to award her with a Happy Joe's Pizza & Ice Cream Parlor to call her own. We hope this initiative acts as an added incentive for our restaurant managers — and restaurant managers in our industry as a whole — to see that their hard work will be rewarded by employers that truly want long-term success for their managers and franchisees like we do at Happy Joe's."

To qualify for the program, Happy Joe's evaluates the quality of the location's operation, including how it's being run, the general manager's level of involvement in the community, the leadership impact on the restaurant, sales growth and profitability improvement over at least a three-year period.

After moving to Maquoketa in 2011, Radtke became a server a year later. She moved up the management ranks, being promoted to general manager of the restaurant in 2019 before recently joining the brand's family of business-minded franchise owners. Radtke and Clark — who's a longtime kitchen manager at the Maquoketa location — have been a couple for the longevity of her career at Happy Joe's.

"It has always been a dream of ours to open our own restaurant," Radtke said in the release. "When Tom proposed the idea of me becoming a franchise owner, I left the conversation in tears. I am still in shock at the incredible opportunity and am the upmost grateful that this was something Tom would make happen for me. I am thankful for the opportunity and for the support from our corporate office and my peers at Happy Joe's."

Happy Joe's has eight company and 38 franchise locations throughout the Midwest with more in the pipeline.