Millions
of ways to deliver
Andrew Rennie is just an Australian country boy knocking on doors
around the world to deliver a delicious household name.WORDS WENDY KAY • IMAGES ANDREAS LICHTA
pparently, there are 34 million
ways to create a single
Domino’s pizza. Think about it,
just for a minute, then best
move on. Trying to get your
head around how many ways
pepperoni can be partnered, or a crust can be
stuffed, is a little too hard to brainstorm.
It’s probably fair to assume your tastebuds
will never be given the opportunity to be
titillated by such an enormous number of
pizza combinations, but with drone and robot
deliveries on the cards, Domino’s Pizza
Enterprises (DPE) has other wow factors to
boggle the mind.
DPE is the largest franchisee in the world
for the Domino’s Pizza brand, holding the
exclusive rights in Australia, New Zealand,
Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Japan and
Germany. It was Australia’s first publicly listed
pizza company and is the largest pizza chain
in Australia today, the country where it all
began for DPE Europe CEO Andrew Rennie.
Andrew is an original shareholder of the
business, the fourth in fact, after swapping his
13 franchises for stock in 2003. Today,headquartered in France and overseeing
1,000-plus stores, he regards the milestones
of his career with a sense of awe. It’s been
a whirlwind ride for a boy from the farm,
where dialling a pizza wasn’t on the menu.
Andrew grew up about 300 kilometres
north-west of Sydney, just outside Tamworth,
Australia’s country music capital. It’s a town
raised on steak and potatoes and where a
takeaway meal was a hamburger with the lot.
He left school at 15 to become an avionics
technician in the Royal Australian Air Force,
as well as shearing sheep, labouring and
playing professional footy on the side to
build the nest egg he needed to launch him
into business.
In 1994, after a decade of service, Andrew
moved to Darwin in Australia’s far north to
buy Silvio’s Dial-A-Pizza, a tiny franchise
sporting a small but loyal customer base.
Within 18 months, Andrew had
catapulted his pizza store to the number one
sales store in the country. Within a decade,
winning multiple awards along the way, he
had expanded to operate another dozen
stores. In 2003, Andrew merged »106 | theceomagazine.comINNOVATE | Interview