Anthony Tomey still makes a mean Turkey Tom, and he credits his family’s success as Jimmy John’s franchisees to staying close to operations.
“We’re very hands-on; that’s our biggest asset,” said Tomey, CEO of Tomey Group. “We all know every job in the store. All of us are real operators.”
“All of us” includes Tomey’s two siblings, Michael Tomey, the group’s chief financial officer, and Christine Sullivan, chief compliance officer, plus their father, Fawzi Tomey, and an uncle, Tony Tohme.
Already the largest Jimmy John’s franchisee in Michigan, Tomey Group in May grew to 48 stores after acquiring three locations in the state’s southeast market of Washington Township, Chesterfield and New Baltimore. The goal is to get to 100 units, Anthony Tomey said, through a combination of new store openings and acquisitions that could eventually extend the family’s operations to another state.
Fawzi Tomey opened the family’s first Jimmy John’s in 2003, in Novi, Michigan. After immigrating to the United States from Lebanon in the early ‘70s—and changing his last name from Tohme to Tomey—he worked a variety of jobs while earning an accounting degree and later his MBA, eventually spending three decades as the CFO for an automobile industry supplier in Detroit. He considered opening a gas station or a Subway restaurant, but his son’s experience eating Jimmy John’s during his days as a student and baseball player at Eastern Michigan University put the sub sandwich concept on his radar.
“I had Jimmy John’s all the time at school,” said Tomey, who was drafted by the Detroit Tigers in 2003 and pitched in the minor league system until 2008. But with just a few hundred locations of the franchise open at the time, “no one had really heard of Jimmy John’s and no one had heard of delivering a sandwich. The only delivery was pizza.”
New menu additions such as the Firecracker Wrap are helping drive sales in the Tomey Group’s Jimmy John’s stores.
The first store opening was tough, he recalled, with only a few thousand dollars in sales per week. The breakthrough came when the family began taking sandwich samples to local businesses. “Within a year we started doing $20,000 a week and things started to take off,” he said.
By 2008 the family had four stores and Tomey decided to trade fastballs for freaky fast sandwiches. New openings and some smaller deals followed, and in 2019 Tomey Group bought a large package of units that took its restaurant count from 24 to 51 overnight. It finished that year with $32 million in sales.
Between 2019 and 2023 Tomey Group sold four locations and closed two that were part of the large acquisition. Those two restaurants, noted Tomey, were within a few miles of other Jimmy John’s restaurants, opened during a period of rapid expansion for the brand when units were built much closer to one another than is practical now.
“Last year we did just above $41 million with less stores,” he said. “We’re smashing the numbers.”
Fawzi Tomey, now the group’s president, remains focused on the finances, drawing on his 30 years in the CFO role. His approach is simple: “You reduce your costs, you increase your sales and you enhance your service. That’s how we do it.”
The elder Tomey added the group’s success is also a result of its strong banking relationships. “We made sure we never defaulted on any payments to the bank or to landlords,” he said, which has helped enable continued growth.
Jimmy John’s as a brand, meanwhile, has made major strides in menu innovation under Inspire Brands, which purchased it in 2019. That’s been key to driving sales, said Anthony Tomey.
“Jimmy was the innovator early on,” said Tomey of founder Jimmy John Liautaud. “He did an unbelievable job of getting the company to where it is but he was also very resistant to changing the menu.”
“People thirst for those LTOs,” he continued, such as the limited-time offer running now of the Firecracker Wrap, with turkey, salami, ghost pepper cheese and Firecracker Jimmy Chips. The new chicken wraps, too, “have been unbelievable for us.”
As it continues to grow its Jimmy John’s business, Tomey Group is also evaluating the performance of a new addition to its portfolio, Chicken Guy. The group, in partnership with real estate investment company The Jonna Group, opened the first Michigan location of the Guy Fieri-backed chicken franchise in April 2023, in the Detroit suburb of Livonia.
“It started off amazing for us. I thought we hit gold,” said Tomey. “Sales have slowed down a little and we’re figuring out what we want to do with the brand.”The original plan was to open a total of 20 Chicken Guy restaurants.
“We have to get the food costs down,” he noted.
Related story: Guy Fieri-backed Chicken Guy to Expand in California With Mountain Mike’s Franchisee
In addition to Jimmy John’s and Chicken Guy, Tomey Group has several real estate properties throughout Michigan, including Fisk Corners Shopping Center in White Lake, Cedar Oaks Lakeside Resort and the attached Sully’s on the Lake restaurant in Houghton Lake, and Bull Ventures, which includes five apartment complexes. Tomey and his brother are also co-owners of 8 Mile Vodka and an apparel company, Born In Detroit.