Chris Rigassio lived on a buddy’s couch in California for nine months so he could work at restaurants in the market he called the “holy grail of Jersey Mike’s.”
Los Angeles “had all the top-performing stores,” said Rigassio, and as someone who wanted to own a Jersey Mike’s, it seemed like the ideal training ground to cultivate his operational acumen.
Two years out of college in 2013 and having been turned down for a store by the franchisor—“We didn’t have any restaurant experience,” he says of wanting to open a Jersey Mike’s with his father—Rigassio looked through the company’s franchise disclosure document and found Angel Velazquez, the area director in L.A. “I pulled his number out of the back and asked if he would take me around to his stores,” recalled Rigassio. “The last stop of the day, Garen was about to open a store in El Segundo. I wound up helping with the grand opening and staying out there for nine months.”
That Garen is Garen Khodaverdian, and over the next 10 years he and Rigassio would each build up their respective Jersey Mike’s unit counts, become close friends and now credit the informal mentorship they received with helping them become successful operators in a system that’s grown to nearly 2,500 locations.
“We talk every day still,” said Rigassio, today founder and CEO of Prospect Capital Restaurants, based in Holmdel, New Jersey, and with 49 Jersey Mike’s stores and 20 Wingstop units. In April he went out to California to help with the opening of Khodaverdian’s ninth restaurant, in Hermosa Beach, and laughed as he recalled when Khodaverdian used to tap him on the shoulder to move off the slicer because he wasn’t fast enough.
“Getting beat on in those high-volume stores” helped him become laser-focused on execution, which is what propels his stores’ performance today. After not getting approved by corporate he first went to work at a location in New Jersey, where he was used to doing $14,000 a week in sales. “Garen was doing $30- to $35,000 out of the gate.”
“The whole brand is built off of 14 feet,” he said, a reference to the 14-foot front counter in every Jersey Mike’s restaurant, and the brand’s top operators never forget it. Rigassio never let the Jersey Mike’s corporate team forget him, either, and in June 2014 he and his father, Ron, opened their first store in East Brunswick, New Jersey.
“I don’t know if they got sick of me or finally believed in me,” he joked.
Parallel to being a franchisee, Rigassio also worked on the corporate operations team and helped open roughly 50 stores. In 2016, after putting together a group of investment partners including Phil Nisbet, Alan Leibman, John Stathis and John Lovisolo, Rigassio formed Prospect Capital Restaurants and signed a five-store deal. PCR also began acquiring restaurants, including its purchase last year of 23 Jersey Mike’s units in Michigan from franchisee Sharing the Bread.
“We had a massive year last year,” said Rigassio, with sales in most markets up 15 to 20 percent and he noted PCR also built 15 stores. Now it’s time to “hammer down on the operations, hammer down on processes in our company. We knew coming into 2023 we wanted to deliver on the current state of the business.”
Rigassio is also now using his experience staffing up his organization and creating a foundation for growth to help Khodaverdian. “I did that earlier than a lot of franchisees and now I’m helping Garen do the same,” he said of hiring in advance to prepare for more expansion.
With his tenth store opening soon and Nos. 11, 12 and 13 on the way, Khodaverdian said he has one gear, “and my gear is ‘go’.” It’s the same drive he had 20 years ago when, after eating at the first Jersey Mike’s in California, he decided he wanted to become a franchisee.
“I had the No. 9 with roasted red pepper sauce,” he recalled of that visit to Jersey Mike’s in Camarillo. “I thought, this is awesome. This might be the next big thing.”
At the time working in a T-Mobile store in Hollywood, Khodaverdian said he reached out to Dan Burrell, then an area developer, and took a second job working in his and Velazquez’s location in Ventura. “I would work at T-Mobile in the morning and then drive one and a half hours to Jersey Mike’s to work the closing shift,” he said. “That’s how my journey started, as a regular team member.”
“The mentality was, I’ll do whatever it takes to have a store,” he continued. “I came from nothing … I grew up on food stamps. It’s hard work, determination and an eagerness to make it in the world.”
Over the next several years Khodaverdian helped Burrell, Velazquez and their third partner, Artie Maidman, open numerous stores, manage them and even train new franchisees. It was Maidman who later said, “I’ll invest in you, let’s go open some stores,” said Khodaverdian, who signed for his first location in 2008 with a 3 percent ownership stake.
“That Hawthorne store became the No. 1 store in the country,” he said. He and Maidman opened seven locations together and Khodaverdian bought out his business partner in 2022.
To continue succeeding in a competitive industry requires “non-stop training,” Khodaverdian said, along with constant recruiting. He still sits in on every new hire interview—“I have the final say.”—and emphasizes having fun in the stores while putting out quality and correctly made sandwiches.
“We talk about executing flawlessly all the time,” he said. “We’re not perfect, but we talk about execution all the time.”