Pizza Marketplace - Winter 2007 - (Page 14) Photos provided by California Pizza Kitchen. The secret’s in the hearth, and in the people Which is why California Pizza Kitchen is the chain to beat By Richard Slawsky T wenty-two years, ago, longtime friends and attorneys Rick Rosenfield and Larry Flax traded the courtroom for the dining room. The pair always wanted to get into the restaurant business, so in March 1985 they set out to reinvent pizza and opened the first California Pizza Kitchen in Beverly Hills, Calif. Today, Flax and Rosenfield serve as co-CEOs of a company that operates more than 225 restaurants around the world. The company recorded revenue of $554.6 million in 2006 and is on track to top $600 million for 2007. And for the first nine months of 2007, samestore sales at CPK were up 4.5 percent, coming on the heels of a 5.9 percent comp increase in 2006 and a 7.5 percent increase in 2005. For most companies, having dual CEOs would be a recipe for disaster. At California Pizza Kitchen, it’s been one of the ingredients in the company’s success. “We’ve been best friends for 34 years, and as odd as it sounds, Larry and I really do not have conflicts,” Rosenfield said. “We do vigorously debate, but at the end of the day we always come to a conclusion. The strength of our relationship has always been that while we both have healthy egos, neither one of us has that ego invested in being right.” Flax admitted the concept of having co-CEOS draws more questions than any other aspect of the company. People generally assume the two are always in conflict, he said. “We’ve made mistakes and we’ve both been wrong, but we learn from those mistakes,” he said. “If two people get together and they have a great idea and they respect each other, it can be a lot of fun.” Learning from the masters The centerpiece of the California Pizza Kitchen concept is the hearth, which gives the pizza 14 WINTER 2007/SPRING 2008 | PIZZ A MARKETPLACE REPORT
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