Ray Sellers owns 13 Domino’s Pizza franchises in Charlottesville and in Augusta, Rockingham and Shenandoah Counties. Does that make him a mogul? Maybe. He’s just a blip in the massive machine that is the Domino’s brand, which lays claim to 6,000 franchises in the United States and 9,000 throughout the world, but he’s certainly an important part of the community here. The truth is he spends almost as much time giving away free pizzas as he does selling them.
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Ray Sellers, left, could have started Ray’s Pizza, but he opened 13 branches of Domino’s instead, and does his best to earn a place in the local community. On the right is Steve Ambrosi, owner of a Domino’s at Lake Monticello. |
Whether it’s a free pie for a middle school student redeeming his “Reward Card” for good grades or 20 free pies for a local race or athletic event, the guy gives back with a lot of dough. Actual cash too. “We get approached all the time for money or time or pizzas. I don’t think we ever say no,” Sellers tells Restaurantarama with a chuckle. “It’s just part of the Domino’s culture.”
As a brand, Domino’s Pizza has, in fact, institutionalized many community outreach and philanthropic programs, and the cynical among us might say it’s just another marketing tactic, a cost of doing business. The Domino’s stores locally owned and operated by Sellers, however, have taken up their own causes. For example, when one of Sellers’ employees died in a tragic accident, the manager of the store came up with the idea to honor the deceased employee with an annual food drive in his name. Taking donations from Domino’s customers, some of whom handed over their nonperishables straight to the drivers who’d delivered them a pizza, the drive provided enough meals for over 100 needy families last year.
“There’s a big push to shop at local companies, but people forget that we are local,” Sellers says. “Most of the franchises around here are owned by local people.”
Sellers started as a Domino’s delivery driver during college at Virginia Tech and then proceeded through the internal ranks, managing a few stores and serving as a franchise consultant and then an operations director before acquiring his first three franchises in 1992. It’s a typical Domino’s story of climbing the professional ladder—franchises are only awarded to former employees. Two of Sellers’ former employees are already franchise owners in the Lake Monticello area and in Lexington, respectively. Any one of Sellers’ current staff of 250 could very likely be a small business owner in the near future too.
Sellers says, “After managing a store, I’d learned so much, I could have started Ray’s Pizza,” but he says he’d grown to respect and admire the systems that Domino’s had already perfected regarding food safety, preparation and delivery. That online Domino’s delivery tracker is pretty neat even if it does bring up the whole thing about a watched pot never boiling. You can see exactly where your virtual pizza is in the process, including the first name of the person making it and the person delivering it.
But what about the food, the ingredients? No pizza place around here—independent or otherwise—can subsist on Virginia tomatoes unless it’s only open July-August, but still. Where does that stuff for the Philly Cheese Steak Pizza or the Memphis BBQ Chicken Pizza actually come from? Philly? Memphis? California?
“We do very little prep. We get food deliveries three times a week from a distribution center in Maryland,” says Sellers, who adds: “They get product from close by in Maryland as much as possible.”
