Blaze Pizza hires Focus Brands execs as chief development, operations officers

Dive Brief:

Blaze Pizza has hired Johnny Tellez as chief operations officer and Kevin Moran as chief development officer, according to a press release issued Tuesday. Both executives join the company after stints at Focus Brands.
Blaze Pizza’s CEO, Beto Guajardo, joined the company from Focus Brands in January, meaning a significant portion of the pizza chain’s leadership now hails from the multi-brand company.
Tellez and Moran join Blaze as the company builds out a development pipeline and looks to recruit new, multi-unit franchisees.

Dive Insight:

Prior to joining Blaze, Tellez worked as VP of international operations and training at Focus Brands for about a year and a half, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before working for Focus Brands’ overall operations, Tellez specifically worked for Schlotzky’s from December 2018 to July 2019. His tenure there overlapped with Guajardo’s stint a Schlotzky’s brand president from September 2019 to April 2020.

According to the press release, in leadership positions prior to Blaze, Tellez “played pivotal roles in enhancing customer experience and operational effectiveness.” At Blaze, he will be responsible for operational initiatives and maintaining uniform quality across the brands’ stores.

Moran’s time at Focus Brands, which lasted eight years and included a six-and-a-half year period as VP of strategy development and analysis, likewise coincided with Guajardo’s tenure at Focus. Guajardo led Focus Brands as president from April 2020 until he was hired as Blaze’s CEO earlier this year.

Moran’s expertise is “steering development teams towards outstanding performance through the alignment of fiscal goals with comprehensive strategies,” according to the press release. He is tasked with building strategic alliances to speed up the brands’ development, including its international development.

Blaze, which has about 330 restaurants, has spent the last two years signing multi-unit franchise agreements. Most recently, the pizza chain signed a multi-unit deal with a franchisee to build restaurants in Bahrain. Blaze has similar deals in place in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and Canada.

Late last year, Blaze signed development agreements in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and Prince George’s County, Maryland, for a total of 13 new restaurants with two multi-unit franchisees. In March 2022, Blaze announced plans to develop franchised units in Tennessee. At the end of 2021, the pizza brand also announced a franchising agreement in south Florida.