By Charlie Pogacar
When McLain Hoogland graduated from Vanderbilt, he wasn’t ready to enter the family business. Instead, he enrolled in the United States Marines and became an infantry officer. Six years later, the family business called him home—but it looked a lot different than it had when he left.
Today, Hoogland is the president of Hoogland Restaurant Group (HRG), the largest Marco’s Pizza franchisee in the U.S., with more than 120 locations. But the story of how his family built that empire begins not with pizza, but with VHS tapes and gumballs.
His grandfather, Charles Hoogland, founded Family Video, the video rental juggernaut, in 1978. His father, Keith, scaled Family Video from 40 locations to nearly 900, creating a company that outlasted industry behemoths like Blockbuster. Family Video even survived the initial pivot to video streaming services, as proven by one of Hoogland’s favorite fun facts: 2014 was Family Video’s most profitable on record. (Another fun fact: at its peak, Family Video sold $4 million worth of gumballs per year, Hoogland estimated).
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“People think the video rental industry died with Blockbuster,” Hoogland said. “Honestly, it was just bad business practices that killed them. They were going into big cities, urban city centers, paying high rents with high increases. They weren’t buying any of their real estate. They weren’t buying their DVDs—they were using a profit-sharing model.”
By contrast, Family Video owned everything, including the buildings that housed its video rental stores. It also owned all of its DVDs. In other words, Family Video was better equipped to handle a dip in rentals.
There’s a tempting story to tell here, about how a family pivoted into the pizza business as Netflix and other video-streaming services killed the video rental business, but that’s not exactly what happened—at least not according to Hoogland.
The family’s pivot began as the world transitioned from VHS tapes to DVDs. Keith Hoogland noticed that four DVDs could fit in the space once occupied by a single VHS tape. At scale, that effectively meant a Family Video store required less than half the square footage it once did. Suddenly, the Hooglands found themselves with thousands of square feet to spare. The solution? Sublease to tenants like Subway, Jimmy John’s and local pizzerias.
“We realized that whenever we had food next to us, our traffic lifted,” Hoogland said. “My dad said, ‘Why wouldn’t we operate the business next door ourselves?’ And pizza just made the most sense. You’re not going to say, ‘Let’s grab a sandwich and go watch a movie.’ It doesn’t hit the same as pizza and a movie.”
The family began looking for a pizza franchise that could slide into their real estate footprint, but it wanted to find a burgeoning one to grow with. Domino’s and Pizza Hut were everywhere already. But Marco’s Pizza, with just a few hundred units at the time, caught their eye. A Marco’s Pizza regional manager who rented from the Hooglands tipped them off: “You’ve got to come try this pizza,” Hoogland remembered the customer saying. “It’s the best pizza I’ve ever had.”
Tried it they did—and within a few years, they were operating more than 150 Marco’s locations. The transition, however, was anything but smooth. For one thing, the Hooglands had never operated as franchisees before. Because Family Video was a corporately owned and run business, they were used to making unilateral decisions. But, perhaps far more importantly, the Hooglands learned quickly that retail and restaurants are completely different ballgames.
“Retail is clean, nine-to-five,” he said. “Restaurants are chaotic, high-adrenaline, messy. You’re cleaning, dealing with food waste, people are working night hours—the type of person you need as part of your team is very different. We thought we could just copy-paste our success from the world of retail, but we learned fast that we couldn’t.”
Around 2016, Keith Hoogland called McLain, his oldest son, and told him it was time: He needed him to come help turn the restaurant business around. It was an overwhelming prospect for the younger Hoogland—he’d never spent a day working in a restaurant in his life. But his business degree, combined with the work he did with the U.S. Marines, proved a potent combination. His first move was to become a general manager at one of HRG’s Marco’s Pizza locations.
“I spent four months making pizzas, running schedules and placing orders,” Hoogland said. “I had to learn the business. I made a lot of mistakes. I believed people who were wrong. But I read every book and magazine I could to start to get acclimated.”
Hoogland also made a pivotal hire in those early days: Zach McLaughlin, a Pizza Hut veteran who quickly became director of company operations at HRG. “He was the first restaurant guy I brought in, and he was huge for me,” Hoogland said. “He knew how things were supposed to work. I could bounce ideas off him, and we’d figure out together whether the ‘restaurant way’ was the best way as opposed to just the way it had always been done.”
Led by Hoogland and McLaughlin, the cultural shift at the company’s Marco’s locations was massive, but it required a lot of turnover. Little by little, McLain had to replace nearly every regional and district manager on his team. “You either can do the job or you can’t,” he said. “And restaurant leadership is more like the military than retail. It’s hierarchical. You need strong leaders at every level.”
Just as HRG has grown, so has Marco’s, Hoogland said. “When we joined, Marco’s had maybe 500 units. At one point, we were almost 50% of the system. They’ve matured a lot since then—better ops, better tech, better support. We’ve kind of grown up together.”
Today, Hoogland serves as vice president of the Marco’s Independent Franchise Association. He’s built strong relationships with Marco’s corporate team and helped create a better feedback loop between franchisees and the franchisor. While the company owns fewer Marco’s Pizza locations than it once did, Hoogland feels like its portfolio has plenty of room for growth. It’s not as if they will have trouble scouting locations either—the family has a real estate arm of its business that began with the buildings that once housed Family Video stores.
Looking back, Hoogland believes his father’s foresight was the real engine of their success. Even while Family Video was raking in profits, Keith Hoogland was already planning the next act. The vision paid off—but the pizza landscape is shifting once again. Third-party delivery has changed consumer habits. Costs are up. Chain pizza is facing margin pressure and stiff competition from both independents and other fast casuals.
“We’ve lost about 20% of our customers to third-party apps,” Hoogland said. “And they’re not just ordering pizza anymore. One person gets tacos, another gets wings. It’s more fragmented.”
Meanwhile, inflation has narrowed the price gap between chain and gourmet pizza. “Now that our food is more expensive, people are asking, ‘Why would I pay $18 for this when I could get something artisanal for $20?'”
But Hoogland believes Marco’s is well-positioned to stand out—if they tell the right story. “We make our dough in-store every day,” Hoogland said. “Nothing’s frozen. It’s fresh food. But we have to get that message out. People are more health-conscious, more quality-driven. Chains that don’t adjust are going to get left behind.”
And though the Family Video stores are gone—the pandemic dealt a final blow, and the company officially closed in 2022—nostalgia still lingers. “People constantly message us, asking us to bring Family Video back,” Hoogland. “We’re missing something, I think, as a culture… we’re missing the communal spaces. You used to see your friends at the video store. That doesn’t exist anymore.”
For now, Hoogland Restaurant Group is focused on helping Marco’s carve out its place in an evolving pizza landscape—just as the family once did with video. While the pizza segment has proven to be vastly different from the video rental space, the two industries also share something in common, Hoogland said.
“I think we’re trying to capture something familiar,” Hoogland. “Something shared.”
