By Charlie Pogacar
In 1978, Shahpour Nejad came to the U.S. to obtain an American education. He was 16 years old and had grown up in Iran with a well-to-do family of entrepreneurs. Business was in his blood, as he puts it, which ultimately led him to opening up Pizza Guys, a 90-location franchise based in Sacramento, California.
But how Nejad went from a 16-year-old who didn’t speak a lick of English to a pizza kingpin is a much more interesting story than that. Nejad had come to the U.S. alone, without his parents. While he was here, the political climate in Iran rapidly changed. A hostage crisis in 1979 deeply affected Iranian-American relations. For Nejad, the upshot of this was that his family couldn’t send him money any more. Even more upsetting than that, it would be 14 years before he saw his parents again.
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“I was a rich kid, driving a Trans Am with the eagle on the hood and all that stuff,” Nejad said on the latest episode of Peel: A PMQ Pizza Podcast. “And then all of the sudden, you know, things went the wrong way in my country and a revolution happened… and my dad couldn’t send me money any more.”
Ultimately, this led Nejad to take a job in a local pizza shop. He worked hard in the shop while he obtained a degree in mechanical engineering—so hard, in fact, that the shop owner made him a business partner. They grew the business together and Nejad found out he loved selling pizza.
When it came time to graduate from Cleveland State, Nejad started asking around to find out how much he could make in mechanical engineering. “They were telling me some numbers,” Nejad recalled, “and I was like, ‘Wow. I make a lot more than you [selling pizza].”
On this week’s podcast, Nejad describes his upward ascent from there, and how he built a booming pizza franchise from the ground up. One of the things Nejad has enjoyed most about owning a pizza franchise is watching the people who have worked with him for decades flourish as owners of their own business.
“I always say that I am nobody unless these people who are running the stores are successful first,” Nejad said. “If they’re successful, I’ll become successful… so I make sure that all of my franchisees are happy.”
Listen to the podcast:
