By Charlie Pogacar
For so many in the world of pizza, business is a family affair. Kyle McPhee and his family, Papa Murphy’s franchisees, are taking that formula to the next level.
Kyle and Alisha McPhee have been Papa Murphy’s franchisees since 2006, having expanded their portfolio to 16 stores across Utah and Wyoming. Parents to five children, the duo’s eldest son, Aydon, will be a co-owner of the McPhee’s 17th location, which will open soon in Eagle Mountain, Utah.
“[Aydon] has talked about owning a Papa Murphy’s since he was six years old,” McPhee says. “He’s one of my best managers—and he just turned 19.”
Aydon McPhee being a store owner at age 19 is less surprising when you consider the McPhees deep ties to Papa Murphy’s. Kyle McPhee took his first job at age 18, working part-time at a Papa Murphy’s down the street from his parents’ house. After a two-year mission trip to Canada, McPhee returned home and once again returned to Papa Murphy’s. What he thought would be a six-month stint turned into a whole different ballgame.
McPhee quickly climbed the ranks at Papa Murphy’s and even met his wife, Alisha—then a Papa Murphy’s team member—through work. Rather quickly. McPhee was running six different Papa Murphy’s stores with a local franchisee and even began training new franchisees by the time he’d turned 22 years old.
That early experience set a foundation for what was to come. McPhee eventually partnered with his mentor, Jared McDougal, to buy his first store in 2006. Together, they built a small network before parting ways and dividing up the stores. With help from his wife, McPhee launched a second growth phase on his own.
McPhee’s early success didn’t come from clever marketing tricks or deep discounts. It came from a simple but powerful focus: customer service. When he took over his first struggling store, sales were far below the chain’s average. It didn’t take long for McPhee to identify some major issues. The lobby was grimy, wait times were long and customers would show up with books in hand, expecting to sit for 30 minutes or more.
McPhee attacked the problem head-on, intentionally overstaffing the store to get wait times down. He had team members dedicated to answering phones and surplus employees generating the orders. “We ate the labor cost at first,” he says. “We put extra people on so we could get customers out the door in two minutes instead of 20.”
The team members suddenly had time to clean the store top to bottom, too. McPhee and his team members spent time learning customers’ names, with the goal of being able to address a new customer each day by name. Service times plummeted. Within months, sales surged—and McPhee’s reputation for operational excellence was born. Franchisees began approaching him, asking him how he had executed a total turnaround in such a short period of time.
“It was all within the four walls,” he says. “It wasn’t about advertising. It was about what you did inside the store.”
When Kyle and Alisha McPhee began having children, their business truly became a family venture. Together, they are raising five children who all, at some point, worked in the stores—mopping floors, making pizzas and learning the ropes from the ground up.
“The closest thing I ever did to duplicating myself was creating the family,” McPhee joked.
Even today, conversations at the dinner table often drift to work. But instead of feeling like an intrusion, the shared experience has deepened the family bond.
“My wife knows the business inside and out,” McPhee says. “When we’re talking about a store challenge, she knows exactly what I mean. The kids grew up hearing it all.”
It was always their eldest son, Aydon, though, who lived and breathed the family business. Throughout high school, Aydon proved his ability to run a store: managing inventory, hiring, controlling food costs and leading teams with maturity beyond his years.
“He’s run the best labor numbers out of all my stores,” McPhee said. “Even when he was like 15–16 [years old], if I had a store that I wasn’t confident was staffed well, I could drop him off— even if there was an adult manager there—and I knew the store would be good just because he was there.”
Along with opening Eagle Mountain, McPhee is planning to acquire more locations from retiring owners. He’s also exploring other franchise opportunities outside of pizza—possibly sandwich shops—which would complement Papa Murphy’s dinner-focused business.
But franchising will likely remain his preferred path. “The biggest benefit to franchising is someone else already did the hard part—proving the concept,” McPhee says. “It’s safer than starting from scratch. And you still work for yourself.”
And McPhee still loves the work .“For me, owning a business is like playing chess,” he says. “I love the challenge. I love the game.”
And with a second generation stepping into the business, it’s clear the McPhee family’s story with Papa Murphy’s is only just beginning.
