After Firehouse Subs agreed to a sale to Restaurant Brands International, CEO Don Fox went to Miami to visit the company’s U.S. headquarters there. During the visit, he stopped by an old haunt: the Burger King test kitchen.
Fox had spent years in the research and development department at Burger King in the 1990s. The affable Fox, who is always willing to tell a story, told the employees there of the things he’d worked on back then—items, like a Domino’s-branded pizza, that are legends inside BK headquarters. They paid close attention.
“Boy, did I have fun,” Fox said. “I was walking in like I was a museum. They were so eager to pick my brain about projects they’d heard about.”
For Fox, Firehouse Subs’ sale to RBI, Burger King’s parent company, is something of a homecoming. Fox spent more than two decades with the company before he was inexplicably let go 20 years ago.
He took a job with a little-known sandwich concept in Jacksonville, rose through the ranks to become its CEO, helped it grow into one of the country’s largest sub concepts and then watched it get sold for $1 billion to the company that owns his former employer.
“There’s a bit of irony,” Fox said. “As I came to Firehouse, I came here with a professional experience forged by my time with Burger King, 23 years. I learned a lot about what to do. A lot about what not to do. That really served me well.
“In many respects, if someone in the know were to do a deep dive on the mechanics of Firehouse, they’d find a lot of Burger King fingerprints.”
The trumpet player
Fox didn’t think he’d end up in the restaurant industry, probably like many others. He wanted to be either a musician or a historian. He chose the former. He was a trumpet player and enrolled at Glassboro State College in New Jersey, now Rowan University, as a music major.
Eventually he dropped out to play in a band. They played some of their own music, as well as covers of songs by bands like Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears. They did some recording in the studio where Bruce Springsteen recorded some of his earliest stuff. “It was a great time in my life,” Fox said. “I really enjoyed it.”
His first restaurant job came as a teenager in Lakewood, N.J., washing dishes. As a senior in high school, he went to work in the restaurant business at Great Adventure, the local Six Flags amusement park. That soon became a management position.
After he dropped out of school, Fox worked for Six Flags during the day as a multi-unit manager for the park’s restaurants. At night, he played the trumpet.
When the band broke up, Fox was 22 and had to make a decision. “I could keep my music career or double down on my success in the restaurant business,” Fox said. “I took stock of my life goals. I wanted to have a family and have some level of financial success. Being a trumpet player wasn’t going to get me there.”
Hurricane Andrew
Fox took a job with Burger King in 1980. At the time, it was the country’s second-biggest restaurant chain. “I had to take a step down,” Fox said. “It didn’t impress them much that as a 22-year-old I was managing a six-unit territory inside an amusement park.”
He moved to Tampa, Fla., to take a position as an assistant manager. “That’s where my real learning began,” Fox said.
Fox had what he called a conventional career path. He was night manager. Then a restaurant manager. He spent four years in restaurant management in the Tampa area before he was promoted to district manager. He was then transferred to Miami, the chain’s most high-profile market given its proximity to headquarters.
Fox then moved to research and development, helping with operations, for what was supposed to be a two-year stint. Then, a few months later in 1989, Grand Metropolitan bought Burger King from Pillsbury. New management decided to restructure. Fox was given the opportunity to stay in his job, and he spent six years there.
So he was there three years later when Hurricane Andrew devastated the Florida coast, costing some $25 billion in damage.
The eyewall of Andrew, one of the strongest storms to hit landfall in the U.S., went right over Burger King’s Miami headquarters. And it damaged or destroyed the homes of many of those who worked there—including Fox’s, where he lived with his wife and his 8-month-old son. They waited out the storm in the interior of their home.
“Our house was torn to shreds,” he said. “I was scared to death. The air pressure dropped so low I thought my eardrums were going to burst. We could hear everything get torn up.
“The house was penetrated because water is coming in. You’re saying your prayers. You’re afraid you’re not going to make it. For three, almost four hours, it’s just nothing but constant, 160-mile-per-hour winds. You emerge and your entire world is ripped apart. It’s surreal.”
They worked their way to Orlando. The company itself set up a temporary headquarters in the Doral end of town and gave cash to people to help them buy what they needed. The company’s reaction, in fact, helped boost morale that had waned since the sale to Grand Met three years earlier.
“The culture was not very good. The business wasn’t doing particularly well, either. And along comes this hurricane,” Fox said. “They did everything so well. And then this magical thing happens. At least at the headquarters, everybody became loyalists.”
It only lasted so long, however. The CEO at the time, Barry Gibbons, left. A new CEO came and changed the organization and lost it. “They went from a bad culture to a great culture and then watched it all go south when it didn’t have to, and it was a shame,” Fox said.
The move to Firehouse
Fox would work with Burger King for another decade. He moved to Jacksonville in 1995 to become a field consultant and oversaw 130 restaurants throughout the Southeast. He did that until 2003, when he lost his job.
“It was unexpected,” Fox said. “I had 23 years with Burger King. I was as much of a lifer as there could be. I was extremely loyal to the brand. Loyal to the people I work with. It was a bit of a shock when I was released.”
To this day, Fox doesn’t understand why. Bain Capital had just bought the company. It didn’t do a reorganization, but did some “housecleaning.”
Yet, he said, “it was the best thing that could have happened.”
At the time, there wasn’t much of a major restaurant presence in Jacksonville. He interviewed with some major brands but didn't want to leave the city. And then he came across Firehouse Subs, which at the time had 65 locations.
The chain was founded by two brothers, Chris and Robin Sorensen. They were second generation firefighters. They opened a sub shop in Jacksonville in 1994. It served hot subs and had a “firehouse” theme. Its menu features items like its signature “Hook & Ladder” as well as the “New York Steamer,” the “Engineer” and the “Firehouse Hero.”
Fox met the Sorensens. “I became enamored with the brand attributes,” Fox said. “While it was a small, fledgling brand, I saw that it had potential. And personally it was going to allow us to stay in Jacksonville.”
Firehouse Subs U.S. system sales
Source: Technomic
He was brought on as director of franchise compliance. He helped the brand shift to an area-representative growth model. The chain’s growth began to accelerate in the years after, and Fox moved up quickly. He was named chief operating officer in 2005. In 2009 he was named CEO and given charge of the brand’s day-to-day operations. “We were off to the races,” Fox said.
The company began making investments in the brand coming out of the recession. In 2010, it began adding Coca-Cola Freestyle to its locations, a move Fox believes helped the brand generate 20% same-store sales growth in 2011. “That just lit up our sales,” he said.
The year that followed would be its best development year, with 153 new locations. The brand in 2015 began advertising on national cable, which helped generate more sales and unit development. “It’s the old story, an overnight success story that takes a number of years,” Fox said.
The numbers bear that out. Since Fox’s promotion to chief operating officer, the company’s U.S. system sales are up 500%. Unit count is up 350%. Neither figure includes data from 2021, when Fox said the company’s total system sales hit $1 billion—one of his longtime goals for the brand.
Firehouse Subs U.S. unit count
Source: Technomic
Earth, Wind & Fire
The Sorensens put the company up for sale last year. It was a good time to be doing so. Firehouse thrived during the pandemic, with sales taking off in 2020 and again in 2021. Valuations for restaurants that were able to overcome such issues were soaring. Buyers were out there.
The sale price, $1 billion, represented a valuation multiple of 20 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA—a level rarely hit in industry history, though one that has become more common of late in part because of strategic buyers like RBI.
That company is also led by a Burger King veteran in Jose Cil, who began working with the chain in 2000—three years before Fox left. The two never crossed paths during that period. But they hit it off after Fox was brought into the process in September, seven weeks before the deal was announced.
The deal is unique for RBI, however. The company, which owns Tim Hortons and Popeyes, has previously placed its own people into top executive positions. When it bought Popeyes in 2017, those headquarters were moved to Miami. In this instance, Firehouse owners wanted existing management kept in place, in Jacksonville.
RBI agreed to it. Cil said the company didn’t want Firehouse without its existing management.
That brings Fox full circle, back to the company he thought he’d still be working with at this point in his career. And Firehouse was sold at a remarkable valuation for an amount he’d hoped to achieve for the brand years earlier.
“This was the ultimate success,” Fox said. “To have been able to have taken the brand to this level, to perform at a level where it earned the trust of the founders and earned them the type of purchase and sale agreement, and to be able to help accomplish this for them, is wonderful.
“Now we can go onto bigger and better things as part of RBI to leverage their resources, talent and knowhow.” That includes international development, something that Fox said would take Firehouse much longer on its own than it could do as part of RBI.
As for Fox himself, well, his career success has enabled him to tap back into the things he initially wanted to do in the first place.
Fox the history buff ended up writing two books on military history. He wrote “Patton’s Vanguard,” featuring accounts of the U.S. Fourth Armored Division during World War II. He published a second volume just before the pandemic. Fox is also on the board of the U.S. Army Historical Foundation.
And Fox the musician has done things like play trumpet along with Earth, Wind and Fire.
“It’s funny how life goes,” he said. “You can never roadmap it. I think back over time to those very early years when I was a teen having an interest in music and history. I could never have imagined my life turning out the way I did.”
Fox’s advice to students, in fact, is to never lose their passion, even if they choose something else to make money. For most people, life turns out differently from what they envisioned. Fox kept his interest in the trumpet, and his interest in history.
“Because I always applied myself 100% at what ended up being my profession, my success in my eventual chosen profession paved the way for me to stay engaged with other things,” he said.