Thompson has come a long way since he took his first restaurant job as an assistant manager at a Roy Rogers in Sterling after receiving his master's degree in business administration from the University of Virginia. ...
But Warren Thompson's original plan for his company didn't include a food service division. The 38-year-old Windsor, Va., native set out to create a restaurant empire. With the blessings and financial support of his former bosses at Marriott Corp., Thompson bought 31 Bob's Big Boy restaurants from Marriott for $13.1 million in 1992. It was quite a leap for Thompson, whose last job at Marriott was managing the company's food service operations on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Nobody doubted Thompson's ability. "I expected him to be successful," said Richard Marriott, chairman of Host Marriott Corp. "We loaned him a lot of money so that he could get these restaurants up and operating. We had faith in him that he would succeed."
The deal was financed by Marriott and Shoney's Inc., owner of family-style restaurants by the same name.
Over the next two years, Thompson set out to convert all the Bob's restaurants into Shoney's. He figured the area's consumers would jump at a chance to buy the inexpensive Southern-style food served at Shoney's. But waning consumer demand for bargain family restaurants, coupled with the Blizzard of '93 that shut down the East Coast for a week, produced dismal sales at the new Shoney's restaurants.
With hardly any cash on hand and major banks refusing to refinance some of the debt incurred in buying the Bob's restaurants, Thompson said he realized that "we needed to move up our plan to diversify" much sooner than anticipated.
He sold off 11 of the least profitable restaurants, but at this moment of financial crisis, Thompson first got lucky, then proved to be very good -- at the food service business. His break came when the vice president of finance at Baltimore City Community College called to see if the company would take over management of its cafeteria, only a few days after the college fired the former operator.
Then, he called his father's alma mater, St. Paul's College in Lawrenceville, Va., in search of more work. He begged the president to allow Thompson Hospitality to bid for the food service contract even though St. Paul's was about to offer the work to another firm. Thompson got the job.
