Young Ones to Watch: Mac Malchow

Malchow has been working in restaurants since he was 15 years old, holding both front of the house and back of the house positions through high school and early college. Shortly after turning 21 years old, he got a job as a delivery driver for Toppers Pizza, working for a franchisee in La Crosse, WI. It started as a way to earn money to pay the bills, but transformed into an incredibly exciting career!

Near the end of his time in college, he started executing some local store marketing for the franchisee’s two locations and that’s when he really started falling in love with the Toppers Pizza brand and culture. After college he was lucky enough to be given an opportunity in the marketing department at the Toppers Pizza World Headquarters, starting as a Field Marketing Coordinator for the company. Over the next two years, he personally opened 20 new Toppers Pizza locations in cities like Chicago, Lincoln, Fort Worth, and Minneapolis.

He has watched the company triple in size since he first came on board 5 years ago, ballooning to 73 locations and counting. Now, as the Director of Field Marketing, he helps train new franchisees on how to use tools and resources to plan their grand openings, as well as, best practices for allocating advertising funds. He leads a team of three Field Marketing Coordinators who spend the majority of their time in the field working next to managers and team members at Toppers locations.

He also works in the franchise development department, helping lead new candidates through the discovery process. He is the youngest member of the Toppers Pizza Leadership Team.

I love the excitement of franchising. When you work at a company like Toppers Pizza, it’s exhilarating. You’re able to interact with different business owners across the country, each with their own goals and aspirations in mind.

It’s thrilling to walk a franchisee through the process between signing a franchise agreement to clicking the open sign on to a crowd of Toppers Fanatics! It’s a lot of work, but the feeling of accomplishment is incredible. Then you get to turn around and do it all over again – it’s terrific!

Franchising is built around growth and scalability. I can’t imagine working for a company that’s flat-footed and not growing. It would be so boring.

Businesses that are following the franchise model move a 100 miles an hour. Expectations are high. That’s just the nature of the business. Sometimes young people can get bogged down by wanting to know every single detail of how something should be accomplished, especially if it’s uncharted territory for them. It’s important to not let details hold you back. Take the first step. It’s the most important.

Does “Official Pizza Taster” exist yet? No? Well it should, and when it does I want to be the first to apply. In the meantime, I’ll have to keep working towards someday being the President of the Best Pizza Company in the World. Toppers Pizza.