Bruce Reed’s career has a certain circularity to it. Thirty-two years ago, he took over his family’s carhop restaurant near Pittsburgh after being expelled from the eleventh grade. “I got kicked out for being the class clown,” he explains. “I never went back. I never had much interest in school.” After a stint spent flipping burgers (or, at least, overseeing their flipping), Reed turned his attentions to the ice cream business, spending the next 15 years building Bruster’s Real Ice Cream into the 200-unit company it is today. Then he did something few ever do�returned to his roots. In Reed’s case that meant burgers and carhops and his family business, Jerry’s Curb Service. Today his Jerry’s Curb Service stands poised to march from one unit with two more under construction, as of press time, to as many as eight new restaurants over the next 12 months. “We’re going from Maryland to Georgia, kind of the central East Coast over to Tennessee,” promises Reed. But “ultimately,” he says, “it will be a nationwide concept. We’re going to go slow and do it right.” And doing it right means employing what Reed believes is his ace in hole. To make his 1950s-styled concept attractive to would-be franchisees, Reed is employing a decidedly twenty-first century tool�a Palm Pilot. “We started with the handheld technology a year ago,” he explains, “and now the carhops take an order, zap it to the kitchen, then go on to the next car.” As a result, Jerry’s Curb Service is sending out fresh-cooked meals in six minutes where it once took 15. “It’s the handheld technology,” he asserts, “that really makes us franchisable.” Franchising was not something Reed’s father, the Jerry of Jerry’s Curb Service, ever considered when he returned to Oklahoma after a stint in the Air Force and started Jerry’s Curb Service in 1947. “There were quite a few drive-ins back then,” Reed says, “and when he got out of the Air Force, he decided to open one in his home town.” The restaurant held its own almost from the beginning, helped in part, according to Reed, by Jerry’s 1967 invention of the steak salad. “Dad used to sell steak sandwiches,” Reed recalls, “and one day a friend who was trying to lose weight asked him to chop up a steak and serve it with no bun. He also ordered a salad. Dad, as a joke, just chopped up the steak and put it on top of the salad. People liked it and started ordering it, and it went big time.” Even today, according to Reed, in addition to the usual fare of hamburgers, fresh-cut French fries, milk shakes, and vanilla cokes, about 37 percent of the drive-in’s sales come from salads. “I don’t know why,” Reed says, “people just like ’em.” Reed took over Jerry’s in the early ’70s after a disagreement between father and son over business strategies ended with Jerry bowing out. “We were two different types of business people,” Reed explains. “Dad was a really great guy, and he gave everything away. If you wore a uniform, for instance, you ate for free. I didn’t think it was run like a business, so I told him it was either him or me. He said to go ahead and take it over.” For a time, the younger Reed stayed the course his father had charted. Then, in 1989, he opened an ice cream parlor called Bruster’s next door, and a strange phenomenon occurred. Sales at Jerry’s jumped 21 percent the first year, and another 17 percent the second. The third year, Reed tore the old 600-square-foot Jerry’s down, rebuilt it to 1,400-square-feet, and sales more than doubled. “I think Bruster’s increased traffic,” he says. “You’re standing there with an ice cream cone smelling fresh French fries from next door, or vice versa: I think they played off each other really well.” After turning the day-to-day operation of Jerry’s over to an associate, he spent the next several years building Bruster’s into a 200-store chain. “That’s how I learned franchising,” Reed says. With 65 Bruster’s under construction and another 165 in the planning stages, Reed is ready to turn his attention to remaking the drive-in of his youth. Two new stores are already under construction in Spartanburg, South Carolina and Glen Burney, Maryland. Each is expected to open in early 2005. After that, according to Reed, the sky is the limit. “Our model is Sonic,” he says, “and they have 2,800 units.” All that without even Palm Pilots.
Jerry’s Curb Service CEO: Dave Guido HQ: Beaver, Penn. Year Started: 1947 Annual Sales: $1.2 million Total Units: 1 Franchise Units: 0
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