Solos Pizza Cafe: Speedy success

For nearly half a century, Bruce Thomson has been afflicted with the entrepreneur's bug, a malady that has produced a string of prominent businesses ranging from the the Proex photo chain to the Title Wave music and video stores to the Archiver's chain of scrapbooking superstores.

But it's a recent failure -- a business he said turned out to be "lousy" -- that generated Thomson's latest entrepreneurial exertion.

Five years ago, when I last caught up with him, Thomson was intent on challenging Papa Murphy in the take-and-bake pizza business with four Leonardo's stores across the metro area. Whereupon, Papa promptly took the brash intruder to the woodshed.

"I thought we could beat Papa Murphy with higher-quality gourmet pizzas, better service and more effective marketing," said Thomson, 75. "I wasn't as smart as I thought I was."

Maybe. But he's no quitter, either -- and the Leonardo's experience left him with the notion that "pizza is probably the most popular restaurant food" and the conviction that "there has to be a niche for us" somewhere in the business.

He figures he's found that niche in what's called the "fast/casual" category, which offers fast service in a more upscale atmosphere and with a higher-quality product than the conventional fast-food outlet.

The result is Solos Pizza Cafe Inc., a Minnetonka company that offers both gourmet "signature" pizzas and make-your-own pies at two stores in Maple Grove and Plymouth.

"I saw fast/casual working at Chipotle, Panera and Noodles, and I thought it could work for pizza," Thomson said.

He might be right: The company's first store, opened early in 2007, grossed $575,000 in its first 12 months and is running better than 30 percent ahead of year-earlier sales so far in 2008. That puts it on track to top the $60,000-a-month goal that Thomson and partners John Osterberg and Brian Banick had set for the business.

Even more encouraging, a store that opened in Plymouth in June has gotten off to an even faster start, Thomson said.

It hasn't been as easy as it sounds: It took nine months to put all the elements together, including the search for a fast-serve oven that ended with a specialty manufacturer in Chicago and testing of about 40 dough recipes to find the right crust for the system.

The result is a menu of 11 10-inch gourmet pizzas ranging from the Big Tony (marinara sauce, pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, green peppers, onions, basil and oregano) to the Squawker (BBQ sauce, chicken, smoked bacon, onion and green peppers) to the B.L.T. (white garlic sauce, tomatoes, spinach and smoked bacon). The tab: $7.25.

If Solos thrives, it will join a long list of successful startups in which Thomson was a key player, the first being Pemtom, a housing developer that built more than 6,000 homes in the metro area in the 1960s and 1970s and grew to a peak of $15 million in annual sales before he turned it over to a partner.

That was followed by several franchised Burger King stores that he sold for nearly $1 million in the late 1970s; a major investment in the Title Wave chain, which he and his partners sold in 1995 for $18 million; and the Proex photo shops, which he started in 1981, built to $20 million in sales and sold in 1992 for $24 million.

Not to mention the burgeoning Archiver's chain, which he and longtime business partner Jann Olsten started in 2000 and grew to 45 stores and 2007 sales of $61 million. Thomson also owns Application Developers Training Co., a Minneapolis firm that trains software developers and is on track to gross $10 million this year.

All of which does not mean that Thomson is batting 1.000 in the start-up game. His investment duds have included a Stillwater store that sold railroad art, a publisher of martial arts books, several ill-fated electronic and medical device brainstorms and a Chicago health club for women that he opened 20 years before the Curves chain finally proved the viability of the niche.

It's a lineup he figures cost him $5 million over the years.

The way he figures it, the nearly $2 million the Leonardo's debacle cost him and the $1.2 million that went into starting Solos have given him a fairly deep understanding of the pizza business.