Bo Knapp, founder of Perfect Delivery, knew more about accounting than pizzas when he opened his first Papa John’s restaurant off East North Street in Greenville.
“My son John was in third grade in 1992 when we started,” Knapp said. “He’s 39 now. When I turned 65, John became the CEO of the company.”
Today, Perfect Delivery owns 20 stores in the United States and serves as a master franchisee in Canada. The path to get here, however, has not always been a smooth one.
“I was working for PepsiCo in Japan,” Knapp said. “I was a CPA by trade, but I was doing a lot of due diligence work for them, and I got to know the restaurant and franchise.”
At the time, Pizza Hut, which was a PepsiCo subsidiary, was shifting its focus from “red roof,” dine-in locations to delivery services.
“When my kids were starting to get a little bit older, I wanted to come back to the states,” Knapp said. “All of Pizza Hut’s territories were already sold. But it just so happened Papa John’s was starting up at that time.”
An Arkansas native, he wanted to move somewhere close to home.
“I didn’t want to live anywhere but the South,” he said. “And Greenville is very attractive. The ocean’s not too far away. And the mountains are close, and there’s Greenville itself. The people are wonderful. The environment for raising a family is good.”
So, he bought the rights to Upstate South Carolina and Western North Carolina.
“This was right around when BMW announced that they were going to build here,” Knapp said. “Still, I can’t say that I knew Greenville was going to grow so much. But I had a big territory — a great geographical area — to develop, so I’d be able to open a lot of stores.”
Despite 10 years of professional experience, he was still new to restaurants and franchises. He learned a lot early on.
“When you go into business for yourself, you might know what you’re selling,” he said. “You open a clothing store because you know clothes. Or you open a tire store because you know tires.”
But that’s only a small percentage of running a business.
“You can be the best clothing buyer in the world,” he said, “but you’ve also got to learn how to handle insurance, banking, payroll and human resources. You’ve got to deal with all the different government rules and regulations. There are taxes, banking and finance. That’s what people don’t realize. That’s what I didn’t realize.”
Another early hurdle had to do with a lack of brand recognition.
“Back then, nobody knew what Papa John’s was,” he said. “So, we opened to very low sales for a long time. Then we won best pizza of the Upstate in the newspaper.”
Knapp acted fast.
“I sent everybody out on the street corners and passed out free slices of pizzas,” he said. “The slices were in boxes with our coupons attached. Our sales doubled overnight. After that, we held on.”
For the first four stores, Knapp was the only employee above store level.
“I had to do everything from sourcing orders to bookkeeping,” he said, “and it got to be too much.”
As the number of employees and stores grew, Knapp made a conscious effort to treat people fairly.
10 keys for operating
“Fairness is one of 10 keys to operating,” he says. “We make a point of trying to do the right thing by our employees.”
Fair treatment ranges from “praise in public, criticize in private” to rewarding employees who meet operational goals. The result has been a high level of employee retention.
“We just had a ceremony for Brandon Jackson,” Knapp said. “Brandon started with us when he was 15 making pizzas — he wasn’t even old enough to drive — and now he’s 40 and our director of operations.”
Company leaders like John Knapp and Jackson work in a different environment than Bo Knapp did back in the 1990s. From electric cash registers to GPS trackers for delivery drivers to online ordering, technology has changed drastically in the last three decades.
“We’ve got a whole raft of data that we never had before,” Knapp said. “We can tell how long a pizza takes from when it leaves the store. We can monitor our drivers’ speed or if they take corners too fast.”
This wealth of data drives efficiency, improves safety and lowers costs.
“John is really good with all this information,” Knapp said. “He’s a really smart guy. He went to Wofford and got his MBA at USC. And he knows the business because he’s been in (it) basically all his life. He’s doing really well.”
With John Knapp at the helm and long-term employees like Jackson overseeing operations, Bo Knapp has “stepped back into more of an advisory role,” confident that Perfect Delivery is in good hands.
Knapp’s Perfect Delivery
John Knapp shares his father’s commitment to community engagement. Perfect Delivery employs three public relations specialists whose primary job is coordinating fundraisers with schools, churches and sports teams.
“Last year, we donated more than 130,000 free pizzas to students in the Upstate and Western North Carolina to reward perfect attendance and academic success,” says Knapp.
For more than a decade, Perfect Delivery has been the primary sponsor of the Papa John’s Mutt Strut, a 2-mile walk (or run) through downtown Greenville. The event raised more than $75,000 for the Greenville Humane Society in 2023 alone.
“We also give a free pizza dinner for every dog that gets adopted from the Greenville Humane Society,” Knapp says.
