Airport Experience® News - ACDBE & Small Business Issue 2024

Right: Buffalo Wild Wings has become PhaseNext Hospitality’s core brand, with the company currently running locations at ATL, DFW and MSP, with a Buffalo Wild Wings GO currently under construction at BOS.

PATIENCE AND PERSEVERANCE PAYS OFF Roz Mallet, President and CEO of PhaseNext Hospitality, Is Proof Of It

BY SALLY KRAL

In her own words, Roz Mallet is a “recovering corporate geek,” having held leadership positions for such sizable restaurant companies as Carlson Companies , owner of the T.G.I. Friday’s franchise, La Madeleine de Corps and Caribou Coffee Co. “I loved working with franchisees and I really enjoyed the idea of creating brands,” she says. “I have a great passion for the restaurant industry.” This passion led Mallet to strike out on her own. “I had been in Minneapolis with Caribou for two years as CEO and I was ready to move back home to Dallas,” she says. She knew she didn’t want to do corporate again and she wanted more control over where she lived. “I had been in and out of Dallas most of my career – I’ve owned a home here for 27 years, but I’ve only lived in it for about 16 or 17 years of that because my corporate jobs would take me to other places.” Given her experience working with franchisees over the years, and at the encouragement of mentors, Mallet decided that becoming a franchisee was the best option for her to have the control over her decision-making that she was seeking. “And so becoming an entrepreneur was a fairly easy decision,” she says.

But this was toward the end of 2008, and the recession was raging on, which is what led Mallet to set her sights on the non-traditional space. “When I was at Caribou, we had closed over 60 restaurants in the previous year; it was very challenging,” she explains. “I was looking for something that had a little protection from recessions.” She wanted to enter the airport space, but as she learned more about the landscape, she determined she wasn’t interested in entering into joint ventures with prime concessionaires. Rather, she wanted to be a subtenant with the ultimate goal of being a tenant in her own right some day. But she also knew that this would require building up a reputation for her newly created company, PhaseNext Hospitality. “So, I started on a military base, Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, with Buffalo Wild Wings, a brand I had a connection with thanks to my time spent as an officer of the National Restaurant Association alongside fellow officer Sally Smith, who was the CEO of Buffalo Wild Wings at the time, as well as a Smashburger,” Mallet says. “I really wanted to find a way to gain enough credibility so that I could convince the primes that

Above: Roz Mallet, president and CEO of PhaseNext Hospitality.

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AX NEWS JULY/AUGUST 2024