Editors note: The original Pizza Hut opened in 1958 and now sits on the campus at WSU, where Frank Carney was once a student. (New York Times Photo). Bob Geist, East High ’59 and a Pizza Hut franchisee, is quoted in the article below. Send us your Original Pizza Hut stories, and we will add them here.
Pizza Hut co-founder Frank Carney, a disciplined business giant, dies at 82
By Carrie Rengers, Wichita Eagle, December 2, 2020
Wichita, a city that prides itself on its entrepreneurial spirit, has lost a business giant who embodied that ideal.
Frank Carney, who with his brother Dan, started the Pizza Hut empire in 1958 in a tiny former beer joint at Kellogg and Bluff, died Wednesday from pneumonia. Carney’s wife, Janie, confirmed his 4:30 a.m. death — the same time she said he always used to set his alarm when he had a morning flight, regardless what time he was leaving.
The 82-year-old had recently recovered from COVID-19, but he also had Alzheimer’s disease for more than a decade, and pneumonia is common in Alzheimer’s patients. The disease was a particularly cruel fate for someone who had taken exceptional care of his body.
“He is the most disciplined person I ever met, whether it was . . . exercising his body or his mind,” said Bill Walsh, president of Daland Corp., a large Wichita-based Pizza Hut franchise group.
Dan Carney offered the same assessment of his brother. “When he decided he was going to do something, he just . . . went after it.”
Frank Carney was 19 and a student at Wichita State University — his brother was 26 and getting his MBA there — when they borrowed $600 from their mother to start a pizza business at the suggestion of the landlord at the beer joint near their family’s Carney’s Market.
“When you are starting a business that’s going to pay your way through college, you don’t even think about what the economy is doing,” Frank Carney said at a 1992 entrepreneurship conference at WSU, which was reported in The Eagle.
“We didn’t care about who was in the White House or what the unemployment rate was. The entrepreneur, all he thinks about is: Is there a market for the product? Can I sell it?”
Carney’s advice at the conference was to find a niche and then focus, a lesson he learned a costly way as he became a serial entrepreneur.
A SERIAL ENTREPRENEUR
Between selling Pizza Hut to PepsiCo for $300 million in 1977 and famously becoming a Papa John’s Pizza franchisee in the 1990’s — “Sorry guys: I found a better pizza,” he said in a national commercial — Carney had all kinds of other ventures. Only five of about 20 of the companies made him money, which his brother said is actually not a bad average.
“He probably lost most of what he had made in Pizza Hut,” Dan Carney said. “He was not depressed. He was just aggressive to build something different.”
Carney was involved in other food companies, such as Western Sizzlin, along with real estate, oil and gas, automotive, rental and recreational businesses before deciding to narrow his focus again.
“I woke up one day in 1988 with about 28 different things I was doing,” he told The Eagle in 1997. “That’s not my comfort level. That’s not where I do my best work.”
Carney’s soft-spoken style sometimes belied a steely resolve.
When PepsiCo decided to move the Pizza Hut headquarters from Wichita to Dallas — a decision, among many the corporation made, that Carney thought was a mistake — it helped solidify his own decision to take the Wichita Papa John’s market and compete against his friends and former business associates.
“I called Papa John’s and said, ‘I want Wichita. Let’s do it,’ ” he told The Eagle. Carney became one of the largest Papa John’s franchisees and kept working until Alzheimer’s struck.
“Work is a life force — an essential life force,” he once said.
“He just was business from the time he woke up in the morning to the time he went to bed at night,” said Ken Miller, a Daland partner who first went to work for Pizza Hut in 1969.
He said Carney didn’t have a big sense of humor. Instead, he studied a lot and was “no nonsense, just give me the facts and let’s get on down the road.”
Carney was not only educated but an educator, Miller said, and took “every chance he got to send us off to some school.”
Bill Warren said Carney was as much a mentor to him as a partner. A 19-year-old Warren, working as a manager at the Orpheum Theatre, read about Pizza Hut and — without knowing better, he said — called Carney when he wanted to get into the theater business.
“I said, ‘I would like to speak to Mr. Carney,’ and they said, ‘Which one?’ ”
Warren was caught off guard. “I said, ‘Which one’s the president? They said, ‘Frank Carney.’ I said, ‘I’ll talk to him.’
“Luckily, Frank’s secretary was on vacation, and if it wasn’t for that, I would still be waiting to get through.”
Warren discussed his idea for smaller theaters with Carney. When they met in person and Carney suggested Warren get information about a potential site, Warren had it within a couple of hours, and Carney laughed at his eagerness. Thirty days later, the two had a partnership.
In addition to being “a brilliant businessman,” Warren said Carney taught him what it means to have integrity in business. He said Carney was known for always saying, “The appearance of a conflict of interest is as bad as a conflict of interest.”
Carney also taught Warren to not worry about competitors, only customers, and “the rest will take care of itself.”
“It was like having a big brother,” Warren said. “It was the luckiest thing going.”
LOOKING THE PART
In addition to being driven, Walsh said Carney wanted to look the part, too. “He was not going to look tired or act tired.”
Once, they were in a tedious meeting with some Wall Street analysts, and Carney was struggling to stay awake. To keep alert, Walsh said Carney “was just digging his fingernail into his other hand, and all of a sudden, he started bleeding. Now that’s discipline.”
While Dan Carney hated meetings so much he’d take away people’s chairs so they wouldn’t overstay, Frank Carney liked them, said Pizza Hut franchisee Bob Geist. “He was a great planner. A long-term planner…. He’s famous for his five-year plans.”
Carney also ran triathlons and raced cars. He preferred particularly rare fish to pizza, though when he did order it he liked ham, pineapple and jalapeno.
In the early days of Pizza Hut, one of his specialties was scouting Pizza Hut sites and attracting franchisees. Former Sullivan Higdon & Sink advertising executive Al Higdon remembers rooming with Carney during Kansas Air National Guard camps two summers in a row in Georgia and Wisconsin. Higdon said most people flew to the camps. “Frank, instead, charted a course and drove it the whole way.”
He took the opportunity to recruit Pizza Hut franchisees along the route.
Higdon said he remembers the Carney brothers “were scrambling” for franchisees, and Frank Carney “had a good track record of signing them up” before arriving at camp, putting on his uniform and being a soldier again.
“I think it’s emblematic of his work ethic and what it takes to be an entrepreneur.”
Entrepreneurship was so tempting to Carney, and so many people eventually approached him with possible deals that he quit looking, Warren said. “ ‘If you took a look at it, you just might like it,’ ” Warren remembers one person saying, “and Frank said, ‘That’s what I’m afraid of.”
SERIOUS BUT WITTY
Carney was so serious that some friends who were discussing how to eulogize him said they couldn’t come up with any wild tales of crazy times with their friend. “We couldn’t think of anything,” Geist said.
“He was not a guy fooling around,” Walsh said.
Warren takes exception to comments about Carney’s humor and personality, though he acknowledged his relationship with him may have been different than most. “He had a very good Irish sense of humor when he wanted to show it, let’s put it that way.”
Janie Carney said many people thought of her husband as serious, but she said his wit is what attracted her — and that he was a fellow smart aleck.
“We laughed a lot,” she said. “He could tell me more about myself than I could. . . . There was a sense of trust that he emitted that I could allow my soul to be in his care.”
Carney said her husband had a deep caring for others, such as former Gov. Jeff Colyer, who as a 12-year-old sought stock advice from Frank Carney — advice that ended up paying for most of his education.
Janie Carney said her husband used to visit his restaurants in work clothes instead of suits and ties and was prepared to work when he arrived, such as cleaning a bathroom while stunned employees asked what he was doing.
“That’s Frank.”
She said she knew he’d have the same attitude with the Alzheimer’s research he participated in. “You get in and swim with it because if you don’t get in, you can’t help anybody.”
Geist said Carney had many great qualities. “He was a very gracious man and a dear, dear friend,” he said, “One of the most honorable businessmen I ever knew in my life.”
Business made him happy, Carney once told The Eagle, and he appreciated his life.
“I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”
