Progressive Restaurants, Inc. is a 23 restaurant Taco Bell franchisee operating restaurants in Florida including Gainesville, Tallahassee, Ocala, Crystal River, Inverness, Belleview, St. Augustine and Palatka, opening our first restaurants in October, 1997. In July 2007, we acquired seven Taco Bells in the Miami area under PRI Miami LLC. Together, we form The Progressive Companies with a total of 30 restaurants.
We took great care in choosing our name – we wanted a name that would portray what we intended our organization to be – a company that would aggressively pursue its goals while always looking toward the future with an open mind and ensuring that we never take our focus off taking care of our most important asset – our people. The founding principal partners, Nick Davis and Bill Franklin had both begun their careers in Taco Bell Corporation Restaurant Operations and understand the challenges of operating great restaurants. Nick Davis purchased Bill's shares of the company in 2001, but our original vision statement of Becoming the Best Restaurant Operating Company in the World still stands as our goal today.
Upon Bill Franklin's departure, Bill King, a colleague of Nick Davis from Taco Bell Corporation, join the Progressive Restaurants team as Vice President Operations. He has had an impressive career of increasing responsibility and excellent financial and operational results. Bill's passion for excellence, attention to detail and people first mentality is a great fit. He has spent his first years in position aligning a team that has the same vision and will lead us in our planned growth – both in number of restaurants and people development.
In September, 2005 Betsy Guynn joined the team as our Human Resource Director to ensure that we are living our People First mentality. Betsy has proven herself as an indispensible and valuable member of the Executive Team. In January 2008, she became the Vice President of Human Resources, Training and Development. In addition to the traditional Human Resource role, Betsy will lead our Training and Development efforts to continue Building People Capability in our Company. Betsy has been busy formalizing our policies, leading her training team and setting the ground work for a great future.
As you can see, we are young aggressive company with high expectations for ourselves with clear goals for the future. We have amassed a talented team to lead The Progressive Companies in accomplishing our growth projections. Every member of the organization is viewed as a business partner; as we know that each role in the organization is extremely important to achieve the desired results. |
