Our project on Blaze Pizza for Cal Poly Entrepreneur’s The Intrepid was a great professional learning experience that we can translate into our future careers. My group and I were tasked with telling the story of the popular “build your own” pizza joint and how its success has taken it from a small shop in Irvine to an ever-expanding franchise.
“The big gap was the world didn’t need another pizza place, but the world needed pizza for lunch,” said Jim Mizes.
Our team had the honor of interviewing, Jim Mizes, one of the most influential people in Blaze’s rise to fame and fortune. With an extensive history in the food industry, working with fast-food giants such as Jamba Juice, Noah’s Bagels, Free Bird, and Starbucks, Mizes has had a hand in the success of many well-known franchises.
“I enjoyed learning about Jim’s career and his passion for growing businesses and mentoring others,” said Amanda Rondez.
When the story was assigned to my team, we found ourselves in a creative rut, trying to find the best angle to illustrate how great of a company Blaze is. Before the interview, we all researched the former CEO, and the company as a whole, first by doing a simple search for the company then delving deeper into articles as well as social media postings.
Our search results were interesting, first, we found that there wasn’t much about the company other than the new products being introduced in-store, but then the social media postings about the company revealed a fascinating trend. Many Blaze locations are used for fundraisers for various clubs and organizations, so the company can give back to their communities.
“Learning about entrepreneurship as an algorithm and seeing how someone can repeat a successful business model has changed how I view the business world,” said Sophie Baye.
The interview with Mizes went swimmingly, and we learned so much about the company as well as the values it holds. The abundant information from the interview helped us to continue the work of the story, as well as, gain a better grasp of the background of Blaze.
“I found it fascinating to learn about how Jim was able to have such a successful career with the help of networking,” said Grant Anderson.
After we had finished the Zoom interview, we went back to listen to the audio to pull compelling quotes to best illustrate Blaze. Once all the information was gathered, we outlined the story and produced a rough draft, which was then finalized for publication.
Altogether the story was a lot of fun to write, we learned so much about the company and one of its greatest leaders. We hope that our story can be influential to entrepreneurs as well as illustrate the lessons that can be learned from the company and its former CEO.