Joey Restaurant Group president Al Jessa surveys Vancouver from his ninth-floor corner office at Bentall Centre 1 and reveals that he considers the city to have the toughest dining scene in Canada.
“Look at the density of housing in Vancouver, particularly downtown Vancouver – there’s no downtown like it,” he said. “I don’t want to dis the guys out east, but I find it a lot easier to compete in Ontario or even Alberta.”
Vancouver’s density drives demand for restaurants, but its population and its tourists are more discerning, Jessa said, which means if you’re not a great operator you won’t last long.
That forces everyone to step up their game. This includes “formidable competitors” such as the Glowbal Group or Tap & Barrel, Jessa said.
Add stiff competition Cactus Club Cafe, which bases 17 of its 29 restaurants in Metro Vancouver, and Earls Kitchen + Bar, which has 13 of its 65 restaurants in the Lower Mainland, and there is a saturation of quality upscale casual restaurants in the region, according to Jessa.
Though Joey and Earls are owned by the same family, Jessa never had plans to follow Earls’ now-modified decision to forego Canadian beef and switch exclusively to U.S. beef that is certified to be humane.
Competition is so fierce in Metro Vancouver that he bases only six of the 38 restaurants that he oversees in the Lower Mainland.
Easier competition outside B.C. prompted the company to recently open a restaurant in Ottawa and to prepare for an opening in Edmonton in late summer.
All of Jessa’s restaurants are not branded Joey, however.
In addition to 27 Joey restaurants, Jessa oversees nine Local Public Eateries, including one in Kitsilano, and two Saltlik restaurants in Alberta.
Expansion is starting to slow after a torrent of growth during the past dozen years.
Jessa, who has been at Joey for 20 years, recalled that in 2003, the company had 10 restaurants and had experienced no growth for years.
By 2005, he and other executives put together a growth plan and, by 2010, Joey had more than doubled in size to 22 locations.
“I haven’t set a goal for how many restaurants we will have in another five years, but I do have a sales target,” he said. “We went from $46 million in sales to $100 million in sales in five years. The next five years we went to more than $200 million. It wouldn’t be too foreign for us to hit $500 million in sales by 2020.”
Profits are in the healthy 25% range, which is much higher than the industry average.
Jessa revealed that he is part of a profit-sharing system, along with 43 other executives or store managers. Each put up a minimum of $50,000 and the average investment is about $85,000.
“The program is designed to return 25%,” Jessa said. “If the company maintains its EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization] and profit, after four years you will get back your full investment.”
Although Jessa was promoted to be the company’s president earlier this year, his job is much the same as it has been since 2013, when he became vice-president of operations.
His career trajectory started at the bottom.
He was 22 years old. It was 1988, and he got a summer job at an Earls restaurant in Calgary, near his family’s home in Airdrie. Jessa quickly moved up to be a prep cook, line cook, sous chef and then a chef.
He liked the work so much that he recommended it to his twin brother, Mo Jessa, who has similarly climbed the corporate ladder and is now the president of Earls.
(Click here to read a Business in Vancouver profile of Mo Jessa)
Jessa moved to Vancouver to be a chef in the Earls chain’s test kitchen, and he ran it efficiently enough to be given a big promotion a couple of years later.
Earls owner Stan Fuller wanted to “turbocharge” his kitchens’ quality and decided that he would introduce a system where he would have regional chefs who were responsible for about eight restaurants, Jessa remembered.
The rationale, he said, was that if someone could operate one kitchen well, he or she should be training others and overseeing many kitchens to ensure that all had an efficient system.
Jessa’s jump to Joey came a few years later, in 1996.
Both Earls and Joey were, and are, owned by the Fuller family. That includes patriarch Bus Fuller as well as brothers Stan, Jeff, Clay and Stewart.
All have different-sized ownership stakes in each of the family's ventures with the primary operator having a larger stake. Stan Fuller was and is CEO of Earls while Jeff Fuller was and is CEO of Joeys.
“There was a shortage of people to develop the Joey brand so the brothers came together and asked, ‘How do we grow and use the whole talent pool in the company to facilitate that growth?’” Jessa said.
The brothers profess to compete with each other, and both the Earls and Joey divisions report separately, but Jessa said decisions that are good for the family’s holdings overall trump those that benefit only one chain.
So the brothers decided that Jessa’s expertise would have a bigger impact at Joey, and he was willing to become an executive chef at Joey.
“Al is a real enthusiast who is extremely passionate,” Stan Fuller told Business in Vancouver. “He loves what he does, and he carries that passion through to his people.”
Jessa admits that motivating people is one of his great passions.
He went through Landmark Worldwide’s program in 2003 and it inspired him so much that he now volunteers once a week to be a Landmark seminar leader.
Some of the rest of his time is taken up with his wife, Neeti Jessa, or taking his 13-year-old son, Deven Jessa, to play soccer games in Burnaby.
“If we had the choice to go to the Whitecaps games or to watch Arsenal on TV, we watch Arsenal,” Jessa said with a laugh. “That’s our favourite team.”
Jessa’s 16-year-old daughter, Ariana Jessa, won acceptance at Wales’ prestigious – and, he admits, “expensive” – UWC Atlantic College, which hosts students from many different countries.
Born in Tanzania, Jessa learned the value of education early on.
His father, Sultan Jessa, owned a gas station. There was also a general store in the family.
But it was the 1970s and, like neighbouring Uganda, Tanzania was descending into violence.
His father wanted to escape that danger, Jessa said.
“Another motivating factor was that there was a limit to how well you could educate your kids. He thought, ‘If I’m going to set my kids up, I’m going to have to send them away.’
So his first two kids – my two older brothers – went to school in England.
“That was one way to do it. The other way to do it was to get out. So, that’s why we came to Canada.” •
