Your Pie Pizza’s Efrem Yates Reveals How He’s Improvising During COVID-19

The coronavirus pandemic has forced many to improvise in life, finances and in business.

Meet Efrem Yates, a Your Pie franchisee in Cary, North Carolina.

A native of Kinston, NC, in the coming months, Yates will open nine additional Your Pie franchises in the Triangle.

On a recent episode of the Scoop B Radio Podcast,Yates discussed how he’s managing his business during the coronavirus & tons more.

Check out a snippet from our dialogue below:

Efrem Yates on how he’s managing during this COVID-19:
“First of all, just managing it a day at a time. I think if you ask any leader and they pretend they have all the answers, they’re just lying. We’re all figuring this out with the best information that we have and so, I feel like my job as a leader is just to take all the information and make the best choice I can and I’m being very transparent with my team, watching the news outlets and paying attention on social media, Twitter…you in general just trying to read through this, right? You never really know the decision is the perfect decision, but you have to be able to live with the outcome and be able to communicate with your team and you have to let them know most importantly in a situation like this, that everybody is a little bit fearful and everybody is a little bit on edge, you just tell them that the first priority is to keep them safe and their families safe and then our customers safe and that’s the three things that are guiding our decisions that I’m making personally.”

Efrem Yates on franchising Your Pie Pizza:

“It’s interesting. What I found out is that I – to give you a little context, I’ve been interested in franchising for probably 7 or 8 years now. And probably the last 5 or 6 years, I have been very intentional about researching different brands and different concepts for one reason or another, that opportunity just didn’t work out. There were some brands – you know, the concept was good but maybe they didn’t have the territory or availability that I wanted, so I felt that I would be pigeonholed or they’re restricting the terms in the way I could roll, but there were other brands that were like, it seems good but I just don’t get that feeling that they’re really sold on me or that they’re really invested into what I offer in terms of diversity; in my diverse background and experience and what I can bring to the table. So you know, there were certain opportunities that I passed on and didn’t go further because of that reason just feeling that, ‘I don’t want to be begging you for my money’ so, in that regard but then, Your Pie was very much different. From my very first email, they were very much welcoming and very much like – the follow up was there, they were very transparent and they let me talk to as many existing franchisees that I wanted to. I probably talked to about eight franchisees and had hour long conversations and I was even able to reach out to a few former franchisees and they were very open. And that for me, after sort of doing that due diligence and then actually flying down to meet with the leadership team in person, and visiting the stores, for me it just right. The financials were there in terms of making sense and I just felt that they would be a really good partner, and the final piece was Your Pie was relatively –North Carolina was relatively an untapped territory for Your Pie. So selfishly, that gave me a chance to say, “Oh. I can grow with this brand. Know one really knows about it. They’re already killing it in the Southeast in Atlanta and in the surrounding towns. Let’s bring this to North Carolina and really expand it and grow with the brand.” And so, honestly this has just been so far, a fairly good relationship.”