A business that began with one person in mind
The origin story does not begin with a market-sizing exercise. Jeff Perera lost his job, his wife Danielle returned to work, and finding a good bagel still required a long drive. She suggested he learn to make one for her. He took the assignment seriously.
Speaking with Beck and Chad at the Restaurant Franchising Innovation Summit, Perera describes becoming absorbed in getting that bagel right. Other people liked the result. What began in the family kitchen eventually became Jeff’s Bagel Run, with shops and franchise partners carrying the idea into new communities.
He calls it a love story. That description matters because it identifies a specific person and a specific experience behind the business. The original goal was not simply to sell breakfast. It was to make something Danielle would genuinely enjoy.
The challenge of growth is preserving that level of care when the founder is no longer making every product or greeting every customer. Much of the interview concerns the systems and relationships needed to do exactly that.
The toaster is not the strategy
Perera is firm about not toasting the bagels. His explanation centers on baking throughout the day and serving a product whose texture does not need another pass through the heat. The position is memorable, but the operating model gives it substance.
He describes starting with a small morning bake and continuing production close to demand. In-house forecasting tools help guide the bakers. The technology serves a physical promise: a customer should encounter a freshly made product, not merely a sign announcing freshness.
That helps explain an unusual early hiring choice. Perera says software engineers were among the first people brought into the growing business. The company developed its own ordering app, point-of-sale and kitchen display tools around its requirements.
There is no universal instruction here to build your own POS. The more useful lesson is to identify the part of the experience that cannot be compromised, then decide what operations and technology must do to protect it. For this business, the bagel leads the discussion. The systems have to keep up.
The second store exposes what the first one hides
Perera’s account of opening a second location is more revealing than a smooth expansion story would be. In the first shop, he and Danielle combined different strengths in the same room. When they split those strengths between stores, the teams and results began to differ.
What worked as an intuitive partnership became harder to reproduce across locations. The experience was demanding both professionally and personally. He describes it as one of the most difficult stages of the business, even though the lessons helped with later growth.
That is a useful warning for founders. A successful location may depend on knowledge and habits that have never been written down because the right people are always nearby. Opening another location reveals those dependencies quickly.
The question before expansion is therefore not only whether the product sells. It is whether the team understands how the good result happens. Which decisions require judgment? Which responsibilities belong to whom? What disappears when one of the founders is no longer standing there?
Your shortcuts can become someone else’s instructions
Perera describes another adjustment: recognizing how much weight his behavior carries. A casual shortcut from the founder can be copied until it becomes the unofficial procedure. A remark can become part of the culture whether or not it was intended as guidance.
He applies the same observation to franchise owners. An owner who arrives mainly to criticize creates a different workplace from one who asks how to support the team. The effect reaches beyond employees to the customers they serve.
Franchise selection, in his account, begins with people who want to operate the business and participate in their community. Training, coaching and continued investment matter alongside recipes and procedures. Community involvement can include supporting schools, but it can also be as simple as making the shop a welcoming place to meet.
That brings the conversation back to the first bagel. A clear product promise is powerful, but it travels through people. Growth requires making the reasons behind the work understandable enough that someone else can carry them into a different neighborhood, on a difficult morning, when the founder is nowhere nearby.
