MEET THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE BRANDS
American Dream By Christina Huang
V
arol Ablak is founder and CEO of Ablak Holdings. He started out with Vocelli Pizza in 1988. Since then the company has grown exponentially and now comprises six main brands, Vocelli Pizza, Rock 'n' Joe Coffee, Sincerely Yogurt, V3 Flatbread Pizza, Zing Basket and his most recent acquisition, Tulumba.com, an online Turkish grocery store.
Can you tell us about yourself? How did you get started?
I was born in Turkey. I came to the US at the age of nine. I went to high school in the Pittsburgh area. My father was a mining engineer. We were constantly on the move with his different jobs. By the time I hit 9th grade, we had moved six times to three different countries. I saw firsthand how people could be at the mercy of their employment. This made me very determined to be in
control of my own destiny. I always wanted to have my own business. I studied industrial engineering in college. After college I found myself down south in New Orleans. I took a job at a place called Sicilian Pizza as a dishwasher just to earn some money while I was trying to figure out my life. I fell in love with the whole subculture of the restaurant industry. Within three years, I had purchased a franchise from the company. I was always intrigued by the business world. I pored over company’s annual reports. I read Fortune and Forbes magazines. It doesn’t matter whether you are making pizzas, shoes, or iPhones; the basics of business are the same. You are concerned with balance sheets, profit and loss statements, and HR issues. Very quickly, I bought a second franchise with my father. Sometime later, we sold both of those stores and moved back up to Pittsburgh.
How did you come up with the Vocelli concept?
After I came back up to Pittsburgh, I wanted to create a delivery concept. I worked on the recipes, and found a location. I went to the distributors to find the best ingredients. It was key early on to get that right. I wanted to make sure that the product was excellent. We wanted to come up with a product line something similar to 18 FRANCHISE CONNECT | NOV-DEC 2019
