5 Moves Nadeem Bajwa Made on the Way to 276 Papa John's (And what a two-location operator can copy)

Nadeem Bajwa reached 276 Papa John's by planning for the hell zone, building a right hand in every store, and bringing his back office in house.

Nadeem Bajwa is billed at Workstream's On the Clock 2026 as Co-Founder and CEO of Bajco Group / Papa John's. He arrived in the United States from Pakistan at 21 and started out washing dishes, then delivering pizzas. He co-founded Bajco Group with his two brothers in 2002. The group is now the largest Papa John's franchisee in North America, and it also owns a call center, an accounting business, a construction arm and a content studio.

I built 720 Sweets from one shop to seven locations, then sold it. At On the Clock 2026 in Atlanta, I sat down with Nadeem for half an hour. What struck me is how little of his growth came from a strategy document. Five moves did most of the work, and four of them are available to an operator with two restaurants. Here is each one, with the version you can run at that size.

1. Plan for the hell zone before you get there

I asked him the question I get asked most. If you run two to five locations, you cannot afford the most experienced people in the market. So how do you build good people around you?

He did not talk about salaries. He named the stage that catches most operators.

"Around five units, they call it hell zone."

Nadeem Bajwa

Here is what the hell zone means. You do not have the cash flow to hire another person to oversee the stores. You are already too big to cover them all yourself. Both things are true on the same day.

He does not accept that this is just bad luck. His answer was that it has to be planned, and if it is not planned, you go back and fix it.

He had his own plan and it still moved. He decided he would not hire a full time operator until he reached ten units. He ended up promoting someone after five.

In his words, skipping that plan "can make your business or break your business".

What you can copy: write down the unit number and the month when you will put your first person above store level, before you can afford them. Then assume you will need that person sooner than your number says, because he did.

2. Train a second in command in every store, starting at store one

The plan only works because of the person he was training at the same time.

From the beginning, Nadeem expected every location to give him one person he could rely on. Not a general manager. A second in command.

When he went from his first unit to his second, he trained someone to take the lead while he was gone. He is honest about the limits of it. That person could not have run the whole restaurant as a general manager. He was good enough to hold certain parts of the day while Nadeem was at the other store, and over time he got good.

That is the whole trick, and it costs almost nothing. You are not paying for an experienced manager. You are starting the training early.

"You need to have your right hand. You need to develop somebody."

Nadeem Bajwa

He is equally practical about the timing. You give yourself time. You set your goals. Then you work out how long it takes to get somebody ready, and you start training them before you need them. Workstream's guide to hiring and training a good manager covers the training part.

What you can copy: pick one person in each store this month and hand them one part of the day. Not the whole job. The same few hours every week, until they can run them without you.

3. Take the cost out yourself instead of hiring it out

Everything at Bajco started with pizza, and Nadeem still calls himself a pizza maker and an operator.

As the group grew he noticed two things at once. Margins in the pizza business were getting thinner. And the normal answer to every job behind the scenes, like taking phone orders or doing the books, was to pay an outside company to do it. That is what he says most franchisors and most companies do.

"I started thinking what can I do to reduce cost and make pizza business more profitable."

Nadeem Bajwa

The first thing he built was a call center, and he built it out of one of his own restaurants. It is now an approved Papa John's vendor. Today it services 2,000 restaurants in North America. He says his cost sits below the big public companies he competes with for that work.

Accounting came the same way. Two of his brothers are former bankers, so the group did its own books from the start rather than hiring it out. That has grown into over 100 accountants, doing the accounting for 15 brands and close to 1,600 restaurants. He says a restaurant group that moves its accounting to them saves more than half of what it was paying. Workstream wrote up some of the same growth lessons from a top Papa John's franchisee after an earlier conversation with him.

What you can copy: list every service you pay an outside company for. Circle the one you could do yourself with the people you already employ. Start with that one, and only that one.

4. Let the next business grow out of the one you have

This is the move that sounds like it needs 276 restaurants. It does not.

Nadeem signed a development agreement with Papa John's and started building stores. Building them was expensive. So the group asked whether they could do it cheaper, tried it on one or two, and then built 15 restaurants themselves. His figure for that is "we saved about over $100,000".

The content studio arrived by an even stranger route. He wanted to pay it forward and share what he had learned with the next group of leaders, so he started doing interviews and podcasts. The group already had a small social media team. Rather than hiring a crew every time he wanted to record, he built a studio in Pakistan with a team of ten. He records there every three or four months.

The accounting business grew the same way. Once other operators knew Bajco did its own books, they asked Bajco to do theirs too.

Ask him how much of this was strategy and the answer is short.

"Nothing was planned. Nothing was planned."

Nadeem Bajwa

All of it, he says, came from one goal: make the pizza business better and more efficient. Every other business came out of chasing that goal. None of them started as a plan of its own.

Bringing work in house should remove a login, not add one. Every hour a manager spends moving the same details between separate hiring, onboarding and payroll systems is an hour they are not running restaurants. Workstream's all-in-one hiring, payroll, and HR platform runs them together, so taking work in house makes the day simpler. Explore All-in-one →

What you can copy: the test is not whether something is a good business. It is whether it makes the thing you already run cheaper or better. If it does not, it is a distraction, however good the business plan looks.

5. Give your HR team the tools to protect the business

Nadeem runs compliance through his HR team, and he is blunt about what happens when that team is weak. "If you don't have strong HR department, things fall through cracks."

He explains it from the operator's side rather than the owner's. An operator is wired to look after the customer and the product. So compliance and HR tend to be the most boring part of the week for them, and the part nobody wants to deal with. That is not a character flaw. It is what the job trains them to do.

Then he explains what is at stake. We work so hard to make whatever money we make, he says, and margins in this business keep getting thinner. Lose that money to a lawsuit or a missed requirement and all of that work was for nothing.

Which leads to the line I would read to any owner who treats HR as a cost to keep down.

"A lot of time HR people come out as villains, but they're not. They're just protecting the business."

Nadeem Bajwa

His conclusion is that paying for their tools costs very little next to what it prevents. As a business owner, in his words, it is the best investment to provide them tools.

Asked what those tools should do, he described the software without naming any. Real time data is where the world is moving, he says. What he wants is an automated system that reminds you and helps you manage, so nothing is missed. His group used to run this on spreadsheets.

He adds two details. The people who need it, he says, are everybody in leadership above the store, not only the HR lead. A policy starts at the top and is followed at ground level. He also names the hardest part honestly: constantly reminding the team to follow through. In a business with this much turnover, a field leader's first job is getting the store open and the customers served, so the small requirements slip.

His closing advice to operators who are still deciding was not about features. He wants one place to log into instead of several, which is the same argument Workstream makes for scaling locations without adding HR staff. He also made a point worth repeating to any vendor. The people who build software are clever, but they are not the ones using it. So it has to be simple enough for the person on the floor to use.

What you can copy: count the logins your manager needs to finish a normal Monday. Then ask your HR person what they would fix first if you gave them a budget. That answer is usually cheaper than the lawsuit it prevents.

The short version

• Name the stage you are in. The hell zone is around five units, and it is a planning problem, not a cash problem.
• Grow a second in command in every store. Start at store one, hand over one part of the day, and start training long before you need them.
• Bring one bought service in house. Only the one that makes your main business cheaper.
• Let the side business come from the main one. Nothing at Bajco was planned. Every one of them was built to help the pizza business.
• Fund your HR team. Their tools cost less than the one claim they stop.

Nadeem is running this across a few hundred restaurants. The same five moves, in the same order, work at two. Workstream's look at one app for a multi unit frontline covers the last point in more detail.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the hell zone in a multi unit restaurant business?

The hell zone is the stage at around five units where you cannot yet afford someone to oversee the stores, but you are already too big to cover them yourself. Nadeem Bajwa uses the term for the gap between those two facts. His warning is that it will make or break the business, and that the only defence is planning for it before you arrive.

When should a restaurant owner hire their first full time operator?

Nadeem Bajwa planned to wait until ten units and ended up promoting someone after five. He treats the gap between the plan and the reality as normal rather than as a mistake. The practical lesson is to pick a number, then expect to need the person sooner, because the workload arrives before the cash flow does.

Is it cheaper for a franchisee to build its own restaurants?

Bajco Group built 15 restaurants in house and puts the saving at over $100,000 against what an outside builder would have charged. Nadeem Bajwa did not start there. The group tried it on one or two stores first, then scaled it once the numbers held. That is the same order he used for every service he brought in house.

How do multi unit operators cut costs without cutting quality?

Move a service you already buy from outside into your own business, starting with one. Nadeem Bajwa built a call center out of one of his own restaurants, and it now services 2,000 restaurants in North America. His accounting arm grew the same way and now runs 15 brands and close to 1,600 restaurants.

Why does compliance get missed in restaurants?

Compliance gets missed because the people closest to it are paid to look after customers first. Nadeem Bajwa says an operator is wired that way, so HR and compliance become the most boring part of the week and slip. His fix is a strong HR team with real tools, plus reminders that reach everybody in leadership above store level.

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About the author. Wilson K Lee built 720 Sweets from one shop to seven locations and sold it. He now runs wilsonklee.com, where he publishes real numbers and playbooks for food and beverage owners, and he hosted the speaker interviews at Workstream's On the Clock 2026.