Sushi Sushi was the pioneer in the fast Japanese category opening their first store in Box Hill, Victoria in 1998. With its opening, it made previously unattainable food available to the everyday consumer making it accessible, affordable and convenient. The products were exceptional and delivered on the mastery and beauty that sushi is known for, while also delivering on a price-point that appealed to everybody. Whilst Sushi Sushi has grown to become the largest sushi franchise in Australia, with over 152 locations, we have stayed true to our values of mastery, exceptional products and creating memorable customer experiences.Since my involvement, we have successfully navigated private equity ownership, built an impressive management team, infrastructure, systems and processes able to service global expansion. Through the challenging Covid period, we managed to expand our business into sushi trains, micro format stores that operate within supermarkets and petrol and convenience stores and have opened a central production facility the services wholesale and catering clients. The new look stores, uniforms and packaging help bring the Art of Sushi to life, and has created brand differentiation in what has become a crowded market.

Retail Zoo has been building fantastic food franchises with global brand presence that deliver sensational profits.The company has evolved from Boost Juice, a single focus single brand company, to a broader business platform with strengths in the back end providing comprehensive support services capable of being easily plugged into to generate high performance growth in a proven and profitable retail business. During Scott’s tenure he has expanded Retail Zoo in Australia with Salsas Fresh Mex, and acquired Cibo Espresso along with continually expanding Boost in Australia and across the globe managing 500+ stores, 4,000+ staff and $360m+ in revenue.Reporting into the Board of Directors that include the Founders, Jeff and Janine Allis, and an experienced team from Bain Capital, Scott directly leads the General Managers of the retail brands, Boost Juice Bars, Salsas Fresh Mex and Cibo Espresso along with other senior executives from the shared services platform. As CEO, Scott’s focus is to provide executive leadership of the development and execution of the vision, identification and maximization of expansion opportunities, to drive profitable growth and increase margins, lead innovation, ensure excellence in every part of the business, protect the brand and drive a performance based culture.Success has required an unending energy and passion for results, the ability to identify an innate talent for innovation in all staff to drive the vision, along with strengths in communicating at all levels from senior private equity partners to employees in the stores.

During this period Scott’s focus was around continually growing the growth brand. Goals included adding significant like for like sales growth, increasing store numbers and ensuring that the brand not only remained cool to its consumers, but continued to grow and stay relevant. Working with the expectation of running best in class operations and franchising, one of the most significant impacts Scott had was creating a step change in the Boost business. He did this by fully immersing himself in the brand from a consumers’ perspective in what is now known as the Boost 30 day ChallengeScott solely consumed Boost products for a period of 30 days. This intensity of experience led to significant change in packaging, ingredients and product categories that propelled the company forward, and drove double digit sales growth for almost 2 years.

Scott had the dual role as COO of Retail Zoo while holding the position of General Manager of Boost Juice Australia. He was directly responsible for HR, L&D and Operations as well as product innovation, marketing and Franchise sales. Initiatives during this time were to introduce online ordering systems, and cube reporting that gave instant visibility of total business performance.This role was created was to ensure that all of the incredible tools, systems and processes that had been developed and had working efficiently in Boost, were transferred effectively to Salsas. During this period the company commenced work on a start-up chicken shop business, Hatch. Hatch evolved as a labour of love starting with a street site chicken shop and expanded into a 160 seat fast casual chicken shop that specialised in chicken burgers. Scott was the brain child behind the brand, the philosophies, the ethos around food quality and integrity.

Having commenced with Boost in 2008 running company operated stores, Scott was promoted to General Manager of Boost Juice Bars in 2009. His role as GM was to establish and deliver the organisation’s goals, objectives; drive profitability and increase margins; maximise customer sales growth; protect the brand; lead innovation; drive a performance based culture; create strong network communication strategies; attract and retain top executives; and manage risk and corporate governance.Given 5 months to prove himself, he was pivotal in turning around company operations to achieve massive growth in EBITDA from losing $900K when he commenced to positive $400k EBITDA within 9 months. He achieved this by applying focus and best practice to this area of the business. To be successful, the company had to become retail operations experts, build credibility within the business, become true leaders to franchised peers as well as create success points within the business itself. Changing the culture of the company operations team and giving it purpose in the business was one significant change that has Boost Company Operations running as best in class to this day.

Body Bronze was the largest chain of Tanning Salons in Australia.New to the market and franchising Scott led the expansion of outlets from 4 to 55 stores. A focus during this time was to improve communication strategies and introduce management systems such as a franchise code of conduct and uniform lease agreements. Scott was pivotal to creating the company style guide, and store look and feel along with driving the people first focus.In addition to Scott’s leadership role he was also the President of the Australian Tanning Association. He developed the Australian Tan Smart System along with an advanced range of wholesale and retail skin care products, tanning and spray tanning products.