![]() Gatti’s in Amarillo was doing $2 million a year,” he said. They opened with go-karts, mini-golf, bumper cars and about 50 video and redemption games in a space of 40,000 square feet compared to 20,000 square feet at Mr. “It was a huge success right off the bat,” Barsness said. Finally, one of the banks here said they’d do it. “I remember going around to nine different banks and all of them turning us down. “They all said, ‘You’re going to build a 40,000-square-foot pizza restaurant?’” he recalled. ![]() Toppers at America’s Incredible Pizza Company back at the opening of the very first location in Springfield, Mo., in 2001 (from left to right), president Larry Abbe, founders Rick and Cheryl Barsness and HR executive Brenda Abbe. It was a challenge to get a bank to agree to a loan, but with some persistence, Barsness made it happen. Gatti’s and a desire to get back to four-season weather, they moved to Springfield, Mo., and set out to open the first America’s Incredible Pizza Company there in 2001. “I wanted to do go-karts and laser tag and all kinds of fun things.”īecause of a non-compete clause with Mr. “I wanted to do much bigger game rooms,” Barsness said. In their remaining 15 or so years as franchisees, they did this to half of their 12 restaurants. Gatti’s location and added 10 to 15 games. That’s how he got the idea to put game rooms behind his pizza restaurants.Īround 1985, Rick and Cheryl had a wall knocked down at a Mr. With that in mind, Barsness was attending the pizza trade show in Las Vegas when AMOA’s expo also happened to be in town. “It was a change in my life going from one direction to another direction,” said Barsness, adding that he went from entertaining adults to focusing on families. They had a new sign erected when the nightclub-turned-church first opened: “New Happy Hour 11 a.m. But he says when he and his wife accepted Christ into their lives, they decided to turn that nightclub into a church. Gatti’s, Barsness also owned Captain’s Table in the early 1980s, which at the time was the largest nightclub in Texas. And during that time, a couple of things happened that led to their eventual founding of America’s Incredible Pizza Company. Over the next 25 years, they owned 12 stores from Amarillo to San Antonio. When the buffet chain was sold to a group of investors, Rick and Cheryl became franchisees, opening their first location in Victoria, Texas, in 1975. ![]() ![]() He met and married Cheryl, and the couple moved to Austin, Texas, where Rick became the personnel manager at Mr. Rick started off managing a Hardee’s fast food restaurant while he attended the University of North Dakota in his hometown of Grand Forks. Cheryl and Rick Barness at an F2FEC conference where Rick regularly shares details on what works in his locations. ![]()
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