Franchisee Spotlight: Clay and Debi Huckaby, Watkinsville, Georgia

Clay and Debi Huckaby met in college while attending Georgia Southern.  After graduation, Clay started a career in governmental affairs while Debi began a career in printing.  The two still maintain jobs in those fields while running their two Your Pie locations.  Clay, a lifelong foodie, always had an itch to open a franchise but never found just the right one.  He was able to scratch that itch after he and Debi made a trip to one of Your Pie Founder Drew French’s locations in the Beechwood area of Athens.  The two fell in love with the customizable pizza concept, the family-friendly atmosphere, and the delicious pizza. The two opened their Watkinsville Your Pie in September 2010.  They opened their 2^nd location in on the East side of Athens in February 2013.  The couple has three boys, ages 8, 13, and 16, who attend Oconee County schools.

How did you learn about the brand?

Clay is a foodie so we go to new restaurants all the time.  We’d heard about this new place called Your Pie so we went and checked it out.  Clay had always been interested in opening a franchise, and had been thinking about it for 10 or 15 years.  We went to Drew’s (Your Pie Founder Drew French) store in Beechwood and loved it!  We liked the whole experience.  We loved the customizable pizza concept, the ingredients, and the beer and wine.  Your Pie is a completely family-friendly place.  Kids love it, and that’s been a really fun part of it.

What makes your business unique in the community?

You get to make your own pizza.  It’s as simple as that.  Being able to customize their own pizza is a big deal to our customers.  We have regulars who come in 3 or 4 times a week and our managers can start making their unique and personalized pie when they see them walking down the sidewalk toward the door.  We have great employees too and we’ve been very lucky in our hiring.  We have some of the high school kids and students from UGA.

Are you involved with any charities or do any community outreach with your business?

We do a lot of “Spirit Nights” where groups, organizations, and teams, come in and we give back a percentage of the profits to the group.  We host youth trivia nights.  We worked with Coaches vs. Cancer recently, a 3-on-3 basketball tournament, and we gave the prize of free pizza for a year to the winner.  We’re very active in our local church. 

What challenges have you overcome to get where you are now?

We, like most business owners, are constantly in a battle to keep our food and labor under control.  We gave a ton of discounts in our first year trying to get people in the doors, but we’ve had to adjust and adapt how we do things each year to make sure the experience is the best it can possibly be for our customers.

What are your expansion or development plans? What is your end goal with Your Pie?

We just opened our Athens – East Side location in February so we don’t have any plans to open up additional locations right now.  We’d like to focus on our two restaurants and make them the best they can be.

Do you have any superstar employees?

We have two great GMs at our restaurants who are actually brother and sister.  Caroline works at Watkinsville and her older brother Grant works at our Athens – East Side location…and their other brother works at the Watkinsville restaurant with Caroline.

Forrest is a fantastic employee who we actually interviewed at the Mexican restaurant next door before we were even open.  She was in high school when she started here, and is now in college.  Forrest won the Your Pie Lineage Scholarship last year.  This year, another one of our employees, Katie Hilton, won the Your Pie Lineage Scholarship.

Do you have any hobbies, pastimes, and passions outside of work?

We spend most of our time with the kids.  We just celebrated our 20^th anniversary and went to Mexico for a week which was fantastic.  We also stay involved with the school council, Oconee County Chamber of Commerce, and our church.