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 2nd 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 20th
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.
