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J-P Despault's food of choice as a university student was pizza. It was cheap, filled him up and, best of all, always available. "There was this tiny little mom and pop pizza shop near the university," he says. "I ate their pizza every day. I practically used to live out of there."

Not much has changed for Mr. Despault. Today, he owns his own pizza shop — a Pizza Pizza franchise in Bancroft, Ont. But before he took the entrepreneurial route, Mr. Despault moved to Japan in 2000, where he taught ESL. By 2006 he and his wife, whom he married in Japan, were ready for a change. "My wife wanted to give Canada a try," he said. "And we knew wanted do something on our own in terms of business."

Mr. Despault and his wife, Toshiko Kojima, did their research on real estate and business options before heading back to the Toronto native's home turf. They considered Muskoka or Georgian Bay, but found the housing prices out of reach. They settled on Bancroft, a town of 3,500, three and a half hours north east of Toronto.

Initially Mr. Despault and Ms. Toshiko toyed with the idea of opening their own Japanese restaurant. "But we weren't sure a small town like Bancroft would be ready for that," he says. He began to investigate franchise opportunities by taking stock of which franchises were already operating in the city and which weren't. "I discovered that there hadn't been a Pizza Pizza in the town for two years," he says. The previous Pizza Pizza franchisee sold the business and although the chain had bought property to open a new location, they had yet to find the right franchisee.

But Mr. Despault wasn't ready to make a choice yet. He talked to about 20 companies, mostly food-based, about franchise opportunities. In the end, he came back to Pizza Pizza. "They were really friendlier than the others and they put forth a considerable amount of effort to help out," he says.

In the summer of 2006 he began the process of applying to be a Pizza Pizza franchisee. The first step was wading through a thick information package brimming with details on the company history, its role in the franchisee's business and current company stats. Mr. Despault also had to sign documents such as a non-disclosure agreement and complete a personal application that asked for information on his background, credit history and even his likes and dislikes.

About a month after sending in all the paperwork, Mr. Despault had an interview with a Pizza Pizza sales rep. "He asked me a lot of questions about Bancroft and the area demographics, which I was ready for," he says. Once he had proven he understood the market, Mr. Despault was ready to move on to the next stage: Pizza Pizza University. Franchisees enter the 12-week training program with no guarantees that they'll actually be approved in the end. They have to score a 90 per cent average on weekly tests and a final exam. "They can throw you out at any time," says Mr. Despault. In addition to hitting the Pizza Pizza books, Mr. Despault had to fork over a $30,000 franchise fee (which he would get back if he didn't pass all the training tests).

In August, Mr. Despault relocated to Etobicoke for the first four-week segment of his training, which was entirely classroom-based. Among the topics covered were guest services, robbery prevention and Pizza Pizza's trademark recipes.

The next four weeks were a combination of classroom work and in-shop work. Mr. Despault spent part of each week at the chain's busiest corporate store at the corner of Toronto's Church and Wellesley streets doing everything a store manager would normally do: inventory counts, opening and closing, training staff, cleaning, ordering supplies "and tons of cooking."

In late September, Mr. Despault started the last leg of PPU. He and his wife (who wasn't a formal Pizza Pizza franchisee) commuted an hour and a half each way from Bancroft to Belleville daily, spending 50 hours a week in a Pizza Pizza store there. They fine-tuned their pizza making skills, concentrating on speed, and picked up tips on everything from handling large school orders (which make up about 10 per cent of a store's revenues) to facing dinner rushes.

By the end of the 12 weeks, Mr. Despault had aced PPU. All that was left before he was formally approved was finding the rest of the money to cover Pizza Pizza's fees. He and his wife took out a loan against their house and used it to make a deposit payment against the cost of the business. Pizza Pizza requires a 30 per cent deposit, which in Mr. Despault's case amounted to $90,000. (The remainder of the $300,000 would be paid in installments over the course of five to seven years).

Financials and training in place, Mr. Despault could finally turn his attention to the actual store, 2,600 square feet of space located between Bancroft's residential and commercial areas. Pizza Pizza had taken care of all the details in terms of design, sourcing equipment and hiring contractors. They gave Mr. Despault the chance to okay the store layout, but otherwise, it was a done deal.

Next up was hiring staff, which, once again, Pizza Pizza assisted with. The company participates in a government hiring program called Job Connect that helps hook up employers with jobs to fill with Ontarians looking work. Mr. Despault got more than 65 applications through the program, and he interviewed every single candidate, hiring about 15 staff for the store opening in November.

Before opening his doors for business (a date that was pushed back three times because of construction delays), Mr. Despault had to train all the new hires. "We took five hours a day every day of the week to train staff," he says. "We went through all the motions of being a customer, everything from beginning to end. And we made a lot of pizzas."

On November 13, 2006, Mr. Despault opened the doors to his very own pizza shop. "We got crushed," he says. "We did double the sales we expected to do. Our lobby has a capacity for 35, but we had about 150 in there every day," he says. In addition to the staff and himself, Mr. Despault had four extra sets of helping hands from Pizza Pizza HQ.

His relationship with Pizza Pizza continues to go strong, with people from the corporate office stopping by a couple times a week. They're there to take a peek at everything from missing name tags to burnt out light bulbs to pizzas in the display case on the verge of expiry. But they're not just around to point out the slip ups. "Pizza Pizza is kind of like a parent in the whole thing," says Mr. Despault. "In the beginning they're there to guide us through the day to day operations and then they'll start looking at the bigger picture -- getting school orders, working on marketing and increasing sales." The company takes care of both local and national advertising for a fee of six per cent of revenues. They also develop new recipes -- but for that Pizza Pizza gets a hand from its franchisees. Any time a franchisee thinks they have the next winning combination of ingredients, they let Pizza Pizza's head chef know, who then tests the recipe. New menu items are rolled out in stores about once a quarter.

Aside from the guidance Mr. Despault gets from Pizza Pizza, he credits his store's success with the familiarity their brand offers. "J-P's pizza shop would never have survived," he says. "We get a lot of tourists in this town and they know the product name and what's behind it," he says. "They don't know the mom and pop's diner down the street, but they do know Pizza Pizza." (The chain, which has been around since 1967, now has 501 locations across Canada).

Mr. Despault's customers aren't the only ones who've got loyalty for the brand. "I truly think the Pizza Pizza product is a superior product by far," he says. And that hankering for pizza that dates back to Mr. Despault's university days lives on: "I still make my own pizza for lunch every day," he says.