Daring to be different
Business lessons from the Eagle Boys Pizza story.
Tom Potter opened his first pizza shop in Albury in 1987 with his mother as his business partner and a shoestring budget. From that single store, Tom built Eagle Boys into Australia’s largest independently owned pizza chain. By the time he sold the business in 2007, annual sales across Australia and New Zealand had reached $170 million and the company indirectly employed around 4,000 people.
Tom’s presentation at the 2026 APAL Industry Forum traced an incredible journey packed with wisdom that any business owner can use.
Don’t take no for an answer
Before Eagle Boys, Tom had left school at 15 and trained as an apprentice baker. He wanted to buy a broken-down bakery in Alice Springs with a mate he’d met through the local footy club. Bank after bank turned them down for a loan. Rather than give up, the pair noticed a friend had just been approved for a car loan on the strength of a phone reference from his employer. So, they applied for car loans instead, gave each other glowing references, bought two brand new cars, sold them straight away, and used the cash to buy the bakery. Tom was candid that you probably wouldn’t be allowed to get away with a trick like this today, but the point stands.
Adapt or perish
Tom changed the Eagle Boys business model three times over the life of the company, responding each time to competition and shifting customer habits. When brutal price wars hit the pizza industry in the 1990s and prices dropped from $16 to under $7 in nine months, he didn’t try to out-discount the big US chains. He refocused the business on its target customers, raised prices back up and accepted he’d lose some trade to get the company back on track. Sometimes the right call is the uncomfortable one.
Know exactly what your customer wants
Ask your customers directly what matters most to them, then build your product around those answers. When he worked out that speed was one of the things pizza customers cared about most, Tom rolled out a “ready in two minutes or it’s free” drive-through offer. Most of his revenue soon came from customers using this offer.
The same thinking shaped Eagle Boys’ move into New Zealand. Friday night there belonged to fish and chips, not pizza, and a $22 fish and chip dinner was the local habit they were up against. Rather than trying to sell customers pizza as a replacement, Tom built an offer around what they already wanted: a pizza and chips combo for $21.95. Within six years the New Zealand business had grown to 75 stores doing $90 million in sales.
Tell people you exist, then keep telling them
A store robbery in Wagga Wagga taught Tom an unexpected lesson about marketing. Local coverage of the incident sent sales through the roof, and he realised that customers hadn’t known Eagle Boys was there until the story ran. He leaned in to guerrilla marketing after that, once sending a costumed mascot out to hand out menus in a rival pizza chain’s car park. Building a business is only half the job. Making sure your market knows you exist is the other half.
Find your happy place
Tom’s most emotive advice has nothing to do with strategy: do the work you love and let everything else fall where it falls. He talked about loving being in the bakery, around food, more than any boardroom meeting. He’s equally blunt about waiting for success to arrive before you let yourself enjoy the work: don’t live for the moment when you’ll finally be happy. Enjoy the days you’ve got, because the years running a business are full of both trauma and fun, often at the same time.
The throughline
None of these lessons stand alone. Tom adapted the business because he understood his customers, marketed hard because adaptation means nothing if nobody knows about it, and stayed grounded in the work he loved through years of near misses, price wars and a franchise built from scratch. Eagle Boys grew from one Albury shop to a household name because Tom kept asking why things were done a certain way, then did them differently.
