How I Turned $1,500 Into $5.5 Billion

So guys, we're on our way to Kentucky right now to visit Papa John. And yes, it's the Papa John, the billionaire Papa John. He's showing us his house; we're getting a day in the life, taking you along. And I got a Starbucks, so let's go!

Yeah, about this property: in '95, right after we went public. This is the home of Hobs, and this is the town of Anchorage. And before it was Anchorage, Kentucky, it was Hop Station. And so he had his well out there; right in here is where he had his crops. His well came down the stream.

How did you start Papa John's?

I was at Gades, worked at Domino's, worked at Rockies. So then I came up with this Papa John concept: recipes, equipment, logos, lighters, hats, shirts, everything. I put it in a box and hit it, and my mom said, you know, if you start something, you got to finish it. So, you know, you got to finish college. That's when I decided to take the box out of the closet and do Papa John's Pizza in the broom closet.

Most of the house is underground, so I didn't want a big, ostentatious building. I wanted something that fit in the charm of Anchorage but had the space. So, I went down the gym, the underground tunnel system, mechanicals, the theater, so that the house doesn't go way up in the air. It's only really a story and a half ranch.

Wow! I heard a very interesting story that you were dumpster diving for receipts outside of Domino's. Could you tell us about that?

We just couldn't get the word out, and even when we put a sign on the door, still, people didn't know about Papa John's, and we didn't have enough money for marketing. Every night, Domino's would throw all their customer lists, their deli sheets, in the dumpster, and we were climbing the dumpster at one or two. Then the next day, I'd send a letter to the customer because I already now knew they ordered. I knew they ordered at home; I knew they knew what home delivery was all about. So, hey, we're a new kid on the block; we make a better pizza. Here's a half price, and that worked! That worked really well.

Why do you have honey here?

'Cause I have my own garden. We have my own farm right across that. Hooks Organic Farm is pretty badass. This is the problem with corporate America: it's always the almighty dollar, but they adulterate this honey. They got a thousand ways to cheat. That's why honey in the stores has price, because it's synthetic, and they're putting all the American bee farmers out of business, these little small farmers. So we grow our own; it's an organic farm, organic flowers, so the bees, everything goes in there as pure as it can get.

I've noticed you have quite a few eagles throughout the property.

There's always one guy or one girl that figures it out. This is a Chesterfield. He's the best eagle guy, and this spins four times an hour. So when eagles mate, they go up a couple thousand feet; they mate all the way down. That's their mating. Right before they hit the ground, they separate so they don't hurt themselves. I perfect timing a clock. So this is a giant clock, four times an hour. But how do you tell the time with this?

Well, you just, because it points that way the fourth time. It's actually within like 3 seconds an hour, but it's not perfect. I feel like there's so many antiques in history here that we're just walking past.

Yes, you are. That came out of Italy; that's from the state in Italy. But you got a good eye—what you do is you take one piece that's old and you put it in here, and you faux finish; this is all faux work, of course, and then it looks like the house is 100 years old. For those that don't know, by the way, the faux finishing like this takes a long time, especially to do a room of this size, all the way to the ceiling. My guess is this is probably a week or two more.

How did you scale from one store to ten to a hundred to a thousand to five thousand?

I think resilience and persistency beats genius and intellect every time. Let's say you want to be a dentist. Sooner or later, there's going to be a dentist that was a dentist before you were a dentist that has made it. Well, human nature—then they start playing their golf, then they start having their poker game on Tuesday night, then they start closing at 5 on Friday. What it does, you give a young entrepreneur like you, that's a striving dentist that wants to be like the other dentist, it gives you that incentive. Sooner or later, if you outwork them, you're going to take advantage of the guy on the golf course, and they all get fat and happy.

And so I call it soft—the concept of sitting on the couch, eating Doritos, watching TV, or drinking beer or Cokes. What a waste of life! I mean, is that really living? 'Cause you can sit there and eat potato chips and watch a game. I mean, you know, I think God is movement. You know, life is movement, and I think it's important to keep moving.

Wow! This is my office. We were talking earlier about perspective. This is a bishop's chair that I got out of Italy, a church in Italy. We think it's about 600 years old, 700 years old, because if you look over here, the perspective is terrible. It almost looks like mush. But if you take one 600-year-old piece, then you build around it, the whole room feels like it's, you know, very old. But that's my grandfather we talked about.

Papa, this might seem ignorant, but how do you come across a piece like this? How do you get this?

I just go buy it. I don't know what I'm going to do with it. I just buy it, and I buy them, and then I start—I'll build something. Then it just comes into play. So, it's back to tinkering.

How has having money changed your life?

I think you've got to ask yourself, why do you want to be rich? Do you want that car? Do you want your child to go to that college? Do you want that house? Do you want to give that money to, you know, charity? I think you've got to do what Tony Robbins does, who’s a friend of mine, and he would say you’d have to ask why. You know, my answer was two-fold: I never want to lose that airplane; 'cause, you know, flying commercial is not cool; private is the way to go. And two is money gives me freedom. You know, I can do pretty much anything I want to do every day, or do nothing.

I think wealth gives you not only the ability but the opportunities to do things that are meaningful. You know, and if you’re making a contribution to society and you’re making a contribution to yourself, you’re going to be a pretty happy human being.

So right now, we're one story below ground level, and what you could see here looks like a little city. This is incredible with the windows, the door, but this is the garage. This is what's so remarkable about it; it kind of reminds me of the Forum Shops at the Venetian with the painted ceilings, and the garage just keeps going down! I mean, what I would do for a garage like this! I would probably hit the like button for the YouTube algorithm and subscribe. That's what I would do.

Where do you invest your money?

I've liked gold the last couple of years, liked oil four or five years ago. I remember Jim Cramer saying, I think it was Exxon, sell at 32, and we've ridden that up to over $100 a share. I like pipelines, but I like the dividend stocks. They usually coincide with the market. I don't want to worry about money, so I don't look at the market. So, you know, the dividend income is, you know, four or five times more than I spend a year to live. If the market goes up 10% that year, that's a windfall. If the market stays exactly where it's at, I don't care, because I get the 6% dividend. And if we have a crash, then I still get the 6% dividend. I've got all the staying power to hold on to those when the market crashes, and then I get that kiss on that black swan.

So the best thing that happens to me right now is a 20% correction; that would be the best thing for me—or a 20% up. You know, having hundreds of millions of dollars; say I had 900 million in the market, and it goes down to 600 million, I’d feel stupid. I mean, I’d feel like a complete idiot. I mean, I just lost $300 million. I don't want to take that chance, and everybody says it's a 100-year crash. Yeah, it's a 100-year crash every 10 years, and we're way overdue for a crash. And we are going to have a crash; just a question of when.

This is a mosaic—means less than two. This has got 320,000 mosaics. There were 20 guys in here for two months laying this floor. The Italians, wow! Ferrari, Lamborghini—they’re great at building things. You want German engineering, but this came out of Italy. This dining room, believe it or not, holds 32 or 34. It's a big room; you could, if you look at it, you can actually play basketball in here, and these lights came out of a bank in England. So I just bought those; I didn’t know what I was going to do with them; hung them up there.

This is Raphael. This is a painting mosaic of Raphael. This is 100 AD before Christ, and the Ten Commandments—you had the four virtues. And these are just as Moses being circumcised, etc.

Now, when you sold off a big chunk of your shares in Papa John, what was that like to see the money hit your account?

When you got all your money in Papa John's stock, 80% of it, and then all of a sudden now, all that money is cash? You don't know how much money a billion dollars is. And then what I've tried to do with my kids—the best mechanism that I've found to educate them on how much is a million dollars—is dividend stocks. It's 5%. How much is a million dollars? It's 50 grand a year. How much is 10 million? It's 500 grand a year. That's what it is, and that's the only thing that's really stuck.

'Cause my kids come to me, "Well, I want to invest in a software company or a computer company; I only need $5 million." You only need $5 million? I mean, they don't have any concept of how much money $5 million is.

I got this out of a castle in France; it's got holes in it where worms eat holes. No way! When this happened, everybody wanted to get rid of their fireplace, but over time, this kind of became like a delicate essence where people want the holes. So this is almost like an indoor-outdoor kind of feel; all of these open up to the backyard.

Yeah, when you're having people over, you open these, you put on the golf, and then they can kind of come and go. You know, we cook pizzas over the pizza oven.

Now this is interesting—we talk about the mind's eye. Yeah, the guest house is two stories, and it's 3 feet taller on topography. Remember, the property slopes 64 feet. Yeah, this is a story and a half, so how do you camouflage the fact that the guest house is higher than the main house? You build a lagoon to hook them together, that the lagoon—the mind's eye disappears—that this is lower than that.

So, what I try to do with a house is use the house, yeah. And so if you look at it, you know, it's fairly big, but I use it! I mean, you know, like that dining room—people love to come over and. In that dining room, this pool, the golf course, I mean, the gym—we, I use the heck out of this place.

Every entrepreneur did something that was not the way everybody else was doing it, and we're not going to solve the problems of today if we're teaching our youth. Give you guys exhibit A: how you know or what to think. You know, you need to learn how to think!

The greatest thing that our youth has, and our youth is our future, is their imagination, their creativity. I call it tinkering, like we'll go look at the backyard where I'm putting in a stadium kind of deal for pickleball. They said, "What are you doing?" I'm tinkering. 'Cause every time I move a corner or I pick out a different counter or I put something on a different angle, it changes the whole perspective.

So, I think it's that creativity that we're stifling by telling people that, you know, you can't disagree with other people. And if you do disagree with them, they're going to attack you because of your ideology. I think that's the most unhealthy thing going on right now, and I think it's a problem.

I had this gazebo; I got the pickleball court; I got a putting green right here. You guys can watch this in the real area. We talk about the tinkering green. This was the tee; kept hitting the lights and tearing up on pickleball. Okay, scrap that! So now this is going to be a putting green that comes into here, and that'll be the practice tee up there. And I put a couch down here with a couple chairs and this a couple 10-foot tents.

Yeah, I thought everybody would stay up by the pool and the gazebo; everybody without exception comes down here! So you got to build a bar. Okay, next problem: they have to go to the bathroom. They got to go all the way to the house, all the way over to the guest house.

So, come on, we'll show you. All these stones came out of a street in Chicago—these granite stones. We just took the cobblestones that arch came out of Italy. I don't even know where I bought that arch; I had the door in storage. I just bought the eagles, and now all of a sudden we got a bathroom. It ended up being—it works perfect!

I know I don't like sitting around watching TV. You know if you turn on one news channel, they look at a situation, see it one way or another—you know, so it's biased. And that's okay, but it's done in a way that's divisive and disruptive, and that's concerns me gravely for the future of our country.

That we're a house, as Lincoln said, a house divided cannot stand. And, you know, our biggest enemy in the whole world is ourselves: this infighting. And it’s just got to stop, and I think it starts with so on the quantum work we talked about, with bliss and kindness and love and mutual respect, thoughtfulness, consideration—just being nice.

We set out the interview with creativity. Yeah, there's no difference in figuring out how to walk around that bar, how many sit at that bar, how has that TV off the bar than building a big company. It's the same part of the brain. We've moved the appliances around in this thing seven times! We moved this twice; I've moved that twice; I've moved that three times. This—we built this; we've rebuilt it now three times!

There are lamps that are just temporary—these are lamps I brought out of that interesting castle. So I'll build it. The personality is what you think, how you feel, and how you act. I mean, you can think positive, but if you don't feel positive, you don't act positive—it's all for nothing! You can talk integrity, but if you're not being truthful and you're not acting truthful, it's, you know, so you want to keep how you feel and how you think and how you act all to be coherent.

Find something you love. You guys love what you do? Find something you're good at and work it to the bone, and you'll be successful. If you like it and you're good at it, sooner or later, you're going to break through. Just find something—I love making pizzas, and I knew how to run a business, so it kind of worked out.