For Tom Monaghan, building a company was only a part of the vision.
Hanging on the wall outside Thomas S. Monaghan's old office at Domino's Pizza World Headquarters is a framed poster bearing the legend "The Stuff that Dreams Are Made of." Someone at Domino's commissioned the work after the Detroit Tigers won the World Series in 1984, the first season the boss owned the franchise. Monaghan himself can't remember where it came from, and it is unclear what space, if any, this piece will occupy in his new $2-million suite over at Domino's Farms, a $140-million office/conference complex now rising on 300 acres of pastureland in rural Ann Arbor, Mich. Whatever its origin or ultimate destination, though, the picture contains enough collage elements -- a boy's scrapbook, a well-oiled fielder's mitt, ticket stubs from the 1934 and '84 World Series, fading news clips of Mickey Cochrane and Ty Cobb, virgin trading cards of Al Kaline and Alan Trammel, a Domino's Pizza box, a miniature pizza-delivery vehicle -- to suggest a fair map of at least one corner of Monaghan's extremely fertile psyche. What is deceiving is the number of important symbols that aren't even in there.
Were the frame extended horizontally, for instance, in the Prairie-style motif of Frank Lloyd Wright, Monaghan's architectural avatar, the picture might include both Snowflake and a "lost" Usonian house prototype, two Wright dwellings now in Monaghan's personal possession; these buildings will soon be joined by a private residence in which Monaghan hopes to incorporate all of his "favorite features" from Wright's work. Parked somewhere in the foreground might be the pair of vintage Duesenberg touring cars that Monaghan bought last autumn, barely a week apart, for $1 million apiece, record sums for their respective categories; or the "Hot One," an Indianapolis 500 racing car driven by Al Unser Jr. and sponsored on the pro circuit by Domino's to the tune of some $3 million a year.
Expand the picture vertically, and there would be room for the Golden Beacon, Wright's great unbuilt skyscraper of the 1950s. Derived from the architect's blueprints for the community he called Broadacre City, the Golden Beacon will finally rise over Domino's Farms, an updated version of Wright's ideal. A pile of pizzas would be appropriate, too -- 10,000 of them, say, or one for each outlet in Monaghan's master plan for Domino's growth. After that, clean out the prop closet. Helicopters, management manuals, Nautilus machines, rosary beads: each would command its rightful place if the frame kept stretching to fit its subject. Then again, even a transcendentalist like Wright put limits on his wall space. Who would have space to hang such a thing?
Framed or unframed, fully rendered or frankly sketchy, the stuff of Tom Monaghan's dreams is beginning to go public in ways Domino's Pizza Inc., his $1.4-billion-a-year company, never has. "It really started when I bought the Tigers," says Monaghan, referring to his emergence as a public figure crowned by many as the Entrepreneurial Hero of the 1980s. "Even if baseball meant nothing to me -- and owning the Tigers is the highest material thing I've ever aspired to -- it would've made sense from a free-publicity point of view."
Recent history certainly bears him out on that score. Barely a dozen years ago, he was wearing borrowed clothes and living in a tract house. His company bore the scars of many brutal management battles, battles in which his lenders had laughed at him, creditors had stalked him, and his own franchisees had sued him. By the time he took over the Tigers late in 1983 (for a cool $53 million), however, Monaghan was being hailed as a managerial messiah. With a personal fortune estimated at $250 million, he held firm control over one of the fast-food industry's most spectacular growth companies. Second in total sales only to Pizza Hut Inc. among national chains, Domino's hadn't invented the common pizza, but it absolutely excelled at doing something that nobody else did: getting that pie to a customer's door, piping hot, in 30 minutes or less, or the pizza came free. In the beginning of 1984, the company boasted 900 units in place (300 company-owned, the rest owned by franchisees), with virtually no outstanding debt; it had plans for adding 400 new units to its ranks by the end of the year.
As founder and owner of this meals-on-wheels juggernaut, Monaghan wasn't exactly a local nobody; folks in central Michigan had witnessed enough drama surrounding Domino's to fill up a few books of the Old Testament. Then again, he was not a household word, either, not even in houses built by Frank Lloyd Wright. National visibility? Put it this way: when it came to hawking the Tom Monaghan Story, his public-relations people were more familiar with the transmitting ends of their telephones than they were with the receivers. Then, in a stunning coup, Monaghan managed to persuade longtime Tiger owner John Fetzer to part with the ball club of his childhood dreams. Consummated under poison-pill restrictions (no press, no leaks, no lawyers -- or no deal), the sale stood all of Detroit and most of the sporting world on its collective head. In one swift stroke, Monaghan leaped from the business page to the front page, with the sports page in hot pursuit. By year's end, he wore a World Series ring, and his company had 700, not 400, new stores pumping pizzas out the door as fast as their red-white-and-blue vans could carry them. The coincidence wasn't lost on the man in charge.
"I won't say we opened an extra 300 [outlets] that year because I bought the Tigers," he observes. "Let's just say we got into a situation where nobody in this market had to be acquainted with who Domino's -- or Tom Monaghan -- was."
Since ascending to the ranks of Steinbrenner, Autry, Doubleday, et al., Monaghan has been diligent in deepening that acquaintance. Although not a particularly polished public speaker, he has refined the basic Domino's/Tom Monaghan biography into a riveting half-hour morality play that practically walks off the podium flapping the cloak of the American Dream. Media types get the same basic garment, slightly cut to fit, but no matter who tells the story, it is something to hear. Beginning with the death of his father when Tom was four, and a troubled mother's decision to send her two sons to a Catholic orphanage, there are moments of Melodrama at every turn. Two Sisters of the order -- a benevolent nun who encouraged his interests (baseball, architecture, the Church), and a disciplinarian who beat obedience into him with a strap -- shaped his values. A stretch in a juvenile detention center cooled his hot temper. After that came a hitch in the U.S. Marine Corps, a college career at the University of Michigan (cut short for lack of money), a brother who abandoned their struggling partnership for the security of the postal service, and a co-owner who paid $500 for half the business and took the rest of the company to the cleaners. In 1969, Monaghan lost control over Domino's growth: the local sheriff was bringing so many subpoenas from so many creditors to his door, Monaghan says, that he -- the sheriff -- "finally started making deliveries only on Fridays." In the late 1970s, Monaghan almost lost his trademark to Amstar Corp., makers of Domino sugar, in a costly, five-year court fight. With a loyal wife and four daughters standing solidly beside him, however, he soon broke through to success, fortune, the Tigers, the new headquarters, and, ultimately, the deep conviction that his journey served as "an example of everything that's right with the free enterprise system." In service of such a cause, and looking oddly boyish for his 48 years, he has posed in the company of tigers, Tigers, horses, helicopters, pizza dough, dominoes, Duesenbergs, and Frank Lloyd Wright furniture, to name just a few.
