Jimmy John’s Jimmy John Decides Against Taking Sandwich Chain Public

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With more than 2,000 sandwich-slinging stores across the country raking in some $2 billion a year in sales, Illinois-based Jimmy John’s seems like the perfect business to take public. But Jimmy John himself has decided against trying to cash in with an initial public offering.

CEO, founder, and majority owner Jimmy John Liautaud tells Bloomberg that he had been considering going public for the last couple of years, but ultimately opted to keep things private for now.

He likens the years of prep to making an entire Thanksgiving dinner and then tossing it in the trash “right before I was going to serve it.”

In recent months, the company, which would have gone public with an estimated value of around $2 billion, had been putting together meetings about an IPO. But the decision was made in October to focus on expansion plans — including 1,300 stores set to open in California in the coming years — instead of going public.

Jimmy John, who started the business shortly after — by his own admission — graduating second-to-last in his high school class, said he ultimately decided that the world of IPOs and stock markets just wasn’t for him.

“I don’t think my wheelhouse is comfortable in Wall Street,” he tells Bloomberg. “My wheelhouse is small-town America.”

by Chris Morran via Consumerist