It’s telling that when asked about the best job he’s ever had, Joe Jordan ’95, P ’25, P ’28, doesn’t have to think long: “Being the dad to my three kids is my favorite thing I’ve done in my life.”
This is from someone who rose in the ranks at Domino’s Pizza Inc. to become CEO of the world’s largest pizza company as of Oct. 1. He has also held high-level marketing positions at PepsiCo, Philips and Unilever, and he’s worked with household-name brands including Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Smithfield Foods and Norelco. When he visits William & Mary’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business as a guest speaker, students ask to take photos with him.
Charlotte Jordan ’28, who followed her father and her older sister, Corin Jordan ’25, to William & Mary, sat in on a class as a first-year student during one of his visits.
“I’m proud because I see how hard he works and how passionate he is about his work, and I know he’s really good at what he does. That’s how he’s gotten to where he is in his career,” she says. “But it’s also a bit funny because he’s just Dad — the guy I build Legos with at home.”
A recent project involved the Jordans assembling a reproduction of the “Home Alone” house, she says, adding that her father enjoys going for runs with her and her younger brother, Hugh, and walking their dogs.
“It’s all about priorities. When he’s home, he makes sure he’s very present,” she says, adding, “Friday is always pizza night at our house.”
Domino’s pizza, of course. (Good, old-fashioned pepperoni for Dad.)
Running Toward W&M
Growing up on New York’s Long Island, Jordan didn’t have William & Mary on his radar until he took part in the Colonial Relays at Zable Stadium as a track team member during his junior year in high school.
“That’s when I learned about the school,” he says. “And the more I learned, the more I liked the idea of a liberal arts education with a business focus.”
Jordan decided to apply. By coincidence, he was back in Williamsburg for the Colonial Relays the next year when he received news of his admission. While talking to his father on a pay phone, Jordan found out a letter from William & Mary had arrived.
“My dad opened it and let me know that I got accepted while I was at the school,” Jordan says.
As a first-year student at W&M, he was interested in business, but explored a range of subjects, including psychology. Through joining Sigma Alpha Epsilon, he met his close friend Jamie Stern ’95, who later served as best man at the wedding of Jordan and his wife, Christine.
Jordan took an introduction to marketing class during his sophomore year with Todd Mooradian, who recently stepped down as dean of the Raymond A. Mason School of Business.
“I was never so excited to go to a class before,” Jordan says. “I fell in love with marketing, so after taking that class, I continued on the path to apply to the business school. I started the marketing association back up as part of the business school while I was there.”
He majored in marketing, with a minor in psychology and a concentration in philosophy. That combination has served him well, he says.
“Marketing is psychology,” Jordan says. “Understanding the way people think has been helpful, and on the philosophy side, it’s about thinking through problems. If we tried something before and it didn’t work, how do we approach it from a different angle?”
Mooradian recalls Jordan as a student with enormous potential who was gratifying to teach.
“It was clear that Joe was going to be focused and tenacious and get into big-time brand marketing,” Mooradian says. Jordan’s success “reflects great competence, but even more importantly, it reflects extraordinary character because he has thrived by being a brand leader with integrity.”
Building Domino’s
Domino’s announced in June that Jordan, then president and chief operating officer, would become CEO this fall, succeeding his mentor and friend Russell Weiner. In his new position, Jordan stewards a company with global retail sales of more than $20 billion per year and over 22,500 stores.
“I think the board made the absolute perfect decision putting Joe in as CEO,” says Weiner, who is slated to become Domino’s executive chairman after the company’s shareholder meeting in April 2027. “I love the company a lot and there’s nobody else I’d rather see lead it. He’s beloved here, not only for what he’s done, but who he is.”
Weiner has known Jordan for over two decades, since first hiring him in 2005 as a manager of innovation at PepsiCo.
“I remember very vividly not only the interview, but once we hired him, we put him on an incredibly difficult project,” says Weiner, who was then director of marketing and product innovation. “That first assignment was to do a deep dive on our water business. He was brand new and he came back in a very short time with an analysis that blew me away. I remember thinking, ‘This guy is so much smarter than I am. I’m glad he’s working on my team.’”
Weiner was also impressed by Jordan’s ability to remember details and talk eloquently about them. When Weiner later became vice president of colas marketing for North America, he brought Jordan with him. Jordan was then promoted to senior director of marketing for PepsiCo, while Weiner moved to Domino’s in 2008. Three years later, the two reconnected when Jordan joined Weiner’s team at Domino’s as vice president of innovation.
Over 15 years at Domino’s, Jordan rose through the ranks to become president and chief operating officer and now CEO.
Among the highlights of his tenure so far have been record sales growth when he was chief marketing officer and the addition of 3,000 stores worldwide when he was head of international operations. He is known for developing strong relationships with Domino’s many franchisees in the U.S. and abroad, colleagues say.
“It’s been a pleasure watching Joe grow as a leader and continue to contribute at every level, every job he goes to,” Weiner says. “A lot of leaders nowadays feel like they only win when somebody else has to lose, but Joe’s not like that. He’s a leader who wants everyone to win.”
Making an Impact
Jordan says he has three criteria for any job he undertakes: “I want to work with nice people, I want to work with smart people, and I want to work in a company where I can have an impact. Domino’s has those three things more than any other place that I’ve worked.”
When he joined Domino’s, the company had completed a good year after the successful launch in late 2009 of its “New and Inspired” campaign, which involved overhauling its pizza recipe in response to poor reviews from customers and falling stock prices. But momentum had begun to slow.
“It was a question of how we sustainably grow over time,” Jordan says.
Founded as a delivery company in 1960, Domino’s was looking for opportunities to reach more customers.
“We were far and away the delivery leader, but we had never done carryout, so we started to grow carryout, and carryout is now actually the bigger part of our business,” Jordan says.
When he was chief marketing officer, Domino’s instituted “carryout insurance” so that if a pizza got damaged on the way home, the customer could bring it back and have it replaced, no questions asked. One ad depicts humorous scenarios in which a pizza gets knocked out of a man’s hands through a series of mishaps as he’s walking down the street.
Another initiative was the Paving for Pizza campaign, in which Domino’s paid to fill potholes that might jostle a pizza or interfere with pickup and delivery. The potholes were painted with a Domino’s logo and the words “Paving for Pizza” and “Oh yes we did.”
“We ended up paving potholes in all 50 states around our stores so that you would have a better pizza experience,” Jordan says. “That let customers know that we get them, and then they came to our stores and ordered more pizza.”
Jordan has also led technological innovation to make it easier and faster for customers to order.
“When I was CMO, we were the first company to launch voice commerce,” he says. “It wasn’t Google or anybody else, it wasn’t Siri. The first time you could use your voice to interact with an app and buy something was with Domino’s. We continued to think through where there is friction in the process for consumers: How do we take that out? How do we make it easier for them?”
In an effort to get pizzas to customers faster, Domino’s has implemented “digital shoulder surfing,” a nod to the previous practice in which a cook would look over the shoulder of the person taking the order and start making the pizza before the phone call ended. Now that 80% of orders are made online, the company uses a customer’s purchase history to start the order.
“So, let’s say that every Friday night, you order two pepperoni pizzas,” Jordan says. “As soon as you come to the website and you’re starting to go through the process, we have the store start making those because we know what you order, and that gets them to you a couple minutes faster.”
A process called an “orchestration agent” also coordinates the timing of baking and delivery so that pizzas are hot and ready to go when the delivery driver comes back to the store.
Another initiative from Jordan’s time as chief marketing officer was Domino’s “AnyWare” campaign. “Our thought was that any technology that a consumer is using, we want them to be able to order Domino’s,” he says. This allowed customers to order pizza from a Samsung TV or the dashboard of a Ford Sync. A customer could also tweet a pizza emoji and have a pizza delivered.
“The key is understanding what consumers want and how we can be there for them,” Jordan says. “How do we make the pizza experience more enjoyable — even more magical?”
Taking On Challenges
Jordan likes to tell a story about trees in the Biosphere 2 project, built in the late 1980s in Arizona. Planted in what appeared to be ideal growing conditions inside a dome — carefully maintained temperature, nutrients and water — trees would grow rapidly, but they’d fall over before reaching maturity. Researchers concluded that in the absence of heavy wind, the trees never had an opportunity to develop a strong root system. Without having faced adversity, they lacked resilience.
The Biosphere story is one that Jordan has applied to his own life: Stepping outside his comfort zone has made him a stronger leader. One case in point is when he was offered the opportunity to manage Domino’s Pizza’s international business. After accepting the position, he asked Patrick Doyle, Domino’s CEO at the time, why he thought Jordan was the right person for that job.
“I had not worked internationally before,” Jordan says. “I hadn’t been to most of these countries that I was going to visit. There are consumer differences, and I needed to get up to speed on how I might work with franchisees in different countries — which parts of the playbook were universal for the brand, and which parts were customized by market.”
Doyle responded that “he saw the relationships that I developed with the franchisees in the U.S., and if I did the same thing with the international franchisees, I was going to be just fine,” Jordan says.
Looking back now, Doyle says it was clear that Jordan had potential to take on greater responsibility.
“The more senior you get in an organization, the less your specific skills matter,” says Doyle, who is now executive chairman of Restaurant Brands International, owner of Burger King, Popeyes, Tim Hortons and Firehouse Subs.
“What becomes more important is your ability to attract and motivate people,” he says. “In the restaurant industry, that means your ability to work very productively with franchisees. We could see Joe doing that domestically from his marketing role. But getting international experience was a really important way to find out if he was ultimately going to be able to do an even bigger job in the organization.”
So Jordan and his family packed up and moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to the Netherlands in 2018, two years before the COVID-19 pandemic. There, Jordan was responsible for overseeing franchises that varied from individual operations in the Caribbean to multibillion-dollar, publicly traded companies in India, the country with the most stores outside the United States, to Iceland, which has more Domino’s stores per capita than anywhere in the world.
“The two years pre-COVID were great,” Jordan says. “Domino’s is in 94 countries around the world and in those two years, I got to visit over 40 of them and meet our franchisees all over the world. I learned more in those couple of years than I did previously going from marketing job to marketing job at different places.”
Jordan’s travels halted during the pandemic, he says, but “it actually ended up being a bit of a tailwind for our business, because people were stuck at home, so they ordered a lot of pizza.”
While the basics of pizza remain consistent across the board — dough, sauce and cheese — toppings vary according to regional preference. Variations include durian (a popular fruit in China), tiger shrimp in South Korea and Kobe beef in Japan. Another difference was that while Domino’s had its own delivery system in the U.S., external services or “aggregators” such as Uber and DoorDash were commonly used in other countries.
When Jordan returned to the United States, he decided that Domino’s should begin working with aggregators here, too: “A lot of customers go to DoorDash or Uber first, and if we’re not there, we’re missing those customers.” However, Domino’s also adopted a loyalty program that rewarded customers who ordered directly from the company.
At its core, the international job was about building relationships, Jordan says.
“As I look back on my career, the things I’m most proud of are the other careers or lives I influenced,” he says. “Our franchisees’ profits per store have more than doubled since I joined the company — and I’m not saying this was solely me; there were a whole lot of people involved. That has changed the franchisees’ lives and their families’ lives. That has changed the lives of their managers, who then became franchisees themselves. And having those ripples is the most fulfilling part of my career.”
Back to School
Jordan and his wife, Christine, have served on William & Mary’s Parent & Family Council for several years, as their daughters attended the university. Charlotte is a junior, double majoring in English and marketing, and she began studies at the business school this fall. Corin recently completed a Master of Science in systems medicine at Georgetown University.
This summer, Joe Jordan became a member of the Business School Foundation Board, serving on its governance committee and deepening his involvement with the school. For the past six years, he has returned to William & Mary in the fall to talk with MBA students, and he’s served as a frequent guest speaker for classes taught by Scott Swan, David Peebles Professor of Business, whose focus is marketing and innovation.
“It is always great to have Joe in class,” Swan says. “The students really appreciate his ability to drive innovation with uncommon honesty and understanding of his customers’ needs. He is loved because he is truly genuine.”
Jordan last visited during the MBA Sprint Week, in which students tackle real-world business scenarios. He watched teams present their cases for new beverage brands. “It’s fun to see the fresh thinking of the students who have not been in the industry, and the connections they make,” he says. “By not having preconceived notions about what you can and can’t do, they always end up surprising me, and I find that fun.”
Listening to Jordan speak, it’s clear that he believes in Domino’s products, service and people, says Ken White, associate dean for graduate business programs. “Joe is an outstanding guest speaker thanks to the passion he has for his work and for Domino’s,” White says. “Students see and feel that energy and they immediately connect with Joe.”
White says an important lesson Jordan shares with students is “get excited about your job, your employer, colleagues, customers and the future. Have fun and love what you do and success will follow.”
Mooradian adds that Jordan demonstrates the value of liberal arts & sciences as a foundation for achievement in business.
“His example is a paradigm for William & Mary as the antidote to being made irrelevant by artificial intelligence or any other technological change,” Mooradian says. “Joe brings to everything he does the critical thinking, lateral thinking, creative thinking and empathetic thinking of a human being. He’s well-educated in the liberal arts and deeply skilled in business.”
Jordan credits his alma mater with helping him develop the skills he needed to advance in his career.
“I attribute a lot of this to the ways of thinking that were embedded at William & Mary: the ability to take a lot of information and discern what’s important,” he says. “As executives, we get so much information, and most of it’s not particularly helpful. So, how do you find those needles in the haystacks for what matters?”
He says he has also observed other leaders he’s worked with and picked up on qualities he admires. In particular, he sees Weiner, Doyle and another former Domino’s CEO, Ritch Allison, as putting the good of the company first: “What they all have in common is it’s about the brand, not about them; they’re here to leave it better than they found it.”
As Domino’s newest CEO, Jordan plans to continue that tradition.
“What gets me excited is I still believe we can do so much better than we’re already doing in the U.S. and globally for our consumers, for our team members, for our franchisees,” he says. Jordan looks forward to “getting to influence the strategy of the company in the coming years — and going back to those lessons learned from other leaders, leaving it better than I found it.”