Interview with Brandon Solano, CEO of Rave Restaurant Group (NASDAQ:RAVE)
A proven operator with a playbook and vision
This post is from Sophon Microcap Atlas, our platform focused on public companies with a sub-$500M market cap.
In late December 2025, I sat down with Brandon Solano, CEO of RAVE Restaurant Group (NASDAQ: RAVE), for a wide-ranging discussion on the company’s turnaround, unit economics, and long-term scaling ambitions.
RAVE is a small-cap franchisor operating two pizza concepts: Pizza Inn, a legacy buffet-oriented brand with deep roots across the Southern United States, and Pie Five, a fast-casual concept that has faced structural headwinds in recent years. While consolidated revenue has appeared relatively flat, the underlying story is more nuanced: 22 consecutive quarters of profitability, improving franchisee economics, and a renewed push toward measured unit growth after decades of contraction.
Solano’s background is well known to investors who follow the name. Prior to joining RAVE, he held senior leadership roles at Domino’s Pizza during one of the most consequential operational turnarounds in restaurant history. That experience — particularly around product reformulation, brand repositioning, retail reimaging, and disciplined franchise system execution — has materially shaped the strategic framework now being applied at Pizza Inn.
Our conversation focused less on headline financials and more on structure: the legal and governance changes that reset control of the brand’s advertising fund, the sequencing of turnaround initiatives (food → media → retail image → replication), the tension between profitability and scale, and the open question that ultimately defines the equity story — whether Pizza Inn can meaningfully accelerate net unit growth after 24 years of decline.
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of that discussion.
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Franco Chomnalez:
Brandon, thanks for joining me for this interview with Sophon. For context, I’m a full-time investor with a prior background as a strategy consultant and hedge fund analyst. Today I run Sophon Capital Research with my partners Pascal Dangtran and Imren Johar to provide fundamental investors with stakeholder-led industry research.
We began looking at RAVE a few months ago after Ed Dorsey, who is a pretty well-known commentator and investor, cited it as his favorite company with a market cap below $500 million dollars, which obviously is a very strong endorsement on his part. I started looking at it and it caught my eye as an interesting and promising turnaround story.
My first question is a bit long, but here goes: You were an executive with Domino’s Pizza from 2008 to 2014. During that time, you were the Vice President of Innovation and then the Vice President of Development, roles in which you oversaw key initiatives such as the revamping of the menu and introduction of new SKUs, as well as the redesign of Domino’s retail and brand image.
I’m well aware — and I’m sure many of my subscribers are as well — that those specific changes weren’t really cosmetic adjustments or tweaks but a complete operational turnaround, and resulted in Domino’s being one of the best performing stocks of the 2010s. I looked up the performance of the stock during the exact dates of your tenure and found that it nearly 6x’d over the course of that period, slightly over six years, which results in a pretty extraordinary annual compounding rate of roughly 30%.
Obviously, that experience and aspect of your background carries a lot of weight, and the few investors I’ve interfaced with who have looked at RAVE or are involved in it always cite your involvement at Domino’s and your role as CEO of the company as the primary key element behind their investment thesis for RAVE.
What I’m most curious about today is learning how your tenure at Domino’s informs your strategy today as CEO of RAVE. At a high level, what are the lessons you are bringing to RAVE from your Domino’s experience? What are the parallels between the two, or key differences between turning around RAVE versus turning around Domino’s? Obviously they are different beasts, but I’d be curious if you could elaborate and provide insight on that.
Brandon Solano:
The outline of the strategy is very, very similar between my time at Domino’s and my time at RAVE. Obviously very different companies and very different scale, but they have some things in common.
