Domino's Began With $900 and a Used Beetle

In December 1960, two brothers from Michigan took over a small pizza shop in Ypsilanti called DomiNick’s. Neither had run a restaurant. Tom Monaghan, 23, had served in the Marine Corps and in 1959 enrolled at the University of Michigan, intending to become an architect. His younger brother, Jim, carried mail for the Post Office.

The shop’s owner, Dominick DiVarti, gave them a lesson in making pizza that lasted about 15 minutes, according to Volkswagen’s account of the company’s early days. Then the shop was theirs.

1960: Borrowed money and a delivery car

How much the brothers paid is told in slightly different ways. Most accounts, including Entrepreneur’s profile of Monaghan based on his autobiography, Pizza Tiger, say they borrowed $900 to buy the store. One book-length history of the company says the deal was about $900 in cash plus an agreement to take on the store’s debts, which different tellings put anywhere between $2,200 and $8,000.

What everyone agrees on is that the business was small and in poor shape. Entrepreneur calls it a failing pizza store. Its most important piece of equipment was a used 1959 Volkswagen Beetle, which the brothers drove around town delivering pizzas.

The work was relentless. Entrepreneur reports that Tom put in upwards of 100 hours a week. Jim kept his full-time job as a mail carrier.

1961: Half a business for a Beetle

About eight months in, Jim decided he had had enough. He offered his half of the business to Tom, and the two settled on a trade: Jim’s 50% for the Volkswagen.

“It was a setback, but I took it in stride and was optimistic,” Monaghan later wrote in Pizza Tiger, as Entrepreneur quotes him. For a mail carrier with a steady job and a brother working himself to exhaustion, getting out with a car looked sensible. Nobody, Tom included, could have known what the half was going to be worth.

1965: A new name, three dots

Tom ran the business his own way. He dropped sub sandwiches from the menu and concentrated on delivering pizza, especially to college campuses. By 1965 he owned three stores.

He wanted all three under one name, but DiVarti would not let him keep using DomiNick’s. As the story is usually told, an employee named Jim Kennedy came back from a delivery and suggested “Domino’s.” Monaghan liked it immediately and renamed the business Domino’s Pizza in 1965. The logo carried three dots, one for each store.

In 1967 Monaghan sold his first franchise. Entrepreneur reports that the company ended that year with a profit of $50,000. Domino’s found its customers in college towns and near military bases.

1998: The $1 billion sale

Domino’s grew into one of the biggest restaurant chains in America. Entrepreneur describes it as the country’s second-largest pizza chain by the time its founder stepped back.

In 1998, after 38 years in charge, Monaghan announced his retirement and sold 93% of the company to Bain Capital, the Boston investment firm, for about $1 billion. A pizza shop bought with borrowed money had become a billion-dollar business, almost all of it owned by one man.

The Beetle trade looks very different in that light. Jalopnik once worked out that the half Jim gave up in 1961 would have been worth roughly $500 million by the time of the sale. That figure is arithmetic, not a price anyone paid, but it shows how much rode on a decision made in a hard first winter.

Domino’s today

Domino’s Pizza, Inc. is now a public company listed on the Nasdaq. Most of its stores belong to franchisees, and most of the company’s own money comes from supplying them with dough and ingredients and collecting royalties on their sales.

In its results for 2025, the company reported global retail sales of $20.1 billion across its company-owned and franchised stores, and 22,142 stores at the end of the year: 7,186 in the United States and 14,956 abroad. Its own revenue for the year was $4.94 billion. The company describes itself as the largest pizza company in the world.

What the record shows

• The first store was cheap because it was failing. Monaghan learned the business on a shop that nobody else was eager to own.
• A partner who leaves early can leave the most behind. Jim’s decision was reasonable for a man with a steady job. It also cost him half of everything that came after.
• Focus beat variety. Cutting the menu and building around fast delivery to college towns gave Domino’s an advantage that was easy to explain and hard to copy.
• Franchising turned one man’s stores into a system. The company that started with one oven now earns most of its money serving thousands of franchise owners.

Franchising built other giants in this archive. Ray Kroc’s McDonald’s made its money from the land under its restaurants, and Colonel Sanders signed up restaurants one by one with a recipe and a handshake.