Wawa All the Way
In February, a few days after the Philadelphia Eagles had won their first Super Bowl, a suburban convenience store celebrated. Hard.
The early-morning event nominally marked the reopening of the renovated store—a squat, tan outpost on a busy road—but it also doubled as an outpouring of football frenzy. Green-and-white noisemakers rattled. Eagles cheers punctuated the formal remarks. The mayor spoke, backed by rows of potato chips, while rush-hour commuters darted in for coffee and breakfast sandwiches. A towering goose mascot helped cut a big red ribbon.
In the back room, wedged between computer servers and a first-aid kit, a brown packing box of Newport Menthol Gold at his feet, the man largely responsible for this $10 billion family empire grinned. “People ask what a nonexecutive chairman does. I tell them: Whatever he wants!” jokes Dick Wood, 80, who possesses, beneath the kindly exterior of a soft-spoken Florida retiree, a spine of steel. “I think I’m a myth.”
Among entrepreneurs, almost. Most family businesses don’t survive the third generation, yet Wood is comfortably watching his multi-generation company thrive. That would be Wawa, the much-beloved convenience store that you likely know either intimately or not at all.
Now Wawa’s semi-retired chairman, Wood was the second and longest-serving chief executive of a four-CEO company, one that’s weathered 54 years of family in-fighting and recessions and several failed expansion attempts. Wood kept Wawa private, but also started handing it off to nonfamily leaders more than a decade ago, betting that the best way to ensure Wawa’s future was to separate it from its founding family. His wager paid off. Wawa is, still, aggressively growing: It now has almost 800 locations—none franchised—and 30,000 employees in six states (plus Washington, D.C.).
Founded in 1964 by Grahame Wood—Dick’s first cousin once removed—Wawa began as a roadside dairy market in the Philadelphia suburbs. Its founder likely wouldn’t recognize Wawa today, as it expands throughout the East Coast and audaciously tries to muscle out of the gas-station ghetto to compete with the likes of Panera, Starbucks, and Sweetgreen.
After decades of pushing cheap gas and cigarettes and made-to-order sandwiches to suburban crowds, Wawa is starting to deemphasize two of the three. The current CEO, Chris Gheysens, is swapping in Tesla charging stations, kale salads, and small-batch coffee,
