President and CEO Charlie Morrison has launched a turnaround strategy at Pizza Inn that is designed to improve franchisee profitability and position the chain for expansion.

With those tumultuous times behind, Morrison has implemented a turnaround strategy that focuses on enhancing operations, customer service and product quality to improve franchisee profitability and position the chain for expansion.

The chain has gone through tough times. How does your turnaround strategy address those problems?

Over the years we had lost focus on what was necessary to be a good restaurant company. And that real focus is operations and taking care of the guests. Our revitalization plan starts first with the customer and addresses the product and the service that we provide to those guests. So we've rolled out recently a back-to-basics program that helps support that.

It does two things. One, it brings back a little bit of nostalgia. So you'll see a warmer Pizza Inn. A little more brick in the interior finishes. You'll see a little bit more of that, a little bit on the exterior. You'll see more of Jo Jo [the pizza-tossing mascot Pizza Inn brought back as part of the turnaround plan].

What you'll see that's more current and exciting is, we will retain our back-fed buffet, but we'll place it in a position that's closer to the kitchen and more efficient to operate. That's one of the challenges that we had with the previous prototype.

The restaurant will be also organized and prepared for delivery and carryout business. Our prior prototype was very focused on the buffet concept only, and we missed an opportunity to generate more delivery sales.

How are you going to improve product quality, and what new products can we expect from Pizza Inn?

Well I can't tell you what the new products will be at this point, but I'll give you a couple of examples. From a quality perspective, we have one new product that's coming out and will be launching here this fall. It's our Chicago deep-dish, thick-crust pizza.

Chocolate Pizzerts have been recent new products that we've introduced. A Pizzert is our pizza dessert, which is in this case a layer of chocolate cake iced and topped multiple different ways to make it into a rocky road, a s'more or other different types of products that consumers can enjoy.

You'll see a lot more R&D coming out of Pizza Inn in the future.

What results have you seen so far since launching these turnaround initiatives?

We just released earnings this week and announced five straight quarters of positive same-store-sales growth and over 2 percent same-store-sales growth for the year last year, which in this economy is a great feat for us to have achieved.

Read or listen to an extended interview with Charlie Morrison.