North Charleston, South Carolina-based Refuel Operating Co. LLC is not like all convenience-store chains.
For one, it has two CEOs: Travis Smith and Jon Rier, who were appointed to the roles in July. It has more than 500 team members who call central Texas home, and it stepped up when deadly flash floods hit the area on July 4. And it looks beyond the financials when considering an acquisition.
In July, it acquired eight convenience stores in Mississippi.
Smith joined CSP’s Vice President of Content Strategy Abbey Lewis on stage at CSP’sOutlook Leadership event in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, to peel back the curtain on Refuel’s operations.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
Abbey Lewis: What do you look for in potential acquisition targets, beyond just the obvious financial metrics?
Travis Smith: There’s the quantitative financial, quality asset, location things … but really what we look for is we look at the culture. And we’ve been really fortunate to acquire family-owned businesses where the people are just really good, and we've been able to bring that into the Refuel fold and kind of make it our own. But really, that's what we pay attention to the most when we're looking at buying a company.
Lewis: How do you approach then maintaining a consistent culture and consistent customer experience across all of these different disparate locations?
Smith: Early on, when Mark [Jordan] and I founded the platform with our investors, we really wanted to build a brand. Mark had started there in Charleston with the Refuel brand, and I think that that's a big part of it. We've built a cohesive brand over the last six years that does pretty well. I think the other thing we do is when we buy a company, our first town hall was in the back office of three different convenience stores, with eight managers in each town hall, where we're just kind of welcoming them to the Refuel family. And I think that that's how we kind of get the culture going from the beginning. They're not just joining a company, they're joining something that we're kind of building from scratch, and they like that. They're attracted to it.
Lewis: As a Texas native, how did the Texas floods affect you personally and how have you balanced that emotion with trying to get stores back open and helping the communities you serve?
Smith: I have a personal connection there. I was born in Georgetown, Texas. … you know, you see that kind of stuff on the news and, if it doesn't really affect you personally, you feel terrible for them, but when it does, you know, you kind of want to do something. But it was interesting—by the time I wanted to do something, which was pretty immediately thereafter, our team was already in motion. And, that's kind of the culture that we built there and, Texans get each other's backs. …
[The Refuel team has] even continued their efforts to organize a task force to go back because I think a lot of times when this stuff happens, everybody comes together for the first week or two and then after that, they kind of move on.
Read more about how Refuel and other c-stores stepped up after the floods here.
Lewis: How is having co-CEOs working out?
Smith: It’s working out great. After Mark and I started the platform in 2019, Jon joined us two months afterwards as our CFO, so Jon and I have been working together for a long time. When Mark and our investors elevated us to co-presidents, and then now co-CEOs, it was pretty easy to do. And I think that the good thing about this set up for us is, he’s my partner. He has a boss, and that’s me. And I have a boss, and that’s him. And I think the team really gets it. And the way we divide responsibilities is, I oversee M&A, development, legal, stuff like that, and then he oversees finance and IT, and then the revenue streams and ops kind of report directly into both of us.
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