Pie Face chain to raise $10 million, aims for $100 million IPO in 2012

Pie Face is aiming to be the first home-grown quick service restaurant to be valued at more than $1 billion, as it prepares for a $100 million-plus sharemarket listing next year.

Pie Face was founded in 2003 by former investment banker Wayne Homschek and wife Betty Fong, and is currently looking to raise $10 million from sophisticated investors in a pre-IPO placement.

Homschek expects the process, which is being handled by the Commonwealth Bank and Macquarie, to go for about a month.

He’s also planning for an IPO in 2012, but says this will depend on the success of the current raising, market conditions and the state of the company’s ambitious store rollout program.

By 2018, Homschek wants Pie Face to the first firm quick service restaurant chain to be valued at $1 billion listed on the ASX.

“We want to be what JB Hi-Fi is to electronics and Flight Centre is to travel,” Homschek tells SmartCompany.

“There’s no reason why it can’t be done with food.”

Pie Face, which currently has a valuation of $45 million, won’t proceed with a float until it is confident a valuation between $100-120 million can be reached.

“If that valuation isn’t achievable, we’ll hold back until we get it,” he says.

“We have the luxury of saying, let’s open another 10 or 20 stores before we press the button on the float, so we’ll do it when it makes sense.”

Homschek stresses an IPO is designed to provide greater liquidity rather than providing an exit for the couple, who now own about 20% of the business.

The bakery café chain already has 49 stores nation-wide, with 15 in the works at the moment and plans to focus on smaller capital cities and large regional centres.

Of these stores, 37 are franchisees while 12 are company owned.

“We’re happy to own and operate [the company-owned stores] because it keeps us very much in touch with what’s going on,” Homschek explains.

“It also provides extra cashflow and critical mass, although we’d prefer to focus in areas like Sydney and Melbourne where we can manage them.”

Beyond decorating its pies with faces that denote their flavour, another point of difference is that some of the Melbourne and Sydney stores are open 24 hours a day.

Homschek says there’s a market in Australia’s two biggest cities for 24-hour trading, with taxi drivers, security workers, bar staff and bar patrons all part of the customer mix.