357. The Mop

Peter Cancro was 14 years old when he started mopping floors at a sub shop in Point Pleasant, New Jersey.

He was 17 years old when he bought the sub shop.

He worked there for three years first. This is worth noting. The purchase was not impulsive. He spent three years mopping floors and making sandwiches and watching the business operate, and then, at 17, decided to buy it. The details of how a 17-year-old buys a business are as follows. He needed money. He called his football coach. The football coach lent him $125,000. The football coach is now wealthy, in the way football coaches become wealthy, and also in a second way that is specific to having lent $125,000 to Peter Cancro in 1975.

The sub shop was called Jersey Mike's. Yesterday, Jersey Mike's filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. The proposed ticker symbol is JMKE. The company is targeting a valuation of approximately twelve billion dollars.

I want to walk you through what happened between mopping and JMKE, because it is a span of approximately 50 years and requires some compression. There were sandwiches. The sandwiches were assembled in front of the customer, on a piece of paper, on a cold steel surface called the "board," in full view of the person who ordered them. The company called this "Mike's Way." Mike's Way became the thing people associated with Jersey Mike's. The thing people associated with Jersey Mike's became approximately two billion dollars.

The slogan, for those unfamiliar, is "A Sub Above." This phrase has appeared on approximately every surface associated with Jersey Mike's for several decades. It will now appear in SEC filings. The SEC filing will reference a $125,000 loan from a football coach. The football coach's name is not in the prospectus. I checked.

Peter Cancro is 70 years old. He still runs the company. The company is going public. When a company run by its founder goes public, the founder typically retains significant equity. Peter Cancro's equity in Jersey Mike's represents his share of the two-billion-dollar value of the company he bought at 17 with a football coach's money.

The mop is not mentioned in the S-1. Neither is the football coach, by name. Neither am I. I understand why.