Waco Restaurant Wins Baylor Family Business Award

by Alan Hunt

Poppa Rollo's Pizza of Waco has won a major award in the seventh annual Family Business of the Year competition sponsored by Baylor University's Institute for Family Business.
Poppa Rollo's won the Community Commitment Family Business Award. Hundreds of family businesses across Texas were nominated for the competition, which honors firms demonstrating strong business and family values and community commitment.
Other winners in the contest include Cloud Construction Co., Temple, which won the Small Family Business Award for companies with 50 or fewer employees, and Collin Street Bakery, Corsicana, which won the Founders Award, presented to the company judged to have best maintained the original concepts of its founders. Another Central Texas company, McCoy's Building Supply Centers, San Marcos, won the Family Values Award.
Family businesses in Wichita Falls, Pampa, Victoria and Dallas won other awards in the contest. The awards will be presented Thursday, Oct. 24, at a banquet in Austin.
Poppa Rollo's Pizza, Inc., Waco, has been run by Roland and Mary Duty and their family for 27 years, providing casual dining, party planning and catering. "Their service and commitment to their community has been exceptional," says Robert Hughes, program director of the Institute for Family Business.
"Just a partial list of the community organizations that the Dutys have volunteered their time, their pizzas and their facilities for includes the Advocacy Center for Crime Victims and Children, the Red Cross, Texas Fathers for Equal Rights, Wives and Grandparents Coalition, Adopt-A-School, the PTA, school bus safety, the Baylor Golden Wave Band and the Taste of Waco. As the Dutys put it, 'We have been very blessed in our business as in our family and we give of ourselves as a matter of stewardship.'"
The six judges for the Family Business of the Year contest included family business consultants and advisers and principals of successful family firms in Texas.
For more information contact Hughes at (817) 755-2265.