A simple idea and a passion for quality took WingsUp! president Darren Czarnogorski from a student looking for inspiration to now being head of his own successful—and growing—franchise system

By Jordan Whitehouse

Back in 2004, a young Darren Czarnogorski was fresh out of university and working for an investment firm in Montreal. He considered doing an MBA, until his dad sat him down one day and asked him a question: Do you really want to be stuck in front of a spreadsheet your whole life?

“I definitely did not,” Czarnogorski remembers with a smile. “That was not my cup of tea.”

Instead, his dad suggested buying a small business and working on the front lines, mopping the floors, doing the dishes, hiring and firing—“all that fun stuff,” as his dad put it.

He didn’t have to think long. The thought definitely had a certain appeal. “I was a young guy, 24 years old, and the idea of running a business was just really exciting,” he says. “I’d learned all this theory in school and now I wanted to apply it.”

The small business he eventually bought was called WingsUp!, a wings restaurant that focused mainly on delivery and takeout. With only four locations in Ontario at the time, it wasn’t well known. Still, Czarnogorski thought that the wings were really good and that the straightforward concept and small store footprints made a lot of sense. He was hooked.

Flash forward 20 years, and that youthful excitement is still there. It helps that WingsUp! has grown to 35 locations across Ontario and will soon expand outside the province. But Czarnogorski says that what really gets him up every morning is the chance to work with other entrepreneurs.

“It’s the ability to meet new people and help them get into business and fulfill their dreams,” he says. “That’s really rewarding. If I can do that every day, then I’m a pretty happy person.”

Finding his flock

WingsUp! started as The Incredible Wing Ding in 1988 in Milton, Ontario. The rebranding came in 1999, and by the time Czarnogorski bought the company in 2004, there was the one corporate store in Milton and three other franchise locations in Ontario.

By 2011, Czarnogorski and his team had slowly grown the franchise to nine locations; however, it was during the pandemic when expansion started taking off. In August 2021, there were 15 locations. Today, on top of the 35 active locations, 11 are in construction or development and five are coming soon to places such as Calgary, Vancouver, and Surrey, B.C.—the first WingsUp! locations outside of Ontario.

“We’ve really just been in line with the shift that’s happening out there—people doing more things at home,” says Czarnogorski. “People are working from home, enjoying their entertainment from home, shopping from home. And so that’s what separates us—that we deliver something to your home that’s quick, convenient, and high quality.”

Still, while timing has been on WingsUp!’s side in recent years, you always need a good team to be successful, says Czarnogorski. He admits that early on he probably didn’t appreciate how important it was to have strong, intelligent people around him.

“I always thought that you could hire whoever and we’ll make it work. And so for years, I’d work with people who had no interest. I was kind of in a bubble.”

That bubble burst several years ago.

“Now I know that working with the right people, building the right team, surrounding yourself with super-smart people that are really hard working and dedicated to the greater cause makes all the difference,” says Czarnogorski. “I think once we started thinking like that, we found that we accelerated a lot faster and we got a lot better at what we do.”

Driven by details

Working with smart, hard-working people also makes the job of leading a franchise a lot more fun, says Czarnogorski. Today, some of his favourite times at WingsUp! are when he gets to dive into the details of the business with his team. That could mean trying to understand the nuances of customer service or the company’s supply chains. Or even dissecting store signage and design.

“It’s always interesting,” he says. “I never get bored because there’s always something coming up, always something to learn.”

The upside for WingsUp! franchisees is that they get the cumulative benefit of all that learning, intelligence, and hard work from the head office team, says Czarnogorski.

“When a new partner joins and they’re unsure about something, they have a resource in us that they can work with. We can share all our experiences and all our mistakes so that they don’t have to make the same ones.”

As for what WingsUp! looks for in potential franchisees, it varies between the operations, marketing, and supply chain teams. For Czarnogorski himself, he wants to make sure that he can get along with franchisees and that they can be engaged in the day-to-day of the business.

“A lot of the skills that are there to be learned can be learned. I wouldn’t say our process is overly complicated,” he says. “So what I want to see is the ability to work through problems together and that they’re dedicated to the brand, that they want to work on it.”

Words of wisdom

In the immediate future, the goal of WingsUp! is even more growth. By the end of 2024, the franchise will have opened over 40 locations. Czarnogorski says that there’s no doubt the cross-Canada expansion will continue, and the company may even soon dip its toe in the U.S.

“We’ve been starting to do franchise shows in Texas, of all places, but we just think that our product and what we do and how we do it aligns really well with that state,” he says. “We think it’s a growing state. We think it’s a well-diversified economy, and we see a gap in specifically what we do.”

Other priorities for the years ahead include continuing to improve partnerships with food delivery apps, continuing to improve the customer service experience, and continuing to sell high-quality, fresh, never-frozen chicken wings.

“It’s a narrow focus, and that’s by design,” says Czarnogorski. “If you have a 5,000-square-foot restaurant and half your seats are empty, but you’re doing delivery, that’s not a very profitable model. Because we make really good wings, take up little bits of real estate—between 800 to 1,200 square feet—we make that business model quite profitable for our franchise partners.”

Those franchise partners also have to put in the work across all parts of the business to see results, he adds. Which is why Czarnogorski biggest piece of advice for any franchisee is to not ignore local store marketing, especially in the early years.

“For the first year or two, this is incredibly important,” he says. “You have to see it as an investment in future success.” Czarnogorski says new franchisees tend to minimize local marketing at the start, not knowing how much business they can expect. In reality, cutting marketing is the worst thing one can do in that situation.

Patience and perseverance, he advises, is the best way to approach it. “There is a time component that can be frustrating; an expectation of instant benefit,” he explains. “But that is not how marketing works. You have to get out there, be part of your community, get to know other people, repeating your message and spreading the word until you get the results you desire. And this will never happen if you cut your marketing expense.”

Twenty years after his dad first floated the idea, Czarnogorski is definitely getting the results he desires from his business. And to think that none of it would have happened if he hadn’t learned that big lesson about team building.

“That’s what I’d wished I’d known when I was first starting out here—just how important it is to find and retain really intelligent, hard-working people,” he says. “If you have a strong team around, you can accomplish just about anything in the world. The rest is all just challenges to figure out together.”