Luna Grill, the San Diego-based Mediterranean restaurant chain, is welcoming retail real estate industry veteran Greg Thorburn to its leadership team. Thorburn has been brought on board to fill the newly created position of Vice-President of Real Estate.
As Luna Grill’s plans call for doubling their number of locations in 2014 to 20, and doubling again by the end of 2016 to 40 units, locating and securing first rate sites in a swift and effective manner is absolutely essential. Thorburn’s expertise makes him the perfect fit to help Luna Grill map out its national expansion.
Thorburn’s most recent experience derives from his work at Pacific Dental Services, a national operator of dental health practices, where he developed their national strategy for site selection across the country. By developing and integrating a cutting-edge analytics system that combines psychographic, demographic and competition data, he helped identify more than 300 locations where new practices were opened, and managed the expansion from 2 to 14 states over a 7 year period.
Thorburn grew up in McAllen, Texas, and graduated with a business degree from the University of Texas at Austin. After a few years on the East Coast, he moved to Southern California in 2005, where he resides with his lovely wife and their three boys.
This announcement follows on the heels of a series of strategic moves by the thriving chain. Last year, a new store development funding facility was secured from Argent Bank, a fully owned subsidiary of Sterling Financial Corporation. Shortly after, Daniel Lowe, a seasoned Chipotle operations manager, joined Luna Grill to develop an effective multi-store management system.
posted by: Eric Fujimori
7/20/14
