THOUSAND OAKS : Pizzas Helped Her Make Some Dough

Jill Lederer, president-elect of the Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce, has turned mozzarella into a lot of moola.

At 19, she got her first job answering phones for a Domino’s Pizza store in Ohio. Seventeen years later, she’s still part of the pizza chain. Only now she is one of the nation’s largest Domino’s franchisees, with 11 stores in the Conejo and San Fernando valleys.

“The restaurant business kind of gets in your blood,” said Lederer, who left college when she realized that she was working more hours at Domino’s than studying. “It’s very people-oriented and customer-oriented.”

Lederer, 36, will start her term as chamber president in October. Now a fixture in the business community, whose restaurants employ about 250 people, Lederer said she wound up in Thousand Oaks by accident.

E. T. brought her.

“I was attracted by the movie “E. T.” and the scenes of rows and rows of tract homes. I thought, that’s where I want to build my Domino’s Pizza store.”

She was working for Domino’s in Indianapolis but wanted her own franchise. Demographics, and E. T., which portrayed a California family visited by an alien, attracted her to Southern California, where Domino’s was not widely known.

“I had four days off from my job in Indianapolis to find a town, find a store location, get it approved by the company and find a loan.”

Frustrated when she couldn’t find an E. T.-type neighborhood in Pasadena, Covina, Burbank, Van Nuys or other San Fernando Valley cities, she drove out the Ventura Freeway. She got off at an exit to have lunch and took a walk near the restaurant.

“I didn’t even know where we were. I said, ‘How about this town?’ ”

The town was Thousand Oaks.

A bank loaned her $10,000 but only if she used some of the money to buy a car as collateral. She bought the cheapest one that she could find, a small Toyota.

She and her boyfriend, now her husband, did much of their own renovation work and leased the equipment at a high interest rate. The store opened on North Moorpark Road in 1983.

“The day it opened, we had $200 in our checking account. We’d sold everything.”

She called her company Born To Run Inc., after one of her favorite Bruce Springsteen tunes. It seemed to match her mood and energy.

Lederer now spends one day a week in the stores checking morale and customer service. And she can still make a pizza pie.

“It’s my favorite thing to do. I don’t get to do that very much,” she said.

In December, she’ll receive a master’s degree in business administration from Pepperdine University.

The little Toyota is long gone. Lederer now drives a fuchsia Porsche 911. Her license plate reads “PZZA MKR.”