Vandewaters planning remodel for Holton's Dairy Queen

Wayne Vandewater first got into the restaurant business as a college student in Indiana, working as a cook at a White Cas­tle fast-food restaurant.

“It just kind of got into my blood,” said Vandewater, a 35-year veteran of the food service indus­try, on Friday.

Today, Vandewater and his wife, Tricia, are the new owners of Holton’s Dairy Queen franchise, having taken over in late April from Mark and Vickie Pruett, who owned the franchise for 22 years. The Holton business is one of two Dairy Queens owned by the Vandewaters, who hail from Mis­souri’s Lake of the Ozarks region.

“We’ve really enjoyed meeting the people in this community,” Tri­cia said. “We want to be as much a part of the community as we can.”

Wayne agreed, saying he and his wife inherited “a really good crew” from the Pruetts.

“We couldn’t have asked for a better place to start,” he said. “We’re always going to work to make things better.”

The Vandewaters’ plans to “make things better” include an up­coming remodel for the restaurant, with physical work on the restau­rant likely to begin this fall.

Taking over the Holton Dairy Queen was a different step for Wayne, who found himself with the opportunity to manage a restaurant while attending Purdue.

“I wasn’t finished with school yet, and I actually left school for a while to go pursue it,” he said of his early days in the restaurant business. “I enjoyed it, and so I left school. And then my parents pan­icked, so I went back.”

Wayne graduated from Purdue University Calumet in 1988 with a degree in restaurant and hospitality management, then went on to a career that encompassed several different areas of food service.

“I’ve managed country clubs, hospital food service and chain restaurants,” he said.

After eight years of working with the Fuddrucker’s restaurant chain as a field training instructor, Wayne joined the Applebee’s res­taurant chain in June of 1999. At that time, he and Tricia moved from the Chicago area to Apple­bee’s home base of Kansas City.

He worked with Applebee’s for about a dozen years as an executive director of training, then served as vice president of learning and de­velopment for about two years be­fore joining the P.F. Chang’s restaurant chain as a vice president of human resources in late summer of 2013.

It was at about that time when he and Tricia looked at purchasing the Dairy Queen franchise in Cam­denton, Mo., a town on the Lake of the Ozarks with a population simi­lar to that of Holton.

“He’s always been on the fran­chise side, and now he’s switched over to the franchisee’s side,” Tricia said. “It gives him a really great perspective on how things go to­gether.”

In early 2015, Wayne made the decision to go completely to “the franchisee’s side” and left P.F. Chang’s to look after the Dairy Queen, saying that “it just made more sense” to focus on the Cam­denton franchise. Not long after that, the Vandewaters began to look for a second Dairy Queen fran­chise.

They found out about the Holton franchise through a business broker who was also working with the Pruetts.

“Everybody told Mark that, well, if you’re looking to retire, it might take you five or 10 years to sell the restaurant and get the price you want for it,” Wayne said. “But we gave him a contract in just days in­stead of years.”

On April 28, the Vandewaters took over the Holton restaurant. Not long after that, Vickie Pruett told The Holton Recorder that she believed the Vandewaters were a good fit for the restaurant.

The Vandewaters continue to live in the Lake of the Ozarks area but still plan to get to Holton on a regular basis to check up on the business, its employees and its customers. They’re also looking forward to the upcoming remodel of the restaurant, which they said was likely to begin in September.

“It’s more than just making the outside more appealing and making the chairs more comfortable,” Wayne said. “It’s another chance to reintroduce yourself to the commu­nity and put a great foot forward.”