When Bryon Stephens worked as a dishwasher at a Holiday Inn after high school, he was just trying to pay the bills, unsure of his future career path.

Forty years later, the 56-year-old native of Logansport, Indiana is the president and chief operating officer of Marco’s Pizza, the nation’s fastest-growing pizza franchise with nearly 700 restaurants in 35 states — and hundreds more on the way.

Stephens recently had the chance to reconnect with his roots in the trenches of the service industry with an appearance on the CBS reality show “Undercover Boss.”

Portraying a middle-aged entrepreneur named Jay tasked with learning lessons from companies for a different reality-based TV show, Stephens was able to go behind the scenes of his burgeoning business in a unique way.

“Anytime you go in and you’re not undercover, you’re going to see a sanitized view of how the company operates,” he told the Logansport, Indiana Pharos-Tribune. “I think people are afraid to speak their mind.

“But when they don’t know it’s you and it’s under the guise of a completely different ruse that was set up for the show, it gives people the unfiltered ability to just be themselves and for me to get to know them who they are,” he said.

During 10 days of filming last October, Stephens visited the Marco’s Pizza distribution warehouse in Maumee, Ohio, as well as restaurants in Huntersville, North Carolina, Sanford, Florida and McKinney, Texas.

At each location, he had different jobs — from preparing dough to delivering other ingredients — and and worked alongside several employees. Stephens said he didn’t know up until five minutes before entering a business who he was working with and what jobs he would be doing. He had to learn on the fly.

“Everything was captured just as it was happening in real time,” he said.

The company has more than 10,000 employees at its hundreds of locations. The few employees he interacted with, he said, had eye-opening stories of their personal lives and the challenges they face in work and in life.

“It was just one of the most valuable exercises and opportunities I’ve ever had in my whole career,” he said.

Because of his experience, Stephens wants every corporate employee to spend one day each year working in a restaurant.

“Sometimes, those of us in the support center think we’re working hard and we lose sight of the fact that the real action for our business is taking place every day with the interaction of more than 10,000 of our employees with our customers,” he said.

Stephens moved back to Logansport a few years ago after his career moved him around the country for three decades. He commutes to Marco’s Pizza headquarters in Toledo, Ohio, each week. He and his family owned a local pizzeria, the Boardwalk Cafe, in the 1990s before selling it. It eventually was sold again before Stephens’ wife, Patricia, took ownership of it in 2013.

Stephens says his turn on a network reality show reminded him of many lessons he learned during his career, lessons he tries to impart to his workers and those in his hometown.

“Anything is possible for anybody if they put themselves out there and they do their best,” he said. “Dreams do come true.”

Middelkamp writes for the Logansport, Indiana Pharos-Tribune.