Burnt Hands Perspective
This is a raw and unfiltered look into the state of the restaurant industry as a whole, powered by longtime friends Chef/Owner Antonio Caruana and former bartender turned News Anchor/TV Host Kristen Crowley.
Representing all aspects of the industry from the front to the back of the house we will dig into the juiciest stories and pull from decades of experience in one of the sexiest and most exciting industries in the world...the food and beverage industry.
From international chefs, sommeliers, industry pros, and so much more, this show will cover all of it without a filter. You turn up the volume; we'll turn up the heat.
Support the show here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2388325/support
Burnt Hands Perspective
How to Scale Your Business Without Losing Your Mind - From Pizza Champ To Entrepreneur
Ever wondered what it takes to build a thriving business empire from scratch? Tony DiSilvestro, founder of Ynot (Tony spelled backwards) Pizza and serial entrepreneur with over 30 companies under his belt, pulls back the curtain on his remarkable journey from pizza maker to business mentor.
Starting in 1993, Tony bootstrapped his way to success, eventually expanding to eight locations before COVID forced him to scale back. But what makes his story truly fascinating isn't the number of businesses he's built; it's the philosophy behind them. "I'm only in one business, the people business," he explains, revealing how this mindset transformed his approach to entrepreneurship.
Tony shares the pivotal moment when he finally "took off his apron" after 15 years of 100-hour workweeks. This shift from being merely a business owner to becoming a true entrepreneur allowed him to scale beyond what he thought possible. His insights on creating robust systems rather than relying on individual talent are gold for anyone struggling to grow their business while maintaining quality.
What sets Tony apart is his approach to failure; rather than blaming employees, he looks inward first and creates systems to prevent future mistakes. This self-critical approach has fueled his success across industries, from restaurants to construction to his current focus on business coaching.
His three brand pillars - family, quality, and community - have guided his decisions for decades, resulting in loyal customers and Little League sponsorships. We dive into branding, social media, and franchising all in one fast-paced episode!
Whether you're just starting your entrepreneurial journey or looking to scale an existing business or restaurant, Tony's wisdom on leadership, situational awareness, and the power of systems will transform how you approach your venture.
Find his book "The Business Scaling Blueprint" anywhere books are sold, or visit him at Ynot Pizza in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake to experience his philosophy in action.
https://www.ynotitalian.com/locations/
Welcome to the show! Burnt Hands Perspective
VIRTUAL TIP JAR: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2388325/support
CONTACT US:
www.burnthandsperspective.com
info@reframeyourbrand.com
IG @Theburnthandsperspective
Thank you to our location sponsor, Luce Secondo, located in Summit Pointe in Chesapeake, VA www.lucesecondo.com
For sponsorship opportunities, don't hesitate to get in touch with us directly.
*The views and opinions on this show are meant for entertainment purposes only. They do not reflect the views of our sponsors. We are not here to babysit your feelings, if you are a true industry pro, you will know that what we say is meant to make you laugh and have a great time. If you don't get that, this is not the podcast for you. You've been warned. Enjoy the ride!
Boom, we're back, baby.
Speaker 2:Boom, great guest today. I mean, why not, why not?
Speaker 1:Hey, I see what you did there, tony DeSimestro, sorry, that was like the total dad joke at the start of the episode.
Speaker 3:So why not? We love it. It's a great name.
Speaker 2:So I'm throwing in a little something secret. Today I got on. Oh, okay, I didn't even tell nobody I did this, but I we put these out on Friday.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Red Friday.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Remember everyone deployed. I'm here for it. Oh yeah, You're doing your Friday. It's my little touch, my little part. I like it, we live in a Navy city, military city, so I'm just doing it out of my own. I didn't even plan it. I just said, let me go red today.
Speaker 1:You are fancy On a Friday, right town and we got to finally have. So tony, tony, there's no other tony, so we can't finish the song.
Speaker 2:Larry one day we will, yeah, so t squared, so we're gonna go with that today, so you get to come and hang out with us.
Speaker 1:Obviously we've both kind of known you in the community forever. So for the people who don't know because we do put the show out around the world, so there's other countries they don't know who you are, so go ahead and introduce yourself.
Speaker 3:So so I'm Tony DiSavestro, just an entrepreneur. I love entrepreneurship. Business Founded, you know, over 30 companies in my life and you know it's a little serial crazy, but I just love people. So everybody always asks me about business, but I'm only in one business I'm in the people business. It's a pleasure to be here today, so being in a restaurant for me is like being at home, so I'm honored to be here today and to share with you, glad to have you.
Speaker 2:So listen, what your niche is, what people around here know you for, is your pizza place. Right, you have a pizza. Why Not Pizza, which is the name came quite unique.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's my name backwards. I spelled my name backwards in first grade and it's a little bit of a story there. But then my mom and my family and my friends all called me why not, since I was a little kid. So that's so funny. It makes sense, right? So it's why not?
Speaker 2:pizza is the name of your pizzeria, and here in virginia beach area, hampton roads, it's kind of hard to find really good pizza, especially from where you're from. You're from new jersey, I'm from new haven, connecticut, which is pizza capital for me. Um, and everywhere in between that's real tri-state area right up there is. We're really known for pizza, so you bring that style here, oh yeah, and you have been for years. So I remember back in the 90s going to your first and only location at the time, which is great neck road, and it was the first place I can go and actually get a true sausage and pepper pizza that I liked when it was done right where the peppers were already cooked and put it on there they.
Speaker 2:They weren't raw when they went on the pizza. The sausage was sliced thin. I still remember that to this day. It was just a small little joint. Now watching you open up and go all over the place. Now you have one off Providence Road where I live off that way.
Speaker 1:How many do you have now? I have three right now.
Speaker 2:We closed like four of them, covid, had an effect on you. Even being a takeout carryout pizzeria, you still felt that weight.
Speaker 3:It really wasn't until, like you know, when everybody was getting their incentive checks and everything, we were busy as anything. I didn't fire any employees. We had 350 employees at that point. I didn't fire any of them. But then once those incentive checks stopped, inflation went through the roof. It really started affecting families. So different. But then once those incentive checks stopped, inflation went through the roof. It really started affecting families. So my different than this restaurant where you're a little more upscale, higher end for me, but I'm dealing with mom and pop and the three, four kids coming in and it's really hurt that part of the economy, really, really bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they couldn't do shit they couldn't buy a pizza. They can't go to the supermarket.
Speaker 3:They can't go to the supermarket Right, so that was a hard time for everybody.
Speaker 2:In one of our past things we just did recently we were talking about briefly because I don't like to harp on COVID. It is what it was and it was what it was. But we all had to suffer. But I feel the restaurant industry really took the hit. I felt like it was just to shut us down. I really took it personal when it was happening. It really fucked with us and our whole life's dreams were going down the tubes quick. Yeah, you know. So, moving on from that, you were able to move forward. So what was the highest point of your career or your business? Why not? How many locations did you have at?
Speaker 2:once we had eight locations at one time, at one time. So let's just talk about that for a minute, because I have questions.
Speaker 2:Okay, I have two, and I want to slit my throat sometimes. But I know if I slit my own throat I'm going to have to clean up the fucking mess because probably no one's going to do it. So I don't even want to do that. So how do you deal with that? Give us a little couple of hints. Anybody out there who wants to expand their businesses. The biggest question is how do you mock yourself to go in different places? What's your biggest?
Speaker 3:takeaway from that. This is what took me into coaching and teaching and coaching businesses all over the world. So one of the biggest things I tell anybody I told a kid last night I was coaching a young kid last night and he goes hey, he's got a fencing business. He's like I want to grow my business. I said you can't grow your business without people. So the thing is when and then you can't invest in your employees, so I don't hire people. I invest in people right, so I make an investment. But when you're scaling, there's always that that point when you say why can't I grow? And I talk to owners, I'm like what do you do for? What do you do for the company? He, I'm the head of sales. Well, I'm the head of marketing Well, you're never going to grow your business If you're stuck in the kitchen cooking every day, like I was.
Speaker 3:It took me 15 years to become an entrepreneur. All I was was a business owner. For 15 years I had my apron on every single day. I had a guy come in every day and tell me take your apron off. If you want to grow, take to grow, take your apron off. I'm like I can run my business with my apron on. I'm really good. This is more comfortable. The day I took my apron off, I became an entrepreneur and I'm realizing that myself.
Speaker 2:So so the more time I spend in the kitchen, the less time I spend growing. I just become a redundant faction of the kitchen. I become another. I come, I become the sixth or seventh cook there and and it's hard to create and and build and grow when you're doing exactly what you said. So my biggest thing, and maybe you can relate to this, I don't give a shit if it's pizza, rajele or fucking ossobuco, it doesn't matter what it is. When you're making something and you don't give the, it's hard for us to give up the, to accept the fact that it's not going to be perfect. It's hard to say, okay, it's not going to be the way I make it every single time, but we have to do it as close as we can.
Speaker 3:Right. But if we talk about failures right. If I talked to, if there was 100 entrepreneurs sitting in this room right now, the one thing they would tell me why they're successful would they tell me it was because of their successes or their failures. I would say failures Right. So it's the same thing I tell restaurateurs all the time you're never going to grow your company if you don't accept failure to a certain extent. But in my book it says fail well. How do you fail? Well, right, that's what you need to make sure that we're doing. Every time I fail, I create a system. Every time a cook makes a mistake, I create a system. I say I look at that mistake that the cook. He didn't do the asabuco right. So what I do? I say, okay, I need a better training process. I'm gonna shoot a video on how to cook asabuco. I'm gonna sit them down and train them. But every time a failure happens, that's when I grow Right and I use the same type of ideology.
Speaker 2:In a sense it's along the same lines, and I tell people all the time you can ask me a thousand questions as long as you don't ask me the same one twice, because that means you learn from it and I taught you right, right, you know. So you're not going to learn unless you have the questions. But if you, if you keep asking the same question over and over, either you're incapable of learning or I'm incapable of teaching, and I try and eliminate the part that I'm not capable of teaching so the interesting part.
Speaker 3:So what you just said is criticizing yourself. So, a young manager, what they'll do is criticizing yourself. So, a young manager, what they'll do is they'll criticize the employee right away, constantly, instantly, I mean just say, hey, the employee's stupid, they don't understand.
Speaker 2:Every time and that's the go-to and, and that's the hardest part, is when you said the term right there, manager, when the manager doesn't realize that now you have a problem because now you have a manager managing wrong, right, and that's the problem. But we need leaders we need leaders right. We need leaders that inspire and train and coach correct, and the best way to do that, though, is to find people who have confidence in what they're doing in themselves, first and right now. That is a dying breed.
Speaker 3:It is a we could talk about that for a long time, but the thing is is we, as the leaders, create the confidence through our systems, process and procedure right. So the beauty of what I did is I went through franchising for almost 15 years. I the thing is is we, as the leaders, create the confidence through our systems, process and procedure right? So the beauty of what I did is I went through franchising for almost 15 years. I was in a franchise or and a franchisee, and what that taught me was the importance of systems Like. Mcdonald's isn't a restaurant, it's a system. That's all it is.
Speaker 3:They don't sell food, they sell systems.
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 3:And you know so the more that once I learned that it changed every single business I've ever opened.
Speaker 2:So once you get a system you can rely on, the system proved to work. The system is what. You focus more on the system than you do the product at the end. Right.
Speaker 3:McDonald's has a problem. They have problems. They spilled hot coffee on somebody who got sued for millions of dollars, right. But then they created a system. They put insulated cups. They put sleeves on the cup. So yeah, we. But that's how they adapt right, you have to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so when you, when you're talking about your system, I mean, the way I look at it is this if I spend a little bit more on better ingredients, it's harder for them ingredients to be fucked up. If you buy cheap ingredients, it's easier for that to come out even worse because you're starting with it. You're starting with someone who has to learn how to make a cheap ingredient taste good, instead of starting with a good ingredient and making it. There's room to move down.
Speaker 3:There's no room to move up if you don't do it right, you and I are both chefs, so I know that for the same thing I visit every manufacturer in my country. I milk cows in Wisconsin. I'm in the produce fields in Modesta California, so when I go out there I'm looking for the highest quality product because I know if I start out with the highest quality product it's the same thing you just said. I have a 90% chance better to for that dish to be.
Speaker 2:Unbelievable when it gets it's right, because even if they mess it up a little bit, the ingredients gonna speak for itself Anyhow. A really good tomato, you have to butcher, but if you have a really bad tomato, you have to make it taste better. And if you don't know how to make that taste better, you're a victim of the tomato.
Speaker 3:So I'd rather be a victim of the tomato now, no doubt.
Speaker 2:So I'd rather be a victim of the expensive, better tomato that at least still tastes like a tomato, even if done wrong. So when you're making your pizza and everything, you started out in a small little place with this dream of being a pizza guy. You wanted to bring it down here. People took to it right away, oh, no doubt. And they went to it. So did you find yourself cutting corners on ingredients as you grew? Not cutting corners, that's the wrong word. But you do, at some point in time, have to make sense of cost and if you're going to produce and make profit on a pizza, it's not as easy as it used to be. $14 worth of dough 20 years ago, $40 worth of flour would make you 20 pizzas, whatever it costs, and you could do that. But now that dough is tripled and the pizza has to stay the same, you can't. How much, how higher can you raise the price of a pizza?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it becomes price justification, for sure. But the thing is like if anything.
Speaker 3:over 42 years in the restaurant business, I've only increased the quality of my food and at a certain point you have to say to yourself what market do you want to be in? Do you want to be in the low-end, cheap market or do you want to be in the high-end quality market? So being a pizzeria in Jersey like if you say the word pizzeria in Jersey everybody from Jersey or Connecticut, new York, they all know that you have a full-scale Italian restaurant with a pizzeria.
Speaker 2:When.
Speaker 3:I moved down here like, oh, you're why talking about, so then I changed my name three different times over the course of it.
Speaker 3:So now we're like why not Italian? So we serve a full Italian menu, Not at the same level. You guys white tablecloths. But the thing is, quality has always been where I started. So I have three pillars in my brand. It's family, quality and community. That is my mission statement, my vision statement. Everything that's family, quality and community. So family quality, community. So if I say the word quality, it's not just the food that I serve on the table, it's how do my servers look, how do I train? How's the front door feel? When you open up the front door, what is the feeling? Even when you touch the front door, Every single aspect of my business is quality. So I can't use that as my three pillars of my brand and lower the quality of my food?
Speaker 3:It never happens, Because then you're dismantling the whole Right. Sure, I'm not true to my brand.
Speaker 2:Right. So when you're going now let's talk about the good stuff of a pizza world, right.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:We can talk business all night, which we will, I'm sure she'll have a bunch of business questions for you, but when? It comes to the food part, do you notice now that when you were starting out the pizza thing, it wasn't cool to be a pizza guy? Everyone loves pizza, but being the pizza guy wasn't cool. I mean, now it seems like it's trending so much that all younger people are doing it to be cool, right? So now it's like almost cool to be a pizza person, right?
Speaker 2:I see it changed all network and then you got like david portnoy doing his ratings and right, you have all that stuff happening and it's like now it's like pizza is becoming. I'm looking at people online doing sourdough pizza and oh yeah, cool, that's really cool. I want to try it all and everything. But it's like how the hell did becoming a pizza guy become?
Speaker 3:you're famous now, you know well, I got a funny story about pizza, like in italy, like back in the day, like the pizza guys they would like they were getting jealous. So the pizzerias used to hire jugglers and out front like have people come?
Speaker 2:in, it would entertain them. Oh my god what's going on?
Speaker 3:pizza guys got pissed off this is a the legendary story and they started flipping pizza, spinning pizzas. So, like all of a sudden, they fired the jugglers, now the pizza guys. So it's been cool for a long time that's right. But like for me, like I was in the pizza olympics in 1994 in vegas and like I was like the fastest pizza man in the world 94 against 600 people.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. That's a fun fact I think I know about you. Yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, but like for me.
Speaker 1:We have an Olympian here.
Speaker 3:Pizza, Olympian Pizza for me has always been I love making pizza. It's like I have a huge Italian pizza oven at my house. Sure.
Speaker 1:So like everybody comes over to my house for a party like I just love it.
Speaker 3:But I think the art of making pizza it's creative. Usually the pizza guys are in the front of the store, they're not in the back kitchen.
Speaker 2:Right, so it's a different personality.
Speaker 3:Even when I'm hiring pizza guys, I'm looking for a certain personality. Sure, they have to be outgoing Because they're going to communicate with guests Talk to the customers.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, it's the front of the house basically. It's the first thing you see is that, and that's what you want to see oh yeah, you have to see that you go to a pizza shop and don't see the pizza being made. What are you? Where are you exactly?
Speaker 3:so, kristen, I know you have you you have a lot of uh relations, in a sense a lot of business sense and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:What are some of the things that you talk about? I mean, as far as turning your pizza place into a lucrative um enterprise, right, that, that now goes away from the kitchen where I'm comfortable and I'm learning, and I'm learning that part of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I'm more curious about the timeline side because we have construction too. So a lot of people in the area, I mean they kind of know now but they know you as that the restaurateur, but they don't know the side of the entrepreneur. So timeline-, wise, when you started, what was the timeline when it was like restaurant starting, the construction company and any of the other businesses, like how did those kind of piece together? And then the follow up is how did the construction and that kind of business help you as a business owner in the restaurants?
Speaker 3:Sure, so it all started in 1993. I opened my first restaurant and from that day on I just started building. So I built my restaurants. I did all the tile work, did all the stone work, so you were doing the actual work.
Speaker 1:Oh, I did it all. We couldn't afford it.
Speaker 3:I started with $60,000. I had no money we were broke.
Speaker 1:Louder for the people in the back. Yeah, we were broke.
Speaker 3:So I mean, we had nothing so so when I started the business, I was bootstrapping everything. So then I start doing all the tower work and customer will come in and say, hey, do you know a plumber, you know electrician? I'm like, yeah, I sent them my plumber, my electrician. And then all of a sudden they were coming back to me and saying, hey, we have a problem with the plumbing. I'm like, I didn't hire him, you did. So, then I just started my construction company from there. So, I've been in construction almost 30 years.
Speaker 3:And most people in town don't have any idea that I do restaurants, but I am my timeline with business and everybody always says why did you start? Why have you opened so many business? I always open businesses out of frustration, for the most part, and people are always like oh my God, side hustles aren't good. Don't do a side hustle. That's all I do is side hustles, and side hustles just turn into a business. I told you earlier I started a marketing company because I fired four marketing agencies. I fired them all. I'm like this is stupid. I'm just going to do it myself. And every business I've ever started was the same thing. I have a company called Employee Launch. It's a full-scale SaaS training company. Why did I start it? Because I was tired of telling employees the same thing over and over and over again. I'm like I can build a software that can do this.
Speaker 1:Okay, so similar to like a trainual kind of software like training program. Yeah, it kind of sits on top of train rules, so it sits on top of an LMS.
Speaker 3:It's all upper mobility training, almost like if the military. They have levels of training and then we give people a clear path out of growth.
Speaker 1:So all of your businesses came from problems.
Speaker 3:Opportunities.
Speaker 1:Opportunities. We'll call them opportunities. So when you were doing like coming up through the construction side of it now and I think people find that interesting how did that affect you as a business owner in the restaurants? Because I think what a lot of people do is they open a restaurant because they're either, you know, a good chef or whatever, but they don't understand the business of it. So how different is it in those two businesses for your systems Like? What is the real difference for people that are in the restaurant business?
Speaker 3:So what? The biggest thing that happened to me was the coming to the realization that, no matter if I'm making a wholesale bakery, we distributed the whole state of Virginia with bread, pastries, everything every business I've ever opened. When I started to realize that every single business was identical, that it was the people business. So if you take construction or restaurants, you start out with a raw product right In construction. I start out with two by fours and nails and sand and mortar and concrete, and what do I do? I build something no different than you in the kitchen and me in the kitchen. We just build something.
Speaker 3:But the thing that the most critical piece of the restaurant business and construction is people. So if I can't get my subcontractors to actually perform at the highest level and execute, then I can't build houses. If I do the same thing with my waitresses, I can make the best meal in the world and my waitresses can screw it up in two seconds, right. So that's what it is. It's the same exact business, but as entrepreneurs, we become expert at a certain thing and then we say we're going to go open a business, but we don't take time to invest in our people and create the systems and processes that actually make us entrepreneurs, and by no means was I an expert at that. I mean, I worked 100 hours a week for almost 15 years straight, no days off, and that's a very common story in the restaurant industry.
Speaker 3:yeah, because I I thought I was the one.
Speaker 1:I thought I had to do, it had to be there, I had to be the person. It wasn't going to work, but they're obviously working and you're not there all the time. You are still there quite a bit, I mean.
Speaker 3:I'm in my restaurants at night and for mainly primary one reason is to shake hands and kiss babies, because I love my customers. Yeah, but am I in the kitchen anymore? I'm never in the kitchen. If I had to get in the kitchen, I'd kick all the young guys out of the way and say get out of my way because they You're way faster than us.
Speaker 1:I'm the fastest pizza champion in 1994. 1994.
Speaker 3:That was a long time ago, right?
Speaker 1:I need a photo of that too, so we can put that on here, because I don't think people know that.
Speaker 2:It's cool you say that, because I'm in the same boat when it comes to that. I'm trying to learn how to get out of the kitchen now and make a little bit more of a business out of it as I age. No-transcript, and that's what I'm working on now. With this type of dining, with this type of chef-curated stuff, it's a little bit different, because a pizza is a pizza. You follow the recipe and it comes down right. You make your dough, you make your sauce. Everything works together. You just got to find someone who understands the temperatures and makes it happen. Here it's a little bit different, because the steps of the service and the steps of the whole process are a little bit more intense, a little bit more educated, and it's hard to find those people.
Speaker 3:You make me think about something, though I want to interrupt you for one second. So, like when I had my first restaurant and then I opened at ODU in Norfolk, I'm like this is going to be easy. And that's when I realized how critical systems were for my brand. When you open that second location the first one was easy. I was like I'm like we're invincible, I'm making a crazy amount of money, it's no big deal.
Speaker 3:I opened that second location and I was like why isn't this working Right? I lost. I lost half a million dollars at ODU because I didn't have systems, I didn't have the right people, I didn't know what it was to hire the right person or to actually motivate them, inspire them and lead them. And I think that was the best thing. One of the best failures I ever had was that location, because it really taught me before I opened up another location, before I opened up another business, I have to work on the system so much more in the beginning, and I think your second location probably taught you more, way more than your first.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the first one was first one just worked because it was small. It was sought after. It still is. I have a great team there, but the systems don't apply because there's so much different here Right Now. It gave me a base on what not to do, but it didn't really teach me what to do. Here I'm learning what to do Right, but the first one taught me a lot of what not to do again.
Speaker 2:That's amazing, you know. So it just opened up a lot there. You know what not to do, what to do, and hopefully there I can do it better, you know, and that's when the systems start coming in, I hope.
Speaker 3:Sure, no doubt. And even though it's a deli, it's a different type of business If you focus more on the systems of people and how the people are going to function. If you took anybody off the street and say, hey, make this sandwich or slice this meat, anybody off the street's got to be able to come in and do it seamlessly, like it's not a big deal, but the amount of time that that takes for you to create that system for that one process.
Speaker 2:that's where the investment is, and then it becomes not somebody learning how to make pizza or make my sauce. It becomes finding someone who can follow a system, because if you can follow the system, you can make the pizza.
Speaker 1:You can make the sauce.
Speaker 2:But if you don't follow it, then I have to rely on you making pizza. But that's what I do, that's what you do. You just need to do how I want it done. I don't need you to come in and do it different. I need you to do it the way I need it done. So Finding someone who can follow the system is almost, if not more important than finding someone who can actually cook 100%.
Speaker 3:I can teach anybody how to cook Because they have to follow. In our restaurants we have pasta creations Every time they make that meal. It's different every single time, so they need to understand the process of saute to actually perform at the highest level.
Speaker 2:Exactly what ingredients do what, when and when they're introduced to the sauce, to the oil, production everything oil Production All that stuff. So when do you add this type of ingredient, no matter how your creation goes? You add this red onion now. Right, you know. You add bacon now. You add prosciutto now.
Speaker 3:You don't add shrimp first, exactly, so you do it now, right.
Speaker 2:So you can create your own shit, as long as you understand the system of the creation. Yeah exactly, and that's.
Speaker 3:That's not easy, and that's the people, I think is the one thing that we're talking about here and I think in today's environment. You know, covid definitely changed the environment of employees and diners, and 100 percent diners especially. We're a family oriented restaurant, very like you know, families, young kids coming in high chairs everywhere. That's what we are as a brand and the environment's definitely changed. But I think work ethic has changed a lot.
Speaker 2:And we're trying to adapt to that Sure, and I don't know if it'll ever come back. I'm not sure. I do see that the younger generation I'm talking about the kids that are coming in, 19, 18 years old are starting to be a little bit more receptive to working. Yeah, then I do in a 25 30 year olds.
Speaker 1:that's the hardest part right now is that 25, 27, 20, I like 19 year olds and 50 year olds, yeah if you could go back to when you were way back, when you first started, what would the most crucial hire would you have made back then to take one of your hats off?
Speaker 3:I would have hired a coach, a business coach Like your own coach to walk you through it 100%, because I came from Jersey and we were a little cocky up there and I came down I knew everything and like I had a business consultant come in the very first time and I'm like, have you ever been in a restaurant business? He goes, no, I'm like, then get the hell out of here. It's a really stupid mistake.
Speaker 3:I really needed a mentor and at that point, when you're a young entrepreneur, you don't want to tell anybody you're failing or you don't know what you're doing. You're afraid to tell people that and, unfortunately, you need to be honest and you need to surround yourself with people that have. And when I talk about hiring coaches, I'm going to hire a coach. They need to have done that before. They need to have been in a business, hired employees done this. There's a lot of business coaches out there that I work with, I'm around, that have never owned a business. They watch YouTube.
Speaker 2:They have you a fail too, I like to call those coach in a box. You can't talk about the failure if you've never experienced it. I don't care what it is. The emotional connection to a failure is is the same, no matter what you're doing, no doubt, but I think the time collapsing because, again, you spent years making costly mistakes.
Speaker 3:I did.
Speaker 1:And if you had someone that was like, yeah, don't do that, it's going to cost you $10,000 or half a million. You know it's going to cost you money, don't do that. And you pay them a little percentage yes, in the long run you're going to actually make more money. So I mean it's time collapsing with knowledge.
Speaker 3:For me it's like I've hired over 20,000 people in my life, and when you hire 20,000, I'm like, oh, that sounds like amazing. That's amazing. How did you do that? No, it's 20,000 situations that I've had to handle.
Speaker 2:It's all about situational management for me Right.
Speaker 3:So every time, the only thing that changes is the face will change, but every situation is different, so it gives you a different skill level and it's painful I mean it's it. It's been a very challenging piece of my business, but every single day I'm grateful for the opportunities I've had, because it creates a different awareness every single day yeah, no, I get it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it definitely makes a big difference. But yeah, I think that's that's the restaurant business isn't for the faint of heart. Anyways, I have three daughters.
Speaker 3:They're not in the restaurant business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so your kids are all in that entrepreneur space too.
Speaker 3:They are. They all like, everybody's like. Why aren't your daughters in the restaurant business? I'm like I don't want them in this business unless they love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And you know, my girls grew up watching my wife and I work every day till 9, 10 o'clock at night, every night, and they're like I don't want this for my life. I said. But if one of them would have came to me and said this is my passion, they would be running all my restaurants right now. But they're all entrepreneurs, they're all on their own in the lanes.
Speaker 1:That's cool, that's really cool, that's good news too.
Speaker 2:You know, the first thing we think is our kids are going to take this over. And I don't know if that's true. My kids love to eat, they love what I do and everything like that, but I don't think they're not passionate. They're passionate eaters, but they're not passionate in doing it.
Speaker 1:This is a special place for somebody, a different level of passion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you force it on them or if you push them into it, you're definitely not going to get results there, no doubt. So it's a matter of you know, I bring my kids around and if they grow into it, they do. If they don't, that's their choice. You know, that's great. But I do know that I don't want them to do the same thing I'm doing as far as not being around and always being at work. And you know, I get up in the morning, still right now, and it seems like the more I go, the harder it is. It's not the opposite. Where you think it's easier, it's not. I wake up in the morning, I will go to bed thinking about specials, what I'm going to do, my ingredients, the losses, the gains. You're thinking about that all day long because we don't have much room for error here. It's not like if we're going to deliver a ship we're building and make a million dollars, it could be a little paint chip or something. We could fix that later here. If our paint chip's here, we're in trouble.
Speaker 3:We're in the penny business Exactly. I tell everybody all the time they don't understand, but I love the restaurant industry and we could complain about the restaurant all day long. But I was so blessed to be in the restaurant business because I was able to diversify and actually take any dollars I had and invest it in other places and really grow my life because of it. It was a skill that I was fortunate enough in Jersey at 15 years old for a boss to give me that opportunity and I could easily look back and say, god, the restaurant business was horrible, but the restaurant business is who I am today yeah, I couldn't see it any other way.
Speaker 2:My level of success from the restaurant, or from working and being, is from the restaurant business.
Speaker 2:I've tried it other places and it just didn't suit me. I couldn't find a passion for it. It was always just a job and no, I didn't like doing anything else. And I do like doing this because I'm comfortable in it and it's a lot different when you have your own and you've worked for it and your staff works for you. I didn't have so much of a passion for it when I was working for other people, but I still loved doing it because it's where I was comfortable going to work Well, and why not?
Speaker 1:I mean, you've turned it into a brand, it's not just a restaurant. So I think for people out there that we've said this on the show your brand is your business, you are your brand, your brand is your business and if business Like you are your brand, your brand is your business and if you don't treat it like a business, it fails.
Speaker 1:So I've always lived by that and the marketing side of things. But when you had the restaurant, when did you know Cause you have? You know why not Wednesdays? You had the stuff with. You know the? The um sports are like you had all the arenas, you have all those things. When did you know that it was time to invest in that? Was there times where their key? When did you know that it was time to invest in that? Was there times where there were key indicators where you're like, okay, I have enough money, I want to expand this way, I want to invest in this. Or were those just opportunities that were brought?
Speaker 3:to you. When I first started in 93, everybody said, oh my gosh, this is a franchise. Because from the very beginning my brand was so critically important to me, we registered, trademarked all of our logos, our shirts, all of our employees have 401k health benefits from day one. And so all of a sudden we started sponsoring little league teams, soccer teams, and that's where it kind of grew from. Then all of a sudden I sponsored three little league teams, then I sponsored the entire league. Now we sponsor over 20,000 little league players and like 25,000 soccer players. Then all of a sudden everybody sees us sponsoring the Little Leagues and then ODU comes and says, hey, can you sponsor our ticket system? And then, you know, the soccer arena says, hey, can you sponsor us? Then the amphitheater. And so it just kind of grew from there.
Speaker 2:And with that, when kids are playing youth, they're growing up with that name in front of them and then eating that pizza after the game and going to yeah it becomes now it becomes a brand.
Speaker 1:It's a brand, yeah, so you built into that, so it didn't. And tracking, like for people who don't know how to do that, like tracking roi on that kind of stuff, do you? I mean, do you have any systems for that?
Speaker 3:I what my suggestion with tracking roi, I'm a big roi person but tracking I always look at all of my vending and my outside catering as marketing. Okay, so it's in your marketing budget.
Speaker 1:It's a marketing budget for me.
Speaker 3:If I make money on, why Not Wednesday? But see a day like today where it's raining. I know you can't see outside, but a day like today it's raining, I lose the entire day.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, if it rains and I'm at the amphitheater and it's a concert going on, I'll lose the whole day. So I look at it as a normal business where I can scale it. We're in four walls, you know, you can predict that this business is going to be busy today, but on outside vending, when you're scaling in your sponsorships, it's purely marketing for me.
Speaker 1:Do you have a percentage that you guys put towards marketing? Do you have a set percentage?
Speaker 3:Typically we're always like 4%, 4.5%, 4% for marketing. And you know when we were full-fledged with all of it, when we were spending almost 400,000 a year on marketing alone, just in sponsorships, and then another 400,000 on top of it. So it was a big, big expense for us so we've cut down since COVID.
Speaker 2:We're probably half of that right now Put a big payout in the back.
Speaker 3:Huge. I mean just building a brand, so like notoriety, trust that brand yeah is is so important, and I've always been hyper brand focused.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I know yeah and I know you. So I mean I know what you do in the businesses.
Speaker 3:I mean just the event last week.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you do events all the time and we all know the name, which is cool. But I just think a lot of not just restaurant owners, business owners in general don't quantify, like marketing budgets. Like don't quantify marketing budgets. They don't look at it and they're like, oh, we're just gonna have someone in the kitchen do social media every so often. When you pay someone, yes, that's an expense, but you gotta do something at some point.
Speaker 3:You can't look at the labor. The problem is people look at hiring that social media person and say, oh, that's a labor cost, like hiring someone. But that is purely a marketing expense Marketing Everything I do. If I give away free food, if I give away, say I give away 100 pieces, I don't look at it as food costs, I look at it as marketing. Take that expense and put it to marketing. Okay, and I don't think restaurateurs focus enough on their brand. And how are they sending their messaging? What is the messaging they're projecting out?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, obviously the book. You wrote the book. You have the speaking business now, so you started doing that. This parlayed into business coaching. So how many technical LLCs do you have right now?
Speaker 3:I think 16 or 17.
Speaker 1:Okay, it's just a couple. Just a couple, we're just adding to it all.
Speaker 2:So tell us about your book. How long did it take you to write that book?
Speaker 3:And what's the name of Anywhere you can buy a book?
Speaker 1:It's everywhere I actually saw it in the airport when, I was in Atlanta or whatever. And I walked by and took a picture because I was like, oh, that's my friend, how are you doing?
Speaker 3:It was in every airport all the way across the country.
Speaker 1:It was awesome.
Speaker 3:Forbes produced my book for me, so I'm on Forbes podcast. I'm on the Forbes blogs. Eight Fundamentals of Business how to Scale your Business all the way from people a lot of what I talked about today. But my book took. Everybody asked me how long did it take you to write the book?
Speaker 3:It took me 42 years to write the book Because it is in my entire chapter of my life in business and my passion is to inspire entrepreneurs and leaders all over the world, and that's really my goal. That's the next chapter of my life I'll probably be in. I don't know how long I'll be in the restaurant business I was going to say are you going to open another restaurant?
Speaker 3:No, my full business is going to be just helping inspire people over the world. I want to impact the world, and being in a restaurant or stuck in construction is I'll never be able to do that. So I'm 56 right now, so my next it was.
Speaker 2:It was a good vehicle to get you there, though Wow.
Speaker 3:I mean I could that's when I say 42 years to write a book I would never be the coach or the mentor or the speaker that I am today. Without all that. I mean, I am who I am because of the experiences in my life.
Speaker 2:Sure, when you're around people all the time and you're trying to please them, you learn quickly how to do it and how not to. And you learn a lot about temperamental. You learn about people's feelings and emotions. And reading a room and reading their faces, reading their eyes, knowing what's hitting what's not, If you're not being in the hospitality business allows you, gives us a direct no doubt.
Speaker 2:Direct to that, and it's important because I'm now learning it myself, whereas before I was shut off to it. I just I want to make good food. I'm a chef, don't bother me, da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Well, now it's the total opposite. Now it's like let's be a little patient and see what they have to say, let's think about it, let's move forward. How can I turn this into something?
Speaker 3:that I don't have to be cooking every day Because there's going to be a. It'll be hard for you to grow your business without it.
Speaker 2:Without it right.
Speaker 3:If you're stuck in behind that. It took me forever to learn this, but you brought up awareness and I always tease people and I say on my tombstone it'll be the man that tried to solve awareness.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because it's probably one of the most frustrating things for me. I have crazy 3D vision. I see things in 3D, but you know as well as I do, the restaurant business trains us to have awareness. Sure, we see the person that drops their fork or the person that comes out of the bathroom and they're waving their hand. I'm like, oh, the paper towel's out of the bathroom. Yeah, we see that.
Speaker 1:And a lot of people don't have that nowadays.
Speaker 2:No, Well it's funny because she's on our team, but she's also one of our servers for a while here, Right, and and she can tell you that I say to everybody in our meetings a lot of times the biggest thing I worry about here is situational awareness. If you can master situational awareness, you can master the rest of the room. It's that easy. You know how to do your job, you know how to serve, you're skilled to be here in this place. Now you have to worry about situational awareness. What's going on?
Speaker 2:outside of your bubble is what's going to make us better. If everyone pays attention to your bubble, your bubble and your bubble, and you drop a silver on the floor and it's not your table, then obviously that's situational awareness. If a guest walks through the front and they're looking around and you can tell they haven't spoke to anybody and they're kind of lost. Going to them directly is situational awareness Without it, we're nothing.
Speaker 3:You know what I mean? We're nothing. I'll go back to the thing. We can't scale our business without people, so situational awareness creates scaling. If we look at scaling in these four walls, you're scaling through your people. You can't grow your business if the servers are constantly not doing the right thing. You won't scale, you'll grow, you'll out of business. If you look at business from inside these four walls of a restaurant, it's no different than opening up another 50 locations. It's the same exact process of that waitress seeing that person at that front door.
Speaker 2:And what you said about scaling is interesting because the other thing about awareness is, in order to grow as well, you have to be aware of your scaling down. When things start scaling down, you have to admit it, find the problem quick, and a lot of the times, a lot of the times, I find out the problem sometimes was me, no doubt.
Speaker 2:Not addressing it, not taking charge of it, or letting it slide or putting someone else on it. These are things that I realized in time from the other place, the original place. One of those things I learned not to do is that is let things slide or not address them when I should, or not admitting that. Okay, I should have just did it this way.
Speaker 3:My father was a police officer and he always had this thing, the man in the mirror he's like because whenever I did something wrong he goes go look in that mirror, because that's the problem. And it didn't really resonate with me as a kid. But like I train my managers now criticize yourself first no matter what Assume in delegation, there's four steps to delegation.
Speaker 3:It's to task the person, set an expectation and follow through. I said if you think you've set the expectation and they still make a mistake, you probably didn't set the proper expectation. If it happens three times, man, maybe I'm looking at the person at that point, but first thing I'm going to do is criticize myself that I did not set the expectation properly, right?
Speaker 1:That's smart. Set the expectation properly Right. Smart, that's smart, it's just different. I mean leadership and kind of universal. It doesn't matter what your business it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. I think, that's the best part, but you've taken a lot of risks. So I think that's another part of the success factor is you have to be somewhat not crazy but just be able to take the risks without as much fear as other people.
Speaker 3:My daughters would tell me, because I used to say all the time that I'm crazy. And my daughters would start telling me Dad, stop saying you're crazy, you're blessed. But my wife would probably not like me saying that I'm a risk taker. She thinks I probably. No more businesses.
Speaker 1:I know Lord bless her. She puts up with it, she does a great job, it's in my veins it's in my veins. It's who you are. It's who you are.
Speaker 2:People don't understand that. About people like us, or entrepreneurs, it doesn't matter what you're doing. Once you have that in your blood, you can't stop you want it more People say oh, you're married to work, you're addicted? No, I'm not. This is who I am and this is it's how I function.
Speaker 3:It's more comfortable I'm comfortable Like people think you're money-driven. That's the furthest thing from me. I am so success-driven and now, as I've become later in life, I am people-driven to help other people be successful because I've had the opportunities in life. I've been a crazy risk taker and you know, in business it's usually some very simplistic things that stop a business from growing and succeeding and going out of business.
Speaker 3:Yeah yeah, very simple. And you and your branding world, you know people just don't even understand the company they're working for. They don't understand their purpose and as founders, we think it's X but it doesn't make sense to the customer or the employees. So I spend a lot of time coaching companies through their people and their customers and then going back and seeing their vision.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a feeling or a solution. I mean if you have one of those two things, you'll be successful.
Speaker 3:I love solutions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love solutions. So if you have a solution to a problem which you've solved by opening multiple other businesses to solve those problems, or if you just create a feeling, so your brand itself should boil down to one word, Like how does it make you feel it should be one word? And if you can't do that, then you haven't done enough work on the back end to actually figure out the ethos of your brand. So, yeah, I mean that's always a thing.
Speaker 1:We could talk brand forever I know We've had these like discussions and he operates in some of the same circles I do. It's fun because a lot of people don't realize it. It's the most overlooked part of some of these businesses. It's not the dollar all the time, it's the longevity.
Speaker 2:I think the dollar will come. If you do the right thing, the money will come.
Speaker 1:If you sit there and focus on the money.
Speaker 2:You're going to make a lot of mistakes trying to make money.
Speaker 3:You'll never make money. I tell young entrepreneurs. I'm like why do you want to open a business? I want to be rich. I'm like don't go in business, don't do that, I'm like do not go in business Because you can't control that, don't do it.
Speaker 2:You can't control it. The only thing you can control is how you go about your day and how you go about putting out there what you want to project. You can't control if everyone's going to bite it or not.
Speaker 3:If Then there's a lot of other things you could be the best chef in the world and you could lose your business.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, of course it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3:You're not in the food business, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's just creating.
Speaker 3:I'm not in the food business, I'm in the people business. Yeah, because I have to get every single person that's in that restaurant has to perform at the highest level for me to execute.
Speaker 2:Right to want to come back. If they don't come back, you're going out of business.
Speaker 3:The bus boy. The bus boy, they can destroy your restaurant.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course, in two seconds, like we said, the cancer is like when you're trying to cut things out. You just, yeah, just cut it off, Just get rid of it.
Speaker 3:There's been many restaurants. I've gone to that. The server has messed up Because the experience was so bad, but I didn't mind the experience from a waitress giving bad service. But where was the manager?
Speaker 1:Like nobody stepped in. They didn't react. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's a problem too, is when people don't go after it. Yeah, you have to handle it. Look, problems happen, but it's not the problem, it's the solution. If your solution is bigger than the problem, you'll fucking succeed.
Speaker 1:The best customer. That's right, exactly, that's true, exactly, a hundred percent, great yes.
Speaker 3:I mean that's, that's an amazing thing for every restaurateur to learn, right there Yep Treat every yep. So many managers are like, oh, they're a pain in the ass, they're a horrible customer. The same problem.
Speaker 1:Exactly, yeah, no, you can kill them with you can kill them with kindness, sometimes too, and they come back around Well when it comes to the servers, everyone's, every.
Speaker 2:Every server is the customer is the piece of shit. It's always the way it is, but maybe they're not wrong. Let's see what they have to say. Yeah, Not every bad. Not every review, not every bad review talk about reputated reviews.
Speaker 3:I mean 30. I'm open 32 years I didn't have that yeah I didn't have it when I was. That is gold. I mean in your business, in the branding business, it's gold you can find out a lot of things, and how many people use it, everyone. How many people use the actual review, though, to change your?
Speaker 2:business? Well, I do, and I look at them all and I do realize there is a big window now of where the review system has gone a little awry, where people are just bitching and they're complaining about their moment, yeah, but all that aside though you can learn a lot from them. That's where I learn a lot of what's going on in dining room If you read the same review and you know it's the same person over and over again. Obviously every customer is not an asshole.
Speaker 2:Maybe, you're an asshole, maybe you serving asshole. Maybe you're an asshole. Maybe you serving sucks. Maybe you're the problem.
Speaker 3:Maybe you're an asshole, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:If somebody says three reviews in a row, that they waited forever to see their server, and you look back and it's the same server, well then there's your answer, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3:It's quite simple and even the bad reviews that I get, I always look for something 10% in it. It's like when you're playing billiards Somebody says I don't have a shot. I'm like you always have a shot.
Speaker 1:There's something in there, but it's every review.
Speaker 3:It may be two words. I'm like mm. I can get that, I'm trying to put myself in there. I'm sitting in the dining room, that's right, that's where front door.
Speaker 2:I tell her all the time Something happened at that front door when they walked in. That set this chain of events. Man, something happened and most of it was how you didn't handle it.
Speaker 3:I'm a Nazi with my front door. I see somebody standing at that front door for more than 20 seconds. I'm like who's got the door?
Speaker 1:I do it too. He knows, I'm here a lot. I'll be in here and I'm like this light's off, Like I do it too, but I'm also that type of person, so I'm like, yeah, we all have to be, you have to be. I mean, sometimes people don't notice things You've got to call it out.
Speaker 2:If you have situational awareness, you have it, no matter where you are. You could be in a subway looking around saying why is that sticker? Peeled on the wall that's telling you how to get off the damn thing. It's navy seals.
Speaker 3:I mean they come in my restaurant and they're the most stoic people in the world when they come in.
Speaker 1:So I know I'm like navy seal, navy seal, navy seal but they're so hyper aware of everything that's going on they sit there, very stoic, just most of them, yes, until they get older, and then they just don't notice it, they don't care anymore, they don't care anymore. So that's yeah, welcome to my world. Sometimes they're just like it's fine, everything is fine, but no, but it's great having you on. I think that a lot of people in this area they know the name, they know the brand, but they don't know everything else you have done. So it's pretty cool. So thank you for like taking time out for all of our 16 businesses.
Speaker 2:Can you give us a little something on where they can find a? Your book is on amazon. Repeat that if you don't mind, and where else you? You got anything else you want to put out there, yeah it's where the Business Scaling Blueprint's my book.
Speaker 3:You can go to TonyDeSilvestrocom, so a full website with that and I'm at my restaurant six nights a week shaking hands with kids and babies on Great Neck Road. So if you need to find me there, find it. Why not pizza? Great stuff, good pizza in the area I know 757. So we're supporting and it's great.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, thank you. Well, thank you for having me. Thanks for all you do for the community.
Speaker 2:Thanks for all you do for the restaurants and everybody else.
Speaker 1:You keep the standard, at least in the pizza world to where everyone else has to stay up with you, and that, in turn, is good for everybody, because we get a better product all the way around. No doubt we'll have a marketing, we'll have a marketing discussion.
Speaker 2:I'm ready. I love it sounds good. All right, my friend sounds good. All right, ciao for now.
