Latest / The Inspired Stories Podcast / Creating the Third Space: Lazy Moon's Recipe for Success | Restaurants & Franchises Series

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Creating the Third Space: Lazy Moon's Recipe for Success | Restaurants & Franchises Series · The Inspired Stories Podcast

0:05
Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast
0:09
where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from
0:12
their successes and be inspired by how they've overcome
0:15
adversity. My name is Anthony Kotaspodi and
0:17
today's guest is Tim Brown, Co founder of Lazy Moon Pizza.
0:22
He Co founded Lazy Moon Pizza with a close friend, Matt
0:25
Griffiths. Founded in 2004 near the
0:28
University of Central Florida campus, Their goal was to create
0:32
a third space, which refers to a social environment that's
0:36
distinct from the two spaces where people spend most of their
0:38
time home and either work or school, depending on where you
0:42
are in life. They wanted a place where people
0:44
could gather to relax, connect and build community outside of
0:48
those two traditional settings like a coffee shop, park, or
0:53
even better, a pizza shop. We will hear how a failure is
0:57
not an option mindset and propelled them through the early
1:00
difficult days and how that same mindset became very useful again
1:04
during COVID. They pride themselves on not
1:07
taking themselves too seriously, which is immediately apparent if
1:11
you visit the Our story section of their website,
1:13
lazymoonpizza.com, and I'll explain shortly.
1:17
But before we get into all that good stuff, today's episode is
1:20
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1:49
Now back to our guest today, Co founder of Lazy Moon Pizza, Tim
1:53
Brown. I appreciate you making the time
1:54
to Share your story today. I appreciate you reaching out.
1:57
It's it'll be exciting to do it. So thank you.
2:01
So Tim, did you have a background in pizza or the
2:05
restaurant industry before deciding to start Lazy Moon?
2:10
So I had no pizza specific background, nor did my business
2:16
partner Matt, neither of us. He had worked at a place, you
2:20
know, putting pizzas through an oven, but it was also like a
2:22
burger joint and fry joint, but they weren't making the the
2:27
pizza in that place. So we jumped into it at first
2:33
without having specifically made pizza, but we were coming from
2:36
fine dining and like a more classical culinary setting.
2:42
So the idea of creating a tomato sauce and pairing it with a
2:46
cheese and pairing it with a bread for us was familiar enough
2:51
to jump into without knowing what we were jumping into.
2:54
But, you know, we, we hadn't had any formal experience in that.
2:59
But at the time when we'd started it, I want to say both
3:02
Matt and I between us had maybe about a decade and a half of
3:06
restaurant experience. So it was OK, you know, but we
3:11
were really about two to three years only into the the fine
3:15
dining and like the full culinary perspective before we
3:18
jumped off into lazy moon and. What was that prior experience
3:21
like? You were working in another
3:23
restaurant? Maybe Servers, Managers,
3:25
bartenders. Yeah, both.
3:27
Both Matt and I were managing, we were waiting tables.
3:32
We were managing like their catering program with one of the
3:37
other owners of the restaurant we'd actually helped.
3:40
It was a restaurant called Food, Glorious Food in Tallahassee.
3:43
And we had helped the two owners of that open that restaurant.
3:48
There was an opportunity that just came and with an interest
3:52
to one day open my own restaurant, it seemed like a
3:56
really good opportunity to try to do that and learn it with
4:00
someone else and kind of on their dime.
4:03
But but respecting that, you know, not, not like, oh, it's
4:06
your money. We really wanted to learn it and
4:10
see it through someone's eyes who had done it before.
4:13
And so Matt and I both jumped into that with the owners of
4:16
that restaurant. And so we were doing catering
4:19
pastry. We were cooking wine cooks, you
4:22
know, so we were making like stocks and sauces and fillets
4:27
and things like that. We were doing a lot of catering
4:30
at the time for because it's the capital.
4:33
So we were doing a lot of catering for different members
4:38
of the Florida House and Senate. And it was just, it was a really
4:45
intriguing and kind of like cool experience because we got to
4:48
learn management. We got to learn how to really
4:53
make and execute a lot of cooking styles, you know,
4:58
because so many of the chefs in there were trained.
5:01
We had classic French trained chefs.
5:03
We had some people who had a lot of like Asian background.
5:07
And so it was a fusion restaurant that we were just
5:09
learning everything. And it was a really kind of a
5:12
cool experience to be able to do that.
5:15
And we weren't just working 40 hours a week.
5:17
The owners were paying us for 40 hours a week, but both Matt and
5:20
I were tucking into about like 60 or 70 hours a week because we
5:24
just wanted to learn. And the other option for that
5:27
was to go out and pay for culinary school or for an
5:32
experience where you get that experience.
5:36
And we found the better way for ourselves was to just go garner
5:41
the experience, kind of get paid for it and really get it, you
5:46
know? Rather than shelling out a lot
5:48
of money to pay a culinary institute to learn, you're
5:50
getting paid something, putting in tons of hours but getting
5:56
same, maybe even better experience because it's real
5:58
world, You're getting all the warts and wrinkles and struggles
6:01
that you know go along with opening up a real business.
6:04
Right. And that's, that's how we looked
6:06
at it. My dad had done the Culinary
6:09
Institute, you know, he had opened a restaurant when I was
6:12
really, really young and he sent me all of his old books.
6:17
So I, you know, I graduated College in 2003 and I just
6:21
immersed myself in those books for the next year and a half,
6:25
two years. I still, I still have them and,
6:27
and look through them, But I made it a point when I was
6:31
working at, at food glorious food to when I got off of my
6:35
shift, if it was an 8 or 10 hour shift, I would just go to Publix
6:38
and pick an ingredient I've never worked with or go to a
6:41
market and pick an ingredient I'd ever worked with and find it
6:44
in a book and start working with it and see, seeing what it did.
6:47
And then we would take that back into the restaurant and, and
6:52
kind of play with it further there.
6:55
And it was a really, you know, for, for fruit glorious food.
6:58
It was a really cool experience because they were willing to
7:02
teach us and we came into it as willing participants to say,
7:06
like, we'll wash dishes, we will, you know, clean the floor,
7:11
whatever you have for us, We would do it if you would teach
7:14
us this trade, you know, and, and really teach us how to how
7:16
to execute on food the way that that that restaurant was doing.
7:20
So it was a neat little internship is is kind of how we
7:22
played it. So it's interesting you we're
7:25
getting some really good experience in fine dining.
7:29
How do you move from that to an idea for a pizza shop is still a
7:34
dining experience, but very different.
7:36
Yeah. Well, we were doing casual fine
7:38
dining. So it was, it was all fine
7:40
dining execution on the food, but it was in a more casual
7:42
environment and we started to see that.
7:45
And I, we also did fine dining in that same town and, and
7:48
proper fine dining establishments.
7:51
And we found that we like the clientele and the casual fine
7:53
dining more than we like the approach in the fine dining.
7:57
And it was the same people, but it was the onus that they put on
8:01
you when you stepped into that really that really reserved
8:06
space. It was, it was, you know, it
8:08
didn't seem as personal. You see more of a mechanism to
8:14
get them their food, whereas when we were in the casual fine
8:17
dining, it was more of a partnership of bringing them on
8:21
a journey through the food. And we really liked the idea of
8:24
working with the people at the table to see what they wanted
8:28
rather than them coming in and just be, you know, it's, we were
8:32
treated differently because it was a fine dining establishment
8:35
than we were in a casual environment.
8:37
We really liked the casual environment, so we started
8:40
glomming environment. Had a little bit more, I don't
8:41
know, social interaction. Yeah, yeah, it did.
8:44
It it, it felt more genuine. We would have more families
8:48
coming in and, and you know, they were well to do, but they
8:50
were just really cool and collected.
8:54
You could talk about wine with them without, you know, being
8:58
too Snooty of a thing. It could be more of the story of
9:00
the where the juice came from then getting into, you know, how
9:05
much the bottle costs and they would pay for a high bottle.
9:08
But it was really the IT was the connection made that that kind
9:12
of was it was more rich, it seemed more rich in the in the
9:15
casual environment. So we wanted to take that step
9:17
back even further and offer what that was good food in a casual
9:23
environment to a place that hadn't seen something like that.
9:26
Tallahassee has a lot of that going on.
9:28
And for like UC or for Florida, UF, Florida has a lot of those
9:34
establishments kind of already happening.
9:36
But Matt had gone to UCF for two years and we recognize that UCF
9:41
still hadn't developed that college type of feel.
9:44
And most of the offerings that came for UCF students were
9:49
inexpensive and poor quality. And we we saw or they were
9:53
expensive and poor quality and it wasn't really like a genuine
9:57
offering. So we wanted to give them a
10:00
pizza shop that wasn't a traditional pizza shop.
10:04
One thing that we found when we walked into traditional New York
10:07
pizza shops is you always kind of got stared down by the guy
10:10
working the oven until you finally got what you want.
10:12
And I don't put I, I love New York pizza shops and my wife is
10:18
from New York. So we were like, I've had some
10:20
of the most rich and genuine experiences in some of those
10:24
pizza shops, but when you get down to Florida, it's like
10:27
everyone's got a chip on their shelf.
10:28
That's a New York pizza shop. What do you want?
10:30
You know, like what's your? And so we wanted something that
10:33
was more engaging and inviting into the the customer.
10:36
You know, we wanted to we wanted to get to know the customer.
10:38
Hey, we didn't, we didn't want it to be a quick fire.
10:41
Like, all right, here's your slice.
10:42
You go on. We wanted to sit there and talk
10:45
to you and and I mean, that's how we approach it.
10:50
We approach it as if we were waiters in a restaurant having a
10:53
dialogue with someone, you know, whether it's 5 minutes or 10,
10:56
you know, an hour. We would sit there and because
10:59
we were the people working the counter, we wanted to get to
11:02
know their clientele coming in and understand the rhythm of why
11:05
they were coming in, what they liked about it, all that.
11:07
So yeah, that's really, we just wanted to kind of create that
11:12
that setting and be able to give that to UCF and and give the
11:18
students something that was worthy of them and worthy of
11:21
their time. That wasn't it wasn't a chain
11:24
restaurant and it felt specific to them.
11:28
And so that's where we, you know, we we took from at the
11:32
time, micro brewed beer wasn't as big as it is now.
11:36
I don't think it was big. We took from a pub that we saw,
11:43
you know, and we, I'd gone to a couple pizza places that we
11:46
liked and then we took our cooking and, and service
11:49
approach from our fine dining experience and we tried to mash
11:53
it all together into one restaurant.
11:56
And so when we first opened, you know, our first lazy moon in
11:59
2004, we were making our own ice cream for milkshakes.
12:05
We were making, we still make our own stocks and stuff for
12:07
soups, but I mean, we were making everything from the
12:11
ground up and we still make everything from the ground up.
12:14
But we stopped doing milkshakes because it was, you know, it's
12:18
a, it's a whole other process, not because of the ice cream,
12:20
but it's just a whole other process.
12:23
You to really be good at it, you need somebody who's just there
12:26
making milkshakes for for the demand, you know?
12:29
So tell us about some of those early days.
12:32
You made the decision. This is the direction you're
12:34
going to go. You're going to open this
12:35
restaurant. What was it like as you're
12:37
working to get the restaurant open and it's open in those
12:41
first days? Tell us about all the hard work
12:43
that went into it. Yeah, for for the opening stuff.
12:47
I mean, it was really Matt and I leaned into our friends and
12:51
family harder than we ever had before.
12:55
We had family members who would, who had given us I think all and
13:00
some was maybe like 60 or $70,000 worth of family
13:04
investments across maybe like 7 to 9 different people.
13:11
And then we had taken out a line of credit for $30,000 that my
13:15
dad had Co signed on. And so between Matt's family and
13:20
my family, we had all of the, you know, as much help as we
13:24
could. We opened the place for about
13:26
$110,000, which was pretty, was really good because we end up
13:32
doing all the labor to to get it to that space.
13:36
You know, we had a friend who had done some house renovations,
13:39
so he showed us how to build walls.
13:41
He came in and did a lot of build out with us and Matt and I
13:45
both learned a lot about construction.
13:46
And in about 5 months we took a restaurant that was a pizza
13:51
restaurant and turned it into a new pizza restaurant.
13:55
So it wasn't a far stretch, but it was really leaning into a lot
14:00
of friends and family. And we worked it up until we
14:02
opened, we opened the doors. Well, we didn't open the doors.
14:06
We got our first food shipment never having made a pizza
14:11
between the two of us. And I know I wouldn't, it's not
14:17
wise. It's just the way it worked out.
14:19
We didn't have a mixer at the time nor could we afford one
14:22
that would like mix dough in that size.
14:26
And then that, you know, it was, this was 2003, so the Internet
14:29
was pretty nascent and all the, you know, Amazon didn't exist in
14:32
the way it does. You couldn't just get a stand
14:34
mixture. We could go to to a store, but
14:36
it was, you know, it was a $600.00 mixer.
14:39
I think both of us moved to Orlando with like $2400 in our
14:44
pocket, you know, so we weren't trying to buy a mixer.
14:48
We were just like, we'll figure it out when we get there.
14:49
We took the first week, really figured it out, got it to a good
14:54
place and then started serving pizza, ran about another two or
14:58
three days and realized like our recipes a little salty.
15:02
Started kind of peeling that back and then and then really
15:04
move forward with a better product after about day 2 or so.
15:11
And it was, you know, we listened to customer feedbacks,
15:14
we listened to our friends feedback.
15:15
It was really just our friends and family coming in this first
15:17
couple of days and then we kind of opened it up mass.
15:21
It was opened up, but people started to pick up to it a
15:23
little bit more after that. And for those first though,
15:26
sorry. To interrupt Tim, but I'm
15:28
curious on something. Why did you just start decide to
15:30
start a pizza restaurant if neither one of you had ever made
15:34
pizza before? Well, why were you connected to
15:37
that? Because I think in when we were
15:40
in school, that ended up being the place that we hung out.
15:45
Like, you know, like we were always at a like a pizzeria that
15:47
was cheap and we were always trying to find a like a micro
15:52
brewed beer bar. That was we, we were just taking
15:55
the pieces of things that we love.
15:56
Like we found that we, you know, would eat mostly in in a
16:00
pizzeria because it was cheap and it would feed our day and
16:04
that we liked the product. But so we really wanted to just.
16:08
We knew this. We create that hangout space.
16:11
Yeah. Yeah, we knew that it was
16:13
missing and we knew that it was viable.
16:15
Like, you know, hot dogs aren't really an everyday college
16:18
student type of thing, but pizzas kind of a, you know, it's
16:22
a strike down the, the middle of the lane there.
16:25
I, I feel like more than a burger or anything else, we saw
16:27
that there was a, a repeat value to it.
16:30
And so we didn't think there was a repeat value, just a pizza.
16:34
We thought there was a repeat value if we could add salads and
16:38
add soups and make them really good salads and make them really
16:41
good soups. So that if you wanted to come
16:43
there and eat light, you could do that.
16:45
If you want to come there and eat heavy, you could do that.
16:47
And we wanted to make it an offering that was genuine
16:49
because most places we had gone to and pizzerias that we had
16:52
gone to in college would just have a standard like here's a
16:55
spinach salad with like some onions, some carrots and a
16:58
couple olives, maybe it's tomato or two.
17:01
And it didn't feel like a genuine offering from a food
17:03
perspective, from a culinary perspective.
17:05
And I think that's something we picked up in the fine dining was
17:10
it should be a genuine offering. And so we wanted that pizza
17:14
because we felt that that was approachable daily.
17:17
We wanted the micro brewed beers because we were really excited
17:19
about that in 20 in 2003, we felt that that was going to be
17:23
the next big thing. And it was, you know, and so we
17:28
wanted to take all these things and mash them up into a space
17:31
that we felt would be successful for UCF because they were just
17:33
missing it. They were, you know, it wasn't,
17:37
it was just a place where chains popped out of the ground.
17:39
And so it just missed college students.
17:41
And we and we felt that that was that.
17:42
So we could have done anything. You know, we were pretty
17:47
headstrong. And I think having come from
17:49
from a kitchen where we're doing such large things, pizza just
17:54
felt like it was still approachable.
17:56
I mean, the cheese is you find a good cheese, you make a tomato
18:00
sauce. There's only so many renditions
18:02
of a tomato, although there's a lot, but there's, you know,
18:05
we're, we're in a lane and and then we figured, you know, we
18:08
know what type of bread we want. We just have to recreate this
18:10
bread and get it to a kind of a sourdough texture and a
18:14
sourdough flavor without being a full sourdough and get a like a
18:19
bread texture. And so we knew how to do that.
18:22
We'd just never done it, you know?
18:25
You'd never done it and and specifically for a pizza.
18:28
Yeah, we knew that. We knew the techniques and
18:30
tactics to get the thing to the place.
18:32
So there was a learning curve the the early days we were
18:35
learning. I didn't, I didn't know how to
18:37
toss a pizza and Matt couldn't put a pizza in the oven and get
18:41
it out round, you know. So each of us had a skill set
18:45
that the other one needed. And we were continually for the
18:47
first month, month and a half trading off on that skill set.
18:50
So we both had to be there at 8:30 every morning because we
18:53
had to set up. We had to be there when 11:00
18:56
happened because if they needed a pizza, they needed both of us.
19:00
They shouldn't have, but they definitely did.
19:02
So there was a definite, you know, that that would probably
19:05
be the piece where there's a lot of inefficiency built into how
19:08
we approached it because we were both serving a function of this
19:11
thing that neither of us had done.
19:13
So Tim, you know you guys are known for your very large
19:18
pizzas, right? And when I first found that
19:22
information, I thought, oh, OK, these guys are more of like a, a
19:25
bulk value play, you know, big pizza.
19:28
It probably tastes all right. But because I'm listening to you
19:32
talk about all of your fine dining experience and how you're
19:35
taking a lot of those lessons and bringing them into your new
19:39
pizza restaurant, it seems to me that maybe I've misjudged what
19:44
the pizza is like. I I get the sense that there's a
19:48
lot more from a culinary perspective that's going on in
19:53
the kitchen behind the scenes that probably doesn't get the
19:57
attention that it deserves it. Am I on the right track here?
20:00
For sure, and I think a lot of that was just us kind of being
20:03
humble about the approach. We didn't our mentor and and
20:08
boss at food glorious foods, who is still a friend of ours.
20:12
His whole approach is just do it right.
20:15
Don't worry about the guy behind you or next to you, you know,
20:18
like not not in like a ignore them type of way, but don't
20:22
worry about the word what they're doing.
20:24
If you're doing your thing correctly and you're approaching
20:26
the food correctly and you guarantee that all of your staff
20:30
are upholding that value, it'll just people will come.
20:34
They'll they'll find it, they'll figure it out.
20:36
And so we came from a place where, again, social media
20:38
wasn't big. So the idea of putting that
20:40
billboard out there for everyone to pick up wasn't something that
20:43
we were trying to do. Our way of putting that
20:45
billboard out there for people to pick up was when you come
20:48
into the place, you're going to find the value in it because
20:51
we're going to assure that it's sitting there on your plate.
20:53
And that's the Billboard. You know, it wasn't like, hey,
20:56
look at us. We, you know, we ate your dough
20:58
for three days. We've been doing that from,
21:00
from, you know, since 2003. And we slow fermented so that
21:04
there's a larger flavor build. It's like a logger versus a
21:09
nail. The complexity and development
21:11
of what comes out of a logger is greater because of the
21:15
fermentation method, the type of yeast used, all those types of
21:18
things. So you can get so much more
21:19
complexity to what you have. And that's what we're doing with
21:22
the bread is putting that in there.
21:24
And so we've always had like a, you know, a starter that gives
21:28
it its flavor. We've had all these things and
21:30
it's just kind of, we've never really been good at hanging it
21:33
out on the, you know, on the window to let people know that
21:37
that's what they're getting. But for the first, you know, up
21:40
until 2020, our sales trajectory was always up.
21:44
And so we felt that the Billboard was working in that
21:47
way, you know, And so that's what.
21:50
Happened in 2020. Well, 2020 obviously you know
21:53
COVID happens and we are a space that is set up for pure social
21:58
engagement. We didn't deliver.
22:00
We did 25% of our overall sales and pickup and the rest of it,
22:05
the remaining 75 to 77 on any given month was purely in house
22:09
dining. And we were doing anywhere from
22:12
4800 people a week to 7000 people a week through each
22:17
restaurant. And so we got to a point of
22:20
refinement where while we're doing this quality and we're
22:24
doing all of this, all of this with the food, we moved from a
22:28
space where we were really focused highly on quality to
22:32
then speed in. That really happened because as
22:41
our trajectory kept going up, we had to find ways to make sure
22:44
that the pizza met the timing, the quality, the crisp, all that
22:47
thing that it needed to in order for that to happen.
22:49
So we took a, we took a beep back from actually developing
22:54
menu items and moved our efforts into internally making sure that
22:58
we were able to execute for 1000 people the same or or 1000
23:03
people a day, the same way we would for 500 people a day.
23:07
And so that became kind of our challenge between 2013 and 2020,
23:12
which is keeping up with the speed of growth and keeping that
23:17
ability internally operationally to, to get it to be able to
23:21
where if you walk in the door today, Anthony and you walk in
23:24
the door three months from now, you should have the same
23:27
experience. And so we were, we were really
23:30
focused on that prior to COVID and then we were getting ready
23:34
2020, it's pretty wild. 2020 was going to be our big growth year.
23:39
You know, we were planning on the the mid to back end of 20 to
23:43
start really picking our new markets for footprint and stamp
23:48
out acquiring our investment, you know, from really putting
23:55
together an investment strategy and and trying to take our
23:58
footprint and stamp it out. So, but that offered its own
24:03
challenges and I think it has changed a little bit of the
24:07
trajectory of where we are internally and externally.
24:11
And I think it's been, you know, as rough of a time as it has
24:15
been since COVID for everybody. I think we're finding a niche in
24:20
a footprint within that to be able to, you know, come out of
24:24
it that's similar to how we went into it.
24:26
So we're now doing delivery through third party services and
24:30
all that type of stuff, which has been a help for it.
24:33
But really, I think COVID just shifted the landscape because
24:38
people couldn't come in and engage socially.
24:40
And our entire model was built on that idea.
24:44
And that hurts a place because everyone inside, I mean, we had
24:48
115 employees going into COVID and we were able to keep a
24:52
majority of them. But a lot of that leaned into
24:55
some of that government funding and things like that.
24:58
And there's a whole host of like up and down within that process.
25:03
So we can even talk, you know, more more in depth about that.
25:05
There's so many different directions with that.
25:08
Do you feel like you guys have come out of it and people are
25:12
back in the restaurant like they used to be, or has it not come
25:17
back to as many people being back in shop?
25:21
Yeah. So that's a, we are actually
25:24
starting to get back to pre COVID like our sales numbers be
25:32
I think because we exist in the space where we're very
25:34
affordable and there's a quality aspect.
25:37
We, I think I've been able to because I think people are still
25:40
getting hit economically pretty hard at the grocery store.
25:43
And, and you know, all the different things in the
25:46
day-to-day construct for a person, I think they find value
25:51
in what our offering is and that you can come in, you can have a
25:54
sit down dinner, it will be quality and you can have an
25:59
experience like a, like a sit down dinner at any other place.
26:03
But it's fast casual. There's not a necessity to tip,
26:08
but most people tip to some degree.
26:11
It could be a buck, it could be two bucks, it could be 10 bucks.
26:12
It doesn't, it doesn't matter what that is, but I think
26:15
there's a value in it as opposed to it.
26:17
It gives the feeling of an experience and it is an
26:19
experience without it being $100 experience.
26:23
So we found that there's a lot of, we're starting to pick up
26:27
traction on the backside of COVID from that and we're also
26:30
picking up traction from just the labor market being there.
26:35
You know, that really came back in about fall of 2023.
26:40
I know that COVID ended in, you know, or subsided a little bit
26:44
in around late 20 or early to mid 21, but the labor market
26:49
never really recovered until about I want to say we start to
26:53
see it around August to September of 23.
26:56
And that's when you could really go and say, hey, we're hiring
27:01
and you'd have people coming to the door prior to that for about
27:04
two or three years, it was really hard to hire within that
27:08
space. That's hard to, it's hard to
27:10
really run to find standards when you don't have personnel at
27:16
every position you know, or any of those things happening.
27:19
So we're happy to have personnel again.
27:22
We're happy to be at that place where personnel is back in and
27:25
we're setting our standards hard and fast again to like, you
27:30
know, this is exactly what has to be.
27:32
There's no negotiating on this. And that's, that's where we
27:34
existed before COVID. We existed there because of the
27:37
volume coming through the door. The demand was so much.
27:39
We had to be on point. We couldn't fall off of that or
27:42
you'd miss the business that day.
27:44
And then when we hit COVID, everyone just kind of it was, I
27:47
mean, you went from 100 miles an hour to 10 and everyone just got
27:50
in the car. Like what do we do?
27:53
So for us it was a. Yeah, I'm hearing you say that
27:57
the excuse me, the labor market's been coming back.
28:00
You, you know, you put that there's a a job available, you
28:03
get people showing up. I'm curious what kind of
28:06
strategies you guys have found. Once you find some good folks,
28:09
how do you hold on to them? We, we try to keep really good
28:16
communication with them through, through the employment process
28:19
for them. So in, you know, their first
28:21
three months, we want to round up with them and find out how
28:23
their intake and experience has been with the team.
28:27
We try to make sure that we're really hiring not on experience,
28:30
but on personality. We want, you know, you don't
28:34
have to have restaurant experience.
28:35
I mean, we got into it without even making pizza. 1 can learn
28:39
that it doesn't matter where you're coming from.
28:42
I think it matters most how you are with people, if you're
28:46
excited by engaging people, if you're a positive person.
28:51
And so we try to really hone in on the people who are more
28:54
positive or we really try to get just kind of a, we're looking at
29:00
the overall companies and Organism that's living and we
29:05
want the most important part of that ecosystem, which is our
29:09
employees to be harmonious with each other.
29:13
And I think that's one thing that's hopefully set us apart
29:16
over time and and kind of help to create that lore or story
29:20
over time that we started with, you know, is that I think a lot
29:25
of people who have passed through our organization have
29:28
found lifelong friends in their workmates.
29:32
I don't think that's, I don't think that's unusual for a
29:35
workspace, but I think the mass and numbers of which that's
29:40
happening in Lazy Moon is really wild.
29:42
I mean, I'll see entire groups of people just moving and living
29:47
with each other. It's like generations.
29:49
And you'll just see each of the, you know, we've got a generation
29:52
in New York, we've got a generation in LA of or San
29:55
Francisco of these these groups of people that all work together
29:59
and are now like in a different space.
30:00
So I think the way that we've always done it, Anthony, is
30:04
really good communication, picking the people that are
30:07
going to gel with the people around them.
30:10
And the idea of a common respect in the workspace is really
30:13
upheld. We try not to, you know, mess
30:17
around with it. And I think that's one of those
30:19
standards they got, they got messed with is like before
30:22
COVID, you would not call out to a shift without someone, you
30:26
know, covering it or the onus was on you because that's your
30:30
job. You know, and then and then
30:31
during COVID, it kind of switched to the onuses on the
30:34
employer. If you want to do business that
30:37
day, you know, like you have to clean up this mess if you want
30:40
to sell enough pizzas to keep your lights on.
30:43
And so that's really where we, you know, I think that was a
30:46
hard part for us because there were some watering down of
30:48
standards. And I think that impacts sales
30:50
over time. And it wasn't for long.
30:53
We did it in stride with the rest of the world.
30:54
But for us, it was too long. You know, it never felt good to,
30:59
you know, that person's tardy. OK, we'll, we'll, we'll give
31:02
them another chance. Not that person's targeting 7
31:05
times. We'll give them an 8 time.
31:06
You know, it should have happened at 3:00, but you know
31:08
we're going to go to 10. It's just not something we want
31:11
to do. We want to hold shift.
31:12
Your standards just because, yeah, I don't know, That's how
31:15
the world had sort of shifted for the moment.
31:18
Yeah. And it it hurts to say it
31:20
because nobody wants to say that, but I think every, there
31:22
were a lot of companies that did that in a lot of different ways.
31:24
It may not have been like, you know, over, but I think a lot of
31:28
places did and you could see it as a consumer.
31:30
It's certainly a recurring theme that I've heard from the folks
31:33
that I get to interact with, so you guys weren't alone in that
31:36
respect. Sure.
31:38
I got to tell you, Tim, you know, when I was doing my
31:41
research for this interview, I had a little bit of a hard time
31:45
finding info on you guys. You know, no social media, no
31:49
LinkedIn page, you know, I went to your website and there is an
31:54
our story section. I said, OK, great, I'll get some
31:57
good background here. But you know, the the first
32:01
thing that I saw there was it talks about how someone named
32:06
Guido Brownzini was exiled from Italy to America for tossing
32:12
pizzas that were too large. And there's a follow up, a
32:15
single one of his pies then served everyone aboard the
32:19
Mayflower. And you had me until about the
32:22
second sentence when I said, hang on a second, what's going
32:26
on here? Their story goes all the way
32:28
back to 1620 with some guy who served everybody on the May
32:32
flight. So it was clear to me that you
32:35
guys were taking a, we don't take ourselves too seriously
32:39
approach to, to storytelling. But you know, with everything
32:42
that goes on behind the scenes into the quality of your pizza
32:47
and everything that you've been doing to try to build community,
32:51
why have you guys maybe not been more out in the forefront to to
32:56
tell your own story? Yeah, I think, I think we were
33:00
just, you know, we were evolving from a time where social media
33:04
wasn't a heavy presence. And so most of the stories that
33:08
we ever read from restaurants were posted on their website.
33:13
And we never saw fit to do that by the college because we found
33:19
that most college kids being there for four years weren't
33:22
terribly interested in our story.
33:24
We felt they were kind of self-centered in their own lives
33:30
at the time. And they, you know, they were
33:32
the the center of their universe, which is cool.
33:34
We're totally down with that. And so we didn't want to be the
33:38
boring old people were like, hey, hey, here's how we start.
33:41
Check us out. Like we're, you know, we just,
33:43
we just wanted to be the, the cool friend who, who they came
33:46
in, they got to see us. We weren't boring them with a
33:49
lot of details. We gave them what they wanted
33:51
and we made it fun for. And so we never delved too deep
33:54
into our story until we did a website back in like 2006 or 7
34:00
was when we did our first website and we put a story up
34:04
there at that time, which felt fun.
34:07
And it felt like it could have more grab for the students
34:10
curiosities than you know, what our story is.
34:14
Although I think our story is really cool, it didn't feel like
34:18
they really would have cared. And I think for us, we did
34:21
ourselves a disservice and not because I think there are some
34:25
relatable points to our story, you know, we didn't, we had some
34:30
help, but a lot of the things that we did were really on our
34:32
own back. And so we, we just kind of took
34:36
that and we're like, people won't really care about that.
34:38
Everyone works hard, you know, like it's, we didn't, we didn't
34:41
think to hang it out there in a way.
34:43
And, and we thought it'd be more fun to just give people an
34:45
ability to create their own war around it.
34:47
Because we started to see that getting wound up with our
34:49
customers in year 1 and 2, they would, you know, be like, Oh my
34:52
God, this place has started like, you know, this.
34:56
My wife, my wife was a student coming into UCF and she thought
35:01
that it had been there for like half a decade.
35:03
And we were only there for like 2 years maybe, or maybe even a
35:07
decade. She's like everyone who came,
35:08
when I came in, everyone said you had to go to lazy men.
35:11
Like they thought it had been there for forever.
35:14
And we were fine to let people think that, you know, now we're
35:18
20 years deep into it. We kind of have been there
35:20
forever. But yeah, we we like the idea of
35:23
people creating their own lore because it felt more exciting
35:27
probably for them to tell their friends this, like, tall tale
35:31
rather than to get like, oh, it's these kids who came in and
35:34
opened a place by UCF and they didn't know what the hell they
35:36
were doing. Now, here you go.
35:38
Here's your very romantic story. Yeah, we couldn't wind it up at
35:42
the time, you know, but so we found, yeah, it was cool to to
35:46
let people have a lure and then to add to the lure.
35:48
And we always just wanted to insert ourselves into history
35:51
and and various points that way. So.
35:54
So have you guys thought more about being a little bit more
35:59
out front with the story or do you like sort of the the way
36:03
that it's been unfolding? No, I think we would like to be
36:06
up front with the story. I think there's more of a
36:08
compelling nature to it than just the like, what we get out
36:13
of the, you know, people going on.
36:15
And I think people like to go on and and get a little bit of
36:18
humor out of it. But I think there's also still a
36:20
rub where people want to know like, OK, yeah, I see that.
36:23
But really like, what what is this?
36:26
How did, how did any of this come to turn?
36:28
Like, obviously it didn't, wasn't on the Mayflower, you
36:30
know, So like, we don't want to, we, we weren't ever trying to
36:35
like just be, you know, to obfuscate it or to keep it
36:40
obscure. We just wanted it, you know,
36:43
we'd be fine to put it out there.
36:44
And we we've started to put it out there.
36:45
This is actually maybe the second or third interview I
36:50
think we've done in 20 years that talks at all about our
36:53
story. You know, I think it's exciting
36:57
to get out there and talk about it and it's exciting to kind of
37:00
recall back all of the chapters and ways in which I got here.
37:05
So I think we'd be open to it and and we're going to start
37:08
getting it out there where we talked about having our slider,
37:11
you know, a slider for the history where you could get the
37:15
pure history or you could kind of slide to one that's a little
37:18
more tuned up to a, you know, fiction, fictionalized history
37:24
and a really, a really wild one, Dick.
37:27
Into your path and yeah, maybe Iliad and the Odyssey.
37:31
And see how many other. Historical evidence.
37:35
That yeah, that would be past and future.
37:38
Oh, that would be fun. Yeah, I'd like to see that.
37:41
So what's the future hold? What are, are there still growth
37:45
plans on the horizon? Are you guys in a position to do
37:48
that yet coming out of COVID? We are currently setting
37:52
ourselves up for that position. You know, I think we we opened
37:56
our third location in June of this about 2024.
38:02
That took a lot to get out of the ground.
38:04
It was, you know, again, I think that being on the heels of
38:07
COVID, the cost on it were so much more.
38:10
The timing on it was so much greater.
38:13
We got mired in the back end of, you know, everyone thinking when
38:20
COVID happened, everyone thought, you know, well, is it
38:23
going to end? When it started slowing down,
38:26
everyone said, all right, well, it's ended now let's get back
38:28
to, you know, business as usual. And it took about couple years
38:33
for the labor market and everything to reset to kind of
38:36
business as usual. And even coming out of it, it's,
38:38
you know, not. So I think like right now, I
38:42
think people are getting economically hit by like
38:45
groceries and and wild other things that are on the heels of
38:48
COVID and on the heels of all these rising costs.
38:51
So we've been able to find a nice footprint in there.
38:55
Again, the same as when we started UCF, we offer a value
38:59
within that space. We and so we've been building,
39:03
we've been working through our teams, we've been building up
39:06
our teams internally and working through our training and working
39:09
through all of our process so that when we come, you know when
39:13
we get to this point where we are now, we have the third
39:16
restaurant open and we're moving that.
39:18
We're building our profit and loss and we're building our
39:23
balance sheets to at the end of this year really procure
39:28
financing and start the growth step anew.
39:32
We are really keen to just kind of make sure that as we're going
39:38
through 2025 that we're conscious of our growth and
39:43
scale and taking from the lessons that we were shown in
39:47
COVID. You know when you are at this
39:49
point of growth and scale and then you pull back from that
39:52
edge, you know what that takes to wind down and wind back up
39:57
and so. I think that's where we are
40:01
right now. We've found profitability again
40:03
within the stores in a way where it's driven by sales alone and
40:09
not sales and government initiatives to help buffer that.
40:14
And we're having those standards.
40:19
The standards have been reset for our organization and the
40:22
dialogue for all of our all of our staff and all of our
40:27
corporate team members is, is really reset to the place where
40:31
we were going into COVID. And we started that really about
40:35
a year and a half ago. So it's not new in that way.
40:37
But we're finding that the traction on it's really, you
40:40
know, been hitting in the past year.
40:41
So we're excited. We're we're at a point where
40:44
we're looking forward to growth. We're trying to establish how
40:49
that's going to how that's going to come when we grow
40:51
corporately, when we franchise well, we you know, there there's
40:57
so many opportunities and options on that.
41:02
And so I'm going to people that I know in the industry to kind
41:06
of find out the best way to approach that because some of
41:10
them approach that pre COVID and then now would have different
41:14
responses after COVID. And so we're just taking this
41:18
moment to kind of gather all of our resource internally scrub
41:22
through our processes and make sure we're as clean and refined
41:25
as we can be. And that when we come out of 25,
41:28
we have a model that is really scalable because that's kind of
41:34
where we want to go next. I feel like, you know, after 20
41:38
years and we've walked down the road that's we're teed up for
41:43
that, you know, and not not just because, but we have teed
41:45
ourselves up for that. So.
41:48
So I, you know, I hear you talking about refining your
41:51
processes, making sure the PNL looks really good.
41:54
And you know, as business leaders, as we look at that PNL,
41:58
at least in my mind, I kind of think about it in, there's two
42:01
levers that you can kind of pull to affect it, right?
42:04
You can do something to help boost sales.
42:07
You can do something to help decrease expenses.
42:10
As you think about those two levers, Tim, are there creative
42:14
things that you've tried and found success with in the past
42:17
that might be interesting to talk?
42:18
About for hiring and things like that, we found that, you know,
42:25
referral programs seem to work really well.
42:27
Internal employee referrals. If, if you have employees who
42:32
are really, you know, approaching it with earnest and,
42:36
and they're getting good people on the other side, We've, we've
42:38
found a lot of success with that and it, it, you know, helps
42:41
internal employees by putting some cash in their pocket and
42:44
the new person coming in is almost that's not a guarantee,
42:47
but they're, they're better to gel with a group because they
42:50
already gel with this person who gels with the group.
42:52
And so we found some success there.
42:55
We have, I tell you, I think we're, we're also blessed to be
43:02
by a college campus. So we have a lot of opportunity
43:04
with just young people by that campus.
43:09
And so there's I think there's a lot of resource within that.
43:12
But we've we've found that the hiring piece of it is moving
43:17
along at a nice pace for the sales build.
43:21
You know, we're always trying to build top line sales and that's
43:24
kind of a neat thing for us with now all the third party delivery
43:28
and the availability for online access to our product, which is
43:32
something we never even touched on pre 2020.
43:35
We see it as another opportunity to develop into those top line
43:39
sales and new strategy. And we're we're really with our
43:44
teams focusing on building top line sales.
43:48
We're just kind of beating the market and getting out there and
43:52
talking with communities and sponsoring groups.
43:55
And our approach to building top line sales has always been that
44:00
it's more of an outreach piece to bring social organizations
44:06
groups and find people who are under not underfunded, but but
44:12
don't really have the backing, but have a social structure and
44:15
an engagement point and giving them a place from which their
44:19
platform can originate or where they can congregate to, to
44:26
develop their ideas. And so a lot of our outreach
44:29
really comes from inviting people in.
44:32
Sometimes we'll pay for an entire group just to get them to
44:35
come in and have that space and to create that like excitement
44:39
and setting for them. And it's it, we have a layered
44:45
approach. I guess we, we really, we have a
44:47
team of people who kind of work on a couple of different
44:49
community aspects in order to like just keep building top line
44:52
sales. So, and we're now starting to
44:54
get into retail. We're doing our own like hot
44:56
honey that we make and we are getting ready to launch like AT
45:03
shirt retail for ourselves. So we're always looking to build
45:07
the experience or build something that has a value
45:09
within the brand that that customers will pick up on.
45:13
The hot honey and the T-shirts, is that just going to be sold
45:15
within your locations or? Elsewhere, we'll we'll have it
45:19
on our website. It should be up there in about
45:21
the next week or two. And the hot honey we started
45:27
making about six months ago and got a pretty good set up and
45:31
response with that. And yeah, we're, we're really
45:34
just looking to get back to as many like we used to have retail
45:40
on the site, we used to have all these things there and then we
45:43
redid everything. And so we're really just kind of
45:46
like we are at that point of reset, Anthony.
45:49
We're this whole year and the past year has just been reset.
45:53
All these things that kind of fell off, get the whole team
45:55
recharge, change the habits of the people, move it all forward
45:58
and get and that, that and of itself has been the biggest, the
46:02
biggest thing getting back to our standard as the biggest top
46:05
line sales builder. And we tell our teams that all
46:07
the time. You know that if you just do
46:10
this thing, right? Because of the value of the
46:12
product and the offering, people will not be able to look away
46:16
from it. People will come back and
46:18
they'll tell their friends about it, which is the that word of
46:20
mouth is the best form of marketing that you can get.
46:23
That's how we started, you know, being by a college, that's all
46:25
we had to do because if someone tells you go to a place, it's
46:29
going to take five times. If they tell you not to go to a
46:31
place, that's like a one time. If someone tells me not to go to
46:33
a place, I only need to hear it once.
46:36
I may go there at some point, but you'll probably have to tell
46:38
me a couple times to go to a place before I go to it.
46:41
And so we realized that the value of that word of mouth is
46:43
so big. Like if you mess it up with one
46:45
customer or, or you know, a group of customers like that
46:49
could be an additional 20 to 50 people and they're you know,
46:53
that that you've hit without even realizing it.
46:56
Tim, what's a serious challenge that you've overcome, whether
46:59
it's something personal, professional, a mix of the two,
47:04
How did you get through that and what were some lessons you
47:06
learned coming through the other side?
47:11
I think probably the hardest thing that we've had to
47:13
overcome. I mean, initially it was, it
47:15
was, you know, setting up a restaurant under like days where
47:21
there's a lack of sleep and just a heavy ask from your mental
47:24
register, you know. And so that was a really hard
47:27
piece initially was, you know, for three or four months, my
47:30
partner and I were working 2121 to 21 and 1/2 hour days.
47:35
And, you know, it was like 6 days a week doing that.
47:39
So that becomes hard personally to maintain.
47:43
But then you get to a mentality and it's like, OK, well, this is
47:46
just this. I think the hardest piece for us
47:50
as an organization or hardest, hardest thing we've had to
47:52
overcome would definitely have to be COVID, you know, and, and
47:55
what happened in 2020 for us, our, our whole reliance was on
48:00
social engagement. We closed down in March before
48:05
any other restaurants because we felt an onus as an operator not
48:11
knowing what was coming down the, you know, down the Pike.
48:13
We felt the onus to not be the place that was like Ground Zero
48:18
because we had five to 700 people in close proximity in
48:22
that place every single day, you know.
48:24
And so that was hard because we had to almost preemptively just
48:31
turn it off and stop selling pizza.
48:34
And then about two to three days later, we started to see other
48:37
restaurants doing it. And then it, it just everything,
48:40
all the dominoes fell. And when you go from a place
48:44
where social engagement inside the space is, is a almost 100%
48:48
of what you do, you know, it's like 77% of what we do.
48:52
And the people who are coming in to get their food aren't getting
48:54
the same experience when they, when they come pick it up, you
48:57
know, it's a subtly different exchange because now they're
49:00
waiting outside or any of these things.
49:01
So we just had to change our whole format on how we approach
49:06
service. So many of the things that we
49:10
had done as an organization where we were like, you don't
49:13
have to worry about that customer coming in and sitting
49:15
at that table right now, like just worry about them at the
49:18
door. You know, think about them 10%
49:20
instead of 90%. And so you strip away like all
49:24
these things that are that are good in there.
49:26
And I think it's hard for an organization that's built on
49:29
that much speed to slow down, do 180° churn and end up in a
49:35
direction where you're, you know, you found a new business
49:38
model that's kicking and, and running.
49:40
So we really struggled through COVID to make our model work
49:45
when you don't have people passing through the environment.
49:49
And because our pizza's so big and our product is so big and we
49:52
never bet, we never banked on to go being such a large piece of
49:56
our organization and, and business model.
49:59
We didn't even have storage for boxes.
50:01
You know, like you go into Domino's and you see they built
50:04
storage in for boxes because that's X percentage of their
50:07
model. You know, we are consuming our
50:09
dining room with our pizza box because in order to do your, you
50:12
know, to get there, we had to be there.
50:15
And so then what, you know, when, when the world merged back
50:18
in, it's like you need the online, but you also need the
50:21
space in your dining room to store all these products for
50:23
online and you need the dining room for people to come and sit
50:26
in the dining room. And so we found a really hard
50:29
place to merge that back together.
50:30
And you know, again, like I said, we, you know, it's only
50:33
been in about the year past year and a half to two years if we've
50:35
reset that standard and value in our organization since we've
50:39
been able to really hire and and hold that standard in the way.
50:44
And so that was a really hard piece for us to get to, just the
50:49
finance of that, you know, and how you make each of those
50:52
shifts run in an atypical functioning organization.
50:58
You know, it wasn't what we built.
51:00
It wasn't what we set up at all. We had at the time we were doing
51:03
late nights before COVID. And so we would stay up until
51:07
midnight or on Friday and Saturday, we'd stay up until
51:10
2:30 AM. And when we shut that off, we
51:13
realized that it was such a large piece of our business, not
51:17
actually what was coming through those hours, but the Billboard
51:20
that that was the amount of people who would come there
51:23
because you were the place that was open and you were there
51:26
after some event that they went to.
51:29
And So what it did was it drove sales through the rest of our
51:32
day, parts, lunch, dinner and all that because these people
51:36
would see what this time of day where no one else is really, you
51:39
know, present. And so it became something where
51:44
all of that, every, everything that we did basically shifted
51:47
our model. And I think that was, you know,
51:49
I know everyone went through that.
51:50
People lost loved ones. There was so much that happened
51:52
out of COVID that was like, you know, it's really tough, but
51:57
this kind of like shook the whole for us, it was, it was
52:01
what shook our model. It was what was the toughest for
52:04
us because we couldn't exist how we were and, and resetting it
52:08
back when the opportunity was there took so many steps.
52:12
And personally that was hard, you know, because it, I think my
52:15
wife and I had had just had our second child in 2021 and we were
52:20
anticipating a lot of reset of the world.
52:23
And yeah, it's it, it wasn't necessarily that.
52:27
So I found that I, I felt very, I felt half like I was giving
52:33
half of myself to each side of, of, of what I needed personally
52:38
and business wise, I didn't feel I could give everything I needed
52:41
to the business because we also had, I had this personal thing
52:47
going on and I didn't feel like anyone was really like getting
52:52
what they needed from my time. And I think that was hard for me
52:55
for about a year to kind of get to that idea and, and exist in
53:01
that space where it's like, I, I feel like I'm failing at home.
53:03
I feel like I'm failing at work. And, and you're, you're probably
53:07
not, you know, but just, you don't feel like you're in your,
53:09
your most efficient step. And a lot of us on the heels of
53:12
that, you know, I know everyone has gone through that at some
53:15
level. So I don't think that we're on
53:19
an island or that it's, you know, just us, but.
53:23
What did you do to cope through those difficult times?
53:26
You feel like you're stuck at work.
53:28
You feel like you're not showing up in the way that you want at
53:31
home. That can be, you know, those,
53:33
those are the two biggest fears of our world, right?
53:35
That can feel pretty destabilizing if you're not
53:38
satisfied in either of those realms with with the people that
53:42
you can lean on. How did you kind of work through
53:44
that time? We have a lot of people in our
53:47
organization who I was able to, you know, really open up to and
53:51
be vulnerable with on that. And I don't think it was
53:55
something where they necessarily felt that way, you know, but it,
54:00
it just felt that way for me to, to how I normally am.
54:04
I think at times it felt that way at home, just because
54:07
there's so much necessity for the development of a of a child,
54:10
you know, the same way as there is a business, but it's so
54:14
important for the child. I think I coped really, I would
54:17
wake up earlier in the morning. I'd wake up anywhere from 4:00
54:21
or 5:00 in the morning and just start working.
54:24
You know, it's like if there has to be more hours in the day,
54:27
I'll just carve them out. And so there was about a three
54:31
or four month period where I was like, until, until I feel
54:34
adequate in either of these departments, I'm just going to
54:36
keep doing this. And then, you know, eventually
54:39
you feel like you've gotten ahead of the things that are
54:41
just trailing off in your in your mind.
54:43
And, and we got to a pretty good point.
54:46
But for me, I think coping is really kind of results back to
54:52
that same thing we did in the original days of of lazy moon.
54:54
It's just they're the only way out is through.
54:58
So just start digging and go, you know, like, what else can
55:03
you do? And I, and I think it worked,
55:05
You know, it, it, it calmed to my mind.
55:07
I don't think that the fires were as hot and either at home
55:10
or the business, but it's all about standard, you know, it's,
55:13
it's a standard I held for myself that was failing or
55:16
faltering. And so it, it feels nice to
55:23
reset that. It feels like we've reset that
55:24
in all spaces and, and exercise I think is a big thing for me.
55:30
If I'm not, you know, being physically active and it it's
55:34
hard for me to calm, call my day or the mind so.
55:39
Tim, I've just got one more question for you.
55:40
But before I ask it, I want to do 2 things.
55:43
First of all, everyone listening today, I know that you love
55:45
today's content. Tim has had a lot of great
55:47
stories for us today. Please hit the like Share
55:50
subscribe button on your favorite podcast app.
55:52
Tim, I also want to let people know the best way to get in
55:55
touch with you. What would that be?
55:59
Well, we have a, we have a couple of intakes.
56:01
It's there. We have a community at
56:03
lazymanpizza.com. There's obviously my e-mail,
56:08
tim@lazymoonpizza.com, but really we're, we, it's, it's
56:14
just the outreach on our website.
56:15
We we try to make sure that we hear everyone who comes into
56:20
that and and that we're reaching back out so.
56:23
Last question for you. I'm curious how you see either
56:27
your business or the industry as a whole evolving in the next
56:31
couple of years. What do you think the big
56:33
changes are that are coming? From what I can see so far, it
56:39
appears to be automation. I know everyone's talking about
56:45
AI, but it's interesting to watch it, you know, kind of
56:50
permeate the restaurant culture. From what we found since 2004,
56:54
restaurateurs are not typically reaching towards tech until
56:58
about 2020 when COVID hit and everyone's reaching for tech.
57:01
So it's kind of neat to see it happening now because you're
57:05
seeing so much more intelligence into the actual software that's
57:10
driving the industry and there's so much more finance behind
57:13
that. So I think artificial
57:15
intelligence driving everything from like financial platforms up
57:20
through scheduling and all that type of thing will be a thing.
57:24
I think that the automation of personnel is going to be
57:29
something that everyone seeks given the labor market.
57:35
But I don't know how successful everyone will be with that
57:38
because that's such a big piece of the engagement and restaurant
57:43
experience, I think is that human connection.
57:46
And to diminish that I think can be smart in certain ways, but I
57:54
think if you cut it just wrong, the general public will pick up
57:58
on that. And psychologically it'll be a
58:01
just suddenly an off experience for that like social setting in
58:04
space. So we never really look into the
58:07
automation pieces that way. I don't know that we would try
58:12
to refine, but I think a lot of that's coming through, you know,
58:15
like automated fry droppers or burger flippers or, you know,
58:21
dining room cleaners and all this kind of stuff like that.
58:24
So it'll be interesting to see what plays and what is just
58:30
future bad tech, you know? And what really plays in in June
58:36
of 2020 or I'm sorry, January of 2025, Are you guys using AI in
58:41
any way in your business right now?
58:45
We are currently hooking in with a company that has a wound into
58:49
their like, like reporting and finance platform in a way.
58:54
I think that some of our tech uses it, but it's not really
58:58
pervasive. We don't feel it on the front
59:00
end as heavily yet. You just see it coming through
59:05
on the back end and all these little initial phases.
59:08
So all of our purveyors are, you know, really hanging from the
59:12
windows that they've got this new AI thing going on and it's
59:15
going to be this Sat or the other.
59:17
So we haven't seen it. We've seen it, but we haven't
59:20
seen a ton of it that we're implementing and utilizing yet.
59:22
But it is everywhere. So it's, you know, it's starting
59:26
to come through the doors already.
59:28
Well, Tim, I want to be the first one to thank you for
59:30
sharing both your time and your story with us today.
59:32
I really appreciate it. For sure.
59:34
Thank you. It was really nice to do this,
59:35
Anthony. Folks, that's a wrap on another
59:37
episode of the Inspired Stories podcast.
59:40
Thanks for learning with us.