Becoming Pizza Royalty: How to Make it in Pizza, or Pretty Much Anything

[00:00:00.000] - Alice

Hello. Welcome to Books in the Biz, a podcast that looks at both the financial and operational sides of success. Please welcome our hosts, Dan Paulson and Richard Veltre. Dan is the CEO of Envision Development International, and he works with leaders to increase sales and profits through great cultures with solid operations. Rich is CEO of the Veltre Group and a financial strategist working with companies to manage their money more effectively. Now on to the podcast.

[00:00:29.740] - Dan Paulson

Hello, Hello, everybody. Welcome to Books and the Biz. I am here with Rich Veltri. Rich, how are you doing? I'm doing great, Dan. How are you? I am doing wonderful. And I can't think of a better episode to be filming here than talking about pizza. And I ran into a good friend of mine, Brian Weeville. How are you?

[00:00:49.130] - Rich Veltre

I'm doing great. Thank you.

[00:00:51.040] - Dan Paulson

Wonderful. Well, again, thank you for joining us. But I thought it would be interesting. We talk about a lot of different things on here. I think one of our last subjects we talked about, our last interview was somebody talk about artificial intelligence. So going from artificial intelligence to pizza, I think that's a good transition. Rich, just to give you a little bit of background and also our listeners. So Brian and I went to college together many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many years ago. We lived on the same wing. We hung out at times. We were in two different groups. I mean, Brian, you were more the football guy, right? Yeah, I was a football guy. You were playing football at the time. I was in engineering, so I had zero life. I was pretty much studying math and science and all that fun stuff. And we can see where that got me today. But when we got reconnected, or how we got reconnected is the alumni newsletter came out, and I'm reading through it, and I see Brian's name. I'm like, I know that guy. And I'm reading through, and I'm looking at all these accomplishments he had, and I'm like, Dude, I never knew you were that big into pizza.

[00:01:59.520] - Dan Paulson

But Brian, you've got quite a history with pizza, and you've done quite a bit. So I want to open up with just, give us your background, give us your story. How does somebody from the middle part of... I mean, you grew up in Illinois or you grew up in Wisconsin?

[00:02:15.210] - Brian Weavel

I grew up in Illinois. I call myself Process Cheese because I did move to Wisconsin. That's true. Now I'm back to Illinois. Yeah.

[00:02:24.060] - Dan Paulson

So how does a kid from Illinois get so involved with pizza that takes you pretty much all over the country.

[00:02:32.520] - Brian Weavel

Yeah, it's interesting story. When you knew me back in Plata, way back, I think, was it 1700s?

[00:02:39.840] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, something like that. The country was just forming at the time.

[00:02:43.240] - Brian Weavel

Yeah, that's right. So my story is pretty awesome because I started in pizza when I was 16 years old, and I'm 54 now. So we're looking at we're hitting 40 years of pizza. What you didn't know about me back then is I played football at Platteville, Wisconsin. On weekends, I'd be gone back to Rockford, Illinois to make pizzas for a family. And I did that for years. I graduated every weekend at Platteville. I go back and make pizzas for, I think, I don't know, $2.53 an hour. I don't remember how much it was, but I loved it. It was a great industry. At some point, I graduated and I still went back to this pizza place and made pizza on the weekend. I worked at a hospital as a human resource guy for like two years. Every weekend, I travel back to Rockford and do pizza. And so finally, I opened up my own pizza place in Middleton, Wisconsin, which you're probably familiar with.

[00:03:43.230] - Dan Paulson

Very familiar with.

[00:03:44.240] - Brian Weavel

Failed miserably, but you make a choice. I was working full-time at the hospital and full-time at the restaurant. I chose the restaurant because I loved it so much. So I moved back to Rockford, Illinois, in a town called Winnebago, Illinois. It's only about 3,000 people. So for me to accomplish so many different things in the pizza industry and become the area pizza guru, what have you, it's pretty remarkable because it's a 3,000 I was in town, and I did pizza there for 24 years. And in that time, I did a lot of charity work, and I think that's what catapulted me into that spotlight, because I think over the years, I think we raised $250,000 dollars for charities. I mean, from a small pizza operator, that's huge. So I entered contests at one point. It was a guest editor-in-chief of Pizza Today magazine, which that's one of the biggest pizza magazines in the country. There's two of them. There might be a third one starting. Those exist, those pizza magazines. So I won a contest to become the guest editor-in-chief of Pizza Today magazine. And that was huge for me. That was the big catapult into this national spotlight.

[00:05:01.710] - Brian Weavel

It went real well, and I wrote for the magazine. I did photoshoots. My food is on the front center of the front page of the magazine. And it's a little bit of pizza place in Winnebago, Illinois. So then they invited me to be a pizza judge, an international pizza judge at the Pizza Expo that year, which is amazing. Here I sit with the biggest pizza stars in the country. And then there's a little bit of Ryan from Anna's Pizza Imposter in Winnebago, Illinois. So It was pretty amazing. And since then, I've been on TV shows. I did a small business revolution. I appeared on that. It represented the pizza industry. That was with the Deluxe Company. And then I was named as one of the 38 worldwide talents that you need to know, which was weird because once again, I'm a little tiny pizzeria, but I made my mark by doing great things in the community and attaching to my community and never backing down from that. And that's so important. I was voted best pizza in Rockford area a couple of years back. I was voted as one that, well, chamber of commerce. I won the business I won the Business of the Year twice.

[00:06:16.580] - Brian Weavel

I won the citizen of the year once. I mean, there's a lot of cool things because it all came from being real. It wasn't something that, oh, I got to have this recognition. I was being real. And And then I got noticed because after a while, after 24 years there, my kids were getting a little older, 14 and 16 at the time. In 2019, I decided my wife was making this cool vacation that we're doing where we're going to travel to Washington, DC. I see a lot of sites out there. Well, right before I was supposed to leave, I had a bunch of employees call in and say they can't work at all this week. So I stayed home. My wife was wondering what I was going to do. I said, well, I'm selling the restaurant, which she was completely shocked. So with all that community work and everything like that, it catapulted me to a couple of different things. Like the Rockford School district noticed that, and they said, Hey, I'll give you a shot here at the Rack for School district. I muddled around for about two or three years working in school districts as a director of community outreach of a school district and a food service manager there.

[00:07:29.160] - Brian Weavel

I realized that that wasn't for me. My heart was still in pizza until the day I got a call from my boss, who was an incredible soul. And I've known him for years in the pizza industry. Never met him. And I get a call and said, hey, what are you doing, Weevle? And I think I could go and say, it was like, this is like, Weevle, what are you doing? I'm selling for Cisco at this time. And you can put that down. We're going to hire you. I'm like, I jumped on board on that. I mean, that job, it was a perfect trust pizza liners. And he explained the job. And I'm like, man, I love this company. I love what they did. And my background is not in sales. My background is a pizza operator. So they hired me as the Midwest Regional Sales Manager. I'm in charge of seven different states selling a great product. So it really comes back to full circle. It's like, here I was in the pizza industry, full and strong. And then I left the industry because I was working 80 hours a week, seven days a week, and I couldn't do it with two kids at that age.

[00:08:36.340] - Brian Weavel

And I was already... That was before the pandemic, but I was already having employee issues, and you couldn't hire delivery drivers. It's not easy. It's not easy when you're in a small town. When it came back full circle, here I go. I'm on my second, what do you want to call it? The second coming of my career. I was at the top of my career in the pizza industry, and now here I come into this and I'm back on the top of my career again.

[00:09:04.540] - Dan Paulson

And that is the end of part one of our interview with Brian Weavel. As you can tell, he is pizza royalty. He's gained a lot of experience in the industry, is now using that with Perfect Crust Pizza Liners. Be sure to check out episode two when we will talk even more about how Brian built his business and also what he has done to show how the little guy can succeed.