How Can There Be SO Much Pizza!?! How companies can compete.

[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.

[00:00:30.260] - Dan Paulson

All right, it's time for part three of our interview with Brian Weavel. In this episode, we are going to talk a little bit more about why there can be so many pizza places, and they all seem to succeed. We're also going to dig a little bit deeper into connections and how important it is to make those connections and realizing we're all not really competing with each other as much as we should be supporting each other.

[00:00:51.780] - Dan Paulson

So check out this episode, part three with Brian Weavel.

[00:00:55.450] - Rich Veltre

Absolutely. There's not a question in my mind that you have to use social media At least as you're out. It could just be your outreach, right? It gets you out there as far as, like you said, with local. I guess that's always been my challenge with social media a little bit, because I want to stay local. But if I put it on social media, it winds up. I get that straight call from Seattle. Yeah. And you're like, wow, I really want to work with you, but we're 3,000 miles away. So So it becomes a challenge.

[00:01:32.450] - Dan Paulson

So here's a question I have for you, Brian. When we went out last week, we went to one pizza place. Across the street, or actually across the parking lot, they were busy working on another pizza place. Across the street, there was another pizza place. Down the block, there was another pizza place. It boggles my mind because I've been in the restaurant industry. When you have that many restaurants that pretty much the exact same type of item, how can they survive doing that?

[00:02:06.440] - Brian Weavel

To me, it's differentiating your product. The place we went to Pomodora's was a New York style pizza. It's a different style than the place that's going next door, which is Capri, which is the traditional Rockford style pizza, which is amazing pizza, too. Then I think there was a fast food type of pizza place a little farther down, which It's the national chain. You need to differentiate what makes you better, what makes you different. You talk about advertising, you talk about places need to say, let people know this is why I'm different. You can't just say, I make a New York-style pizza. You got to say, Well, we use the freshest ingredients. We use what makes you different than everybody else. Because when I say to you guys, I got great pizza, you're like, Yeah, you got great pizza. But What makes me great? Dan saw four pizza places in the same corner last week. What makes you better than them? What's making me and Richard go to Pomodores instead of Capri's or vice versa? You got to differentiate. You got to make sure people know the quality ingredients that you're using. If you're not using quality ingredients, time to get out.

[00:03:25.870] - Dan Paulson

How big of an issue is that when it comes restaurants having quality ingredients?

[00:03:32.200] - Brian Weavel

It is a big issue. I hate to say you see places come and go. The reason why you see them come and go is when you're cheaping your product. It's better to raise your prices than to cheapen your product. Because if you're raising your prices and you still have that great product, you're still staying ahead of everybody else. But if you lower your quality and keep the same price, people are going to come back. So you're losing customers. So that's important. Those are using cheap products tend to drop off the face of the Earth, which stinks. If I can go in there and say, Hey, you need to use this cheese or this kind sausage, or make your own dough. Here's another thing. I mean, man, we didn't touch base on this. How many places are buying frozen dough or canned sauce or frozen lasagna I made everything myself. I made everything myself. I ground my own cheese. Dan and I talked about people that buy bag cheese. There's a caking agent that's in those bag cheeses. I can taste it. I can really taste it. But if you're grinding your own cheese, high-quality cheese, it's pure, it's good, it's great.

[00:04:58.900] - Rich Veltre

I I think the other thing, I have the same problem here. I just moved into this town recently from another town. Towns are pretty close. So I can tell you that within a mile, probably even less than a mile, we have at least four pizza shops.

[00:05:16.130] - Brian Weavel

I see. That's nice.

[00:05:17.340] - Rich Veltre

Within a tea intersection. They're on the two ends of the tea, and one in the middle, and one at the center. I've tried them all. I tried all four of them. So ingredients, I would say, is probably completely It's totally fine. You want another differentiator on our side?

[00:05:32.990] - Brian Weavel

What's that?

[00:05:34.590] - Rich Veltre

When they prepare the pizza. When you go in and they show you the pizza, it looks good, and then they go and they actually put it in the oven, and it comes out, and it's burnt. And we won't go back to That's right. We've decided to go back to the other. And then the other ones look like we're almost afraid to go in. So we have now our favorite. We found our favorite. So I think some of it comes down to the differentiator being not only do you have to have those good ingredients, et cetera, but then you have to have that presence as well. So go back to your social media. Go back to just how do you look on the street? If I walk by, am I afraid to walk into your restaurant? You know what I Because if I don't like all four of them, the town next to me has another four. Right. See, you're that close.

[00:06:21.790] - Brian Weavel

See, you touched base on a little bit of social media, too. It's like the presentation of pizza. When you go in, you like to see it, everything like that. In my social media searches, you'd be surprised how many places don't post the pictures of their pizza. All of us eat with our brain. We see the product, we see the product and we're like, oh, that looks great. Stop posting cartoon pictures of your pizzas.

[00:06:51.080] - Dan Paulson

Stop posting the beer tastes great with pizza.

[00:06:56.330] - Brian Weavel

We want to see your pizzas. Show your pizzas. Show your pizzas, not the clip art, not the cartoons. Show your pizzas. You know what? You don't know what's really cool, too, Richard, is there's a couple of places I see on social media that do great job where they actually show a shift of the two video clips of their people making pizzas and putting them in the oven, taking them out. And that's cool because then people are curious on that. They want to see what it looks like. Absolutely. They want to see a kitchen because they want to see if it's clean or not. You I want to know if it's clean.

[00:07:32.520] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, exactly.

[00:07:34.660] - Dan Paulson

I think that's what a lot of people take for granted, is how clean is the place, especially how clean is the kitchen, because a lot of places you can't see it. So you're just trusting that they're doing a good job.

[00:07:48.700] - Rich Veltre

Absolutely. And the funny part is my favorite pizza place, I'm going to do a shout out for them is New York Pizza. But my favorite pizza with them is actually the Chicago style pizza, which is funny. To order a Chicago style in New York pizza is pretty thrown off. But I wouldn't have known that unless I had seen the picture and I walked in and said, you really want to try that? Boom. After that, I'm like, anytime they have the Chicago pizza available or even if I'm I'll order a whole pizza, I'll order the Chicago stuff, which is fabulous.

[00:08:18.140] - Brian Weavel

See, that's why even in menu making, you should have a little clip art of your pizza, not standard clip art from someone else. Your pizza. That's important. That's I always did that. I wasn't in business for 24 years for no reason. I did my due diligence. May work a little hard. Got a lot of gray hairs from it, but I love doing what I did, and I'm so grateful to be back in the pizza industry. I mean, it's amazing industry.

[00:08:50.830] - Dan Paulson

But you pointed out, take a picture of your pizza. It's so easy nowadays. Back in the day, because I worked in the restaurant industry, and You had to actually bring in a professional photographer who would then stylize everything. And pretty soon the food that you would eat, you couldn't eat anymore because there was so much plastics and paint and everything. I had to make it look right because it's been sitting there now for three hours. But we have so much technology in our phone, and they take really, really good pictures nowadays. Like you said, you can take a picture of somebody working on the pizza. You can see it when it's right out of the oven, fresh and everything. And even I'm bad at not realizing that I should be using that camera more. When you and I met last week, you had that camera out. You were taking a picture of the cheese bread, the pizza. You were taking a picture of the owner We were taking pictures in the back room next to their logo. We all should get better at that, because that is that free marketing. And as you pointed out, that connection that we have.

[00:09:57.870] - Brian Weavel

Which leads me to another thing with I'm working for Perfect Trust. Eric Bam was amazing at doing this. He connects people with... And I learned that real quick. Maybe I was doing before with my own business. But the more connections you make, the more visible your pizza place is or Perfect Crust is. If you go to Perfect Crust, the website or the social media or mine or Eric Burns or any other salespeople, there's There's connections there. This morning, I got a package in the mail from a company, and I got it right here. And I posted it. It's Stanislaw's tomatoes, which is the biggest tomato company in the industry. They sent me a T-shirt because they know I'm going to try it on and I'm going to sport it. I'm going to post it on my social media. I put it on there this morning. So it's connecting people. It's When Dan came over, I think it only took me about three seconds to pull out that phone and said, We need a selfie. We got to get in with the owner of the place. We got to get a picture of his business on the background.

[00:11:14.180] - Brian Weavel

We got to get a picture of the pizza. Dan's like, Oh, my God, this guy's nuts. But it's all connections. If I'm supporting Dan's business, I'm supporting Pomodora, I'm supporting the industry in general, people are going to support us and support me and support my business and support Perfect Crust. I mean, it goes hand in hand, man. It's like, We're not really competing. We're building each other.

[00:11:42.510] - Dan Paulson

And that was part three of our episode with Brian Weavel. As you can tell, there's a lot going on there, and Brian has a lot of great ideas that many of us should be using in our business as well. Stay tuned. Part four is coming soon. Check it out.