LESSONS LEARNED

Iopened Hot Tongue Pizza in Los Angeles in February 2022. The past year has been filled with highs and lows, each with its own valuable lesson to offer. Owning and operating a brandnew pizza shop is challenging, to say the least, but highly rewarding, especially if you have learned to love the struggle. Here are a few important lessons I learned in the past year:

1Keep your menu simple. I’m typically guilty of doing too much. I used to add things to my menus with very little thought, just because I could, but I discovered that it’s a recipe for disaster. Just because I can make something doesn’t mean every member of my team can be

BY ALEX KOONS

trained effortlessly to execute it the way I want. Two days before Hot Tongue opened, I cut the sandwiches and pastas out of the menu, leaving only the pizzas and a few apps. Looking back, it was the best decision I could have made. It removed the distractions of unnecessarily complicated training and allowed us to focus on what mattered most: the pizza. We finally introduced pastas six months later, and they have been a huge success. But without allowing ourselves that time to get our act together, I believe it would have been a disaster. In the past year, we’ve added only one pizza to the menu. By exercising restraint with the menu, we have been able to make small tweaks to improve on what we’re already killer at.

2Less is more when staffing. In the first few weeks after opening, people were crowding the restaurant to get in and try the food. We were super-busy, and I thought we were understaffed. We were constantly changing the schedule to fit the demand and trying to figure out how many employees we needed and how many hours we had available. Then, that initial hype wore off, and reality set in. The days slowed down, and orders decreased. It was scary, but it turned out to be a huge blessing, because we ended up with just enough hours to go around for our staff after the dust settled. Staffing a restaurant blindly was a pretty big hurdle that, luckily, we got over. In hindsight, I recommend hiring fewer people than you anticipate needing in the beginning, just to ensure that, when the novelty wears off, no one’s hours are drastically reduced. you and your staff treat every guest like a best friend. It’s the first impression people get and the most important factor that influences a guest before they even try that first slice. The food brings them in, but the service keeps them coming back.

3

Budget time and money for a marketing plan. We didn’t have a budget for PR, but we were lucky enough to wind up in a couple of prime publications around Los Angeles. These write-ups boosted our visibility, which helped sales and business, but the benefits always trickled away after a couple of days. To get people in the door, we take advantage of tools like Google Business, Yelp, Instagram, flyers and community outreach. But after a full year in business, many people still don’t know we exist. If I could go back, I would have found the money for some kind of PR launch.

4

Customer experience is the taste before the bite.

I spent the last seven years with my face in a pizza oven or glued to a screen or a book. I gave so much of myself to the food and the team that I forgot about the importance of connecting with the people eating the food and enjoying the restaurant. Since opening Hot Tongue, I’ve been forced to get in front of those customers who come from all over the city— and the globe. In the last year, I’ve made more friends than I’d made in the last two decades. I underestimated the power of the customer experience and highly recommend making sure

5 Your team is everything!

Without the insanely talented team at Hot Tongue, it just wouldn’t function—especially my two managers, Michael and Andrew. They create authentic customer experiences that shape the way the food tastes even before someone has taken a bite. It’s the energy that everyone who works here brings to every shift. Hiring the right people makes a lot of things feel easier. Take your time to hire people that you trust and know will kick butt.

I once thought I had a lot of the restaurant business figured out. Opening Hot Tongue from absolutely nothing has shown me, day after day, that I still have a lot to learn. Being openminded has helped me grow 10 times more than I would have. I will try anything once. No idea is stupid. Say yes, and take every meeting. That attitude has helped this restaurant evolve into what it is today. Don’t put up any walls. Don’t pretend to know it all. Stay open to everything. That’s one year down. Here’s to 20 more!

Using

BY TRACY MORIN

Girmantas Urbonas, a Sarpino’s USA franchisee in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, Illinois, has prioritized sustainability in his local community by completing deliveries with electric vehicles. He believes this choice is a worthwhile investment that creates long-term savings and cost efficiency while helping reduce environmental impact over the long haul. But he’s also found other, less expected benefits—for example, these vehicles attract delivery drivers to his business, a crucial perk in today’s competitive labor market. Here, in his own words, Urbonas shares some of the keys to his electric success.

Because if your phones and web ordering are down, you may as well send everyone home. We become your phone company and provide a backup Internet connection

IP Phone Service

Increase revenue and lower cost

• No Busy Signals

• Call Recording

• Call Queuing / Auto-Answering

• Multiple (random) start-of-call upsell messages

• On-hold music/message loops

• Detailed reports—hold times, lost calls etc

• Callerid delivered to POS system

• Auto-attendants—”If you have arrived for curbside pickup press one”

Cellular Backup Internet Protect against outages

• When your Internet fails our cellular backup router keeps your phones, credit card processing and web orders all working.

• The backup kicks in automatically in seconds. So quickly you will not even drop calls in progress when your primary Internet goes down!

• The same router can be used to create chainwide virtual private network to connect your locations.

• SD-WAN LTE/LTE-A (4G/5G) modems.

Now offering SMS/Text messaging.

“to receive a text message with links to our online ordering press one now ”. Delivery notifications from your POS (if supported). Marketing messaging to your customers, plus inbound text messaging on your store number!

Call Center capabilities for one to thousands of locations!

Maintain control, and get the calls off the front counters. For a small chain all you need is a large office at one location. Cut labor hours up to 50% and/or shift labor to lower cost regions while increasing average ticket . Eliminate the constantly ringing phones at the front counters! Tight integration allows calls to overflow to stores, so you can choose when to staff the call center.

The same tight integration, same detailed reports and call recordings in your hands, same ability to overflow back to the stores, but you let some one else hire and manage the staff. We can provide this service to you or work with your existing call center provider.

A digital assistant always there to take every call. Never late. Never out sick. Unlimited capacity.

Power Up

Having electric vehicles helps with employee recruitment. I don’t have any problem finding delivery drivers—maybe partly because we pay better than some other places, and because we’re busier than the typical place. We also put out ads when the pandemic started. But I think the cars by themselves work as a tool to advertise. So I have the opposite problem, where more people apply than we can employ. I suspended the ads we were running last November, and I still get people asking for applications, asking if they can drive for me! On the plus side, that means I can be more picky in choosing whom to hire.

With electric cars, we almost eliminate maintenance. We used to have hybrid Prius cars, and they needed an oil change once a month. Electric cars don’t need those, and we don’t need to change things like belts. We replace the battery every two years, but that’s it. There’s very little upkeep. Plus, with gas cars, there were always complaints among the employees— who’s going to put gas in the car? With electric, the drivers come in and have a “full tank,” as long as we do the electric charge overnight. That’s enough to last for the whole day, and the only thing we have to do at night is plug it in. In addition to no maintenance or gas fill-ups, they’re amazing to drive, so my guys love them!

We save a lot of money by using electric vehicles. We got our cars right at the beginning of the pandemic, in March 2020. At the time, we got a very good deal, paying about the same price as we would for a gas car. Nowadays, companies like GM have federal incentives, so they’re able to offer electric cars at a comparative price to gas models. Plus, when you think that you’ll put an average of 30,000 to 40,000 miles per year on your car, the gas savings are huge—it’s not like we’re doing the typical car mileage. The only problem is, with the now-$7,500 tax credit people can get, no dealers around here can keep the electric models in stock. They are asking $3,000 to $5,000 more than MSRP—and because they still have a wait list on them, they don’t mind charging that.

We’re reducing pollution—including noise pollution. On our Facebook page, I often post about how many tons of CO2 savings we achieve in one month because of the electric vehicles and how efficient they are. Plus, we’re using a 100% renewable energy provider; here in Illinois, we can choose to buy from a company other than the standard provider, and ours uses hydropower. And, because we deliver a lot in the late-night hours, it’s a bonus that these cars are so quiet—they really make no sound as we drive through neighborhoods, compared with a noisy muffler!

Beware of potential drawbacks. Adding electric vehicles has been very interesting—though most people love it, there are a few who hate it. They have a very strange perception that an electric vehicle is bad. We’ve had a person unplug [cars] from the charger at night, for example, so now we’ve installed cameras in front of the chargers to monitor them after closing. I don’t understand why anyone would get upset at the car—especially as everyone else here is really excited about them and wants to drive them. Also, in the winters here, our electric bill is a little more expensive, so we do take that into consideration. But in terms of setup, it’s easy; we just needed to install a charger in front of the store, which we hired an electrician for.

Overall, I’d recommend electric delivery vehicles to everyone. We have two electric delivery vehicles at the moment, and we’re thinking of getting more. I don’t really see any major issues associated with them—only a bunch of benefits! The cars themselves act as advertising and help attract people to our business. And, from a financial perspective, it’s a no-brainer. With the money and time they save, the cars pay for themselves. Even in my personal life, I now have electric vehicles, and I used to be a total petrol-head. Now, I’ve sold all of my other cars and stick with electric only.

Tracy Morin is PMQ’s senior copy editor and the editor of PizzaVegan.com.