NEW YORK DETROIT CHICAGO NO MATTER WHERE YOU’RE FROM

Mike’s Hot Honey started out of a pizzeria in Brooklyn 11 years ago, creating a whole new category of pizza topping that has been called a gamechanger by pizza fans and spawned best-selling menu items for pizzerias nationwide. Request a sample today to see what all the buzz is about.

www.mikeshothoney.com/sample entrees like pad Thai and ramen dishes. The eatery’s late-night hours drew in Dallas’ service-industry crowd, who needed somewhere to drink and dine after clocking out at work. “We had a service-industry following immediately, which propels us to this day,” he says.

ZaLat came next in 2015, along with a new sense of purpose. “I’m always thinking multiunit,” Nguyen notes. “Why knock out one concept, only to go and change it up? It’s very complex getting one of these ideas to work. If you have one that survives and makes it, why not just perfect that model so you can replicate it at scale instead of coming up with a brand-new one every single time?”

Steady Organic Growth

Before long, Nguyen had opened four ZaLat locations. “That was organic growth, restaurant by restaurant,” he says. As ZaLat expanded, each existing store helped pay for the next one. After opening No. 4, Nguyen started taking on investors and adding more and more locations.

As a DELCO kitchen, ZaLat doesn’t require a lot of space, with a footprint of about 1,500 square feet. “Our buildout costs are insanely low compared to everybody else,” he says. “They don’t care about their buildout costs, because someone wrote them a $300 million check. They’re going to go as fast as they can so their [investors] can exit at a high multiple in five years. Then, the company is left holding the bag, thinking, ‘How are we going to find additional growth going forward?’ We’re going to have steady organic growth. We have stores that pay for themselves in five months, total. That means we’re kicking off two or three more stores per year for each unit.”

ZaLat’s biggest advantage? “We just concentrate on one thing: A-plus execution on the pizza,” he says. ZaLat’s menu is all pizza, all the time, plus one side salad. No calzones or pasta dishes, no burgers or sandwiches. “Ninety-one percent of our sales is pizza,” Nguyen says. “We offer Ben & Jerry’s ice cream for dessert and Cokes. By design, we don’t want to make anything except pizza, so we can make it as perfectly as we can. My thought in designing this model was, let’s conquer this space by focusing on one product.”

Partnering With Uber

Getting that pizza into customers’ hands was a tougher challenge. ZaLat started out with its own team of delivery drivers. That turned out to be one more headache Nguyen didn’t need in his life. “It became very apparent to me that the pizza chains that do delivery are not in the pizza business,” he says. “They’re in the logistics delivery business. The cost of maintaining those drivers is like a second kitchen you’re paying for. [The chains] can afford that because of the economy of their pizza, how they crank those pizzas out. We were trying to focus on great pizza and found that the entire shop was worried about who’s going to take that pizza out.”

Even with 10 or 12 drivers working on a Friday night, ZaLat was struggling to get orders to customers’ doorsteps. “Now I’ve got managers jumping into their cars,” Nguyen says. “I’ve delivered to all of these apartment complexes myself. I was, like, ‘This sucks.’ It’s all we worried about. The stress level was just intense all the time.”

Nguyen soon found himself calling Uber drivers for help. “The driver would come up to our shop expecting a passenger, and we’d walk out with a pizza and have a three-minute conversation: ‘Please take this pizza to a customer, and maybe they’ll give you a tip.’ We convinced three or four to take it, and one cussed us out.”

A pizza-shaped lightbulb flashed above Nguyen’s head, and he went to Uber with a proposal: “I told them, ‘I’m glad to pay full fare for your drivers to carry my food. You’ve got thousands of drivers. Get into this business, and I’ll help you. I came from a tech company. I’ll give you all the tweaks [to your software] to test out whatever model you want to deploy, but you need to be in this business.’ A month later, Uber corporate took me up on it. They said, ‘We have a piece of software we’re using in San Francisco to deliver flowers. We think we can use it to try out food delivery. Do you want to be our restaurant test project?’ They came in a few weeks later, deployed it on a Monday, and I got rid of all our drivers that Friday. We were the only restaurants Uber delivered for in the first three or four months.”

A Glorious Mission Offering delivery only through third-party companies—ZaLat also partners with DoorDash—has worked like a charm,

Nguyen says. Granted, that personal connection between the brand and the customer is lost, but the pizza is so good, he believes, it doesn’t matter. “We don’t touch our customers at all. Their only contact is when they eat the pizza. So we’re focused 100% on the quality and taste of the pizza.”

Maintaining that food quality calls for what Nguyen terms “an extremely high give-a-sh*t factor” among his staff. There’s only one way to get that, he believes: Turn your employees into “zealots” like himself and show them that they truly matter. “It can’t be a minimum-wage-plus employee force. They take care of the customer and the pizza to their maximum capability, and on our side, as a company, we do everything we can to take care of them.”

Not only does ZaLat provide all employees with full benefits, including health insurance and a 401(k) plan, they’re also offered stock options in the company. “All of our employees have a chance to be owners in this company,” Nguyen says. “This comes from my tech experience. If you get in early, you’ve got some stock options. At a company like Google or Facebook, no matter what you did there, when it goes public, you’ve got a huge amount of cash as your payday.”

So the better workers do their job, the better their chances of a future windfall. But most service-industry employees don’t understand stock options and evaluations, so Nguyen makes sure to educate new employees on the benefits of buying in. “We explain how it works. You get a chance to buy a brick in this house. When you do [good work] that causes the value