Speaker 1: What's up, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Big
Speaker 1: Money Energy Podcast, Season two with I Heart Radio, the
Speaker 1: greatest podcast ever. Obviously, today we have a really really,
Speaker 1: really cool entrepreneur, Elier Sela. And now you might be
Speaker 1: saying what I don't know? That is I don't but
Speaker 1: you know what you do have you know what you
Speaker 1: do know? You know you have tasted pizza. Elier Sela
Speaker 1: is the new pizza king because he founded a company
Speaker 1: called Slice, which has completely changed the way people order
Speaker 1: pizza all over the world. He's created it not too
Speaker 1: long ago and he's now built it to one thousand,
Speaker 1: seventy five employees and they're going to do a billion
Speaker 1: dollars in pizza sales this year. The story is totally incredible.
Speaker 1: He's a first generation immigrant from Macedonia, grew up in
Speaker 1: Staten Island, went to local college and just figured out
Speaker 1: what his passion was and so many other things. Also,
Speaker 1: he turned down an offer to sell the company once
Speaker 1: for eighteen million dollars or he said no. That was
Speaker 1: a really really tough decision for him, and then again
Speaker 1: for three hundred and fifty million dollars he said no.
Speaker 1: We go through the whole thing. I'll be like it
Speaker 1: typically there's so much information that I'm like trying to
Speaker 1: pare it down. I'm like, all right, how do I
Speaker 1: be as efficient with questions as possible? Right with you? Like,
Speaker 1: I know just enough, but you're also kind of like
Speaker 1: the secret Ninja entrepreneur, Like there's not a lot out there,
Speaker 1: and so, um, I kind of want to like dig
Speaker 1: into it. People know your background and they're listening to this,
Speaker 1: so they've obviously read the caption and the description of
Speaker 1: what the podcast episode is. But your first generation, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I moved here when I was ten years old. Came
Speaker 1: here from Europe. Um. I remember literally vividly remember flying
Speaker 1: into JFK. I come from a town in Europe, in
Speaker 1: southeastern Europe that has zero traffic lights. I mean there's
Speaker 1: no there's barely ading lights. And coming into New York
Speaker 1: City from from JFK. You look around, you look out
Speaker 1: the window, you're ten years old. I mean it looks
Speaker 1: like magic, It looks like anything, anything could be possible,
Speaker 1: which is kind of the it's stuck with me from
Speaker 1: from that moment forward. And what brought your family to
Speaker 1: the US into New York. Yeah, My my family actually
Speaker 1: has been um, going back and forth. My um, my grandfather,
Speaker 1: my parents lived in the city in the seventies and
Speaker 1: they owned a pizza shop called Charlie's Pizza on sevent
Speaker 1: and the Wild Story. As a real estate U person,
Speaker 1: you'll appreciate this. Yeah, they earned a lot with their
Speaker 1: pizza shop. It was seven operation, saved a lot of
Speaker 1: cash there at least ran up and the building owner
Speaker 1: offered them to buy the building for dollars h five
Speaker 1: man and they turned it down so they could all
Speaker 1: move back home. Got it to take the money exactly.
Speaker 1: But yeah, they moved back, moved back home, and then
Speaker 1: um decided to come back again. And I think part
Speaker 1: of it has to do have to do with the
Speaker 1: fact that my brothers and I we were, you know,
Speaker 1: getting older in a in a sort of sense, and
Speaker 1: they wanted to provide opportunity for us, specifically on the
Speaker 1: education front, so better schools, better opportunities, and they made
Speaker 1: a lot of sacrifices to come back. I'm sure. And
Speaker 1: you spoke English at the time, No, not really barely. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like just so classic, right, like your parents put
Speaker 1: you on an airplane and take you to the US
Speaker 1: and don't really know English, and they're like, go figure
Speaker 1: it out, go to school, go on and be somebody.
Speaker 1: But fortunately I have a twin brother and identical identical
Speaker 1: and are you the twin are you really? You never know?
Speaker 1: We are in a lot of places. I am in
Speaker 1: a lot of places at the same time. Let me
Speaker 1: put it that way. I'm kidding, but we um it was.
Speaker 1: It made things a lot easier. Obviously, I have a
Speaker 1: twin brother, You're kind of going through this journey together.
Speaker 1: You don't feel so alone, and you don't have to
Speaker 1: sort of have this pressure of making friends. So it
Speaker 1: kind of softened the experience a little bit. What did
Speaker 1: you want to be when you were a little kid.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to imagine you is like nine years old
Speaker 1: in Macedonia and then eleven in New York. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: I'll be at my My dad really instilled this sort
Speaker 1: of entrepreneurial passion from from the early days. My dad
Speaker 1: worked incredibly hard. He was, you know, part of the
Speaker 1: family's pizzeria business when he was younger, and then he
Speaker 1: became a master tailor and opened up a shop in
Speaker 1: Manhattan when we moved back, um and really made a
Speaker 1: name for himself because the suits he made were just
Speaker 1: are are incredible? I Mean, we've got to we've got
Speaker 1: to talk after this. But he's retired now and world
Speaker 1: words sort of spread out, and um, you know, John F.
Speaker 1: Kennedy Jr. Was getting married and needed a suit for
Speaker 1: his wedding and my dad handmade his suit for his wedding. Um,
Speaker 1: and that was sort of his own small business, right,
Speaker 1: he was just a master tailor. What he sort of
Speaker 1: taught us was kind of going back to the same
Speaker 1: point I made earlier, which is, when you come to
Speaker 1: to America, every opportunity is available to you. Literally everything,
Speaker 1: it all is um up to you. It's all up
Speaker 1: to you if you want to, um really take advantage
Speaker 1: and seize the moment and sees the opportunities. And basically
Speaker 1: what he said, what are was that the rules of
Speaker 1: this country favor entrepreneurs. Um. Nothing wrong with having a
Speaker 1: job and working for others, of course, but but that
Speaker 1: is what the system is designed to do, is is
Speaker 1: nurture and enable entrepreneurs to launch businesses. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: from right out of school, I mean, my my first
Speaker 1: job was a my own business where we built websites
Speaker 1: in the early two thousands. Um, is that nerd Force
Speaker 1: nerd Force A great. I got great, simple to name. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got really lucky. UM Geek Squad launched with Best
Speaker 1: Buy nationally and um it was not a franchise, but
Speaker 1: people wanted to get into that business. So we started
Speaker 1: painting calls NonStop for people who wanted a franchise. I
Speaker 1: had no idea what that meant, but if they wanted one,
Speaker 1: I needed to sell them that. So I franchised the
Speaker 1: model and we launched the hundred and twenty four locations.
Speaker 1: That's insane. How old were you? I was twenty well
Speaker 1: when I launched those twenty one, so twenty one to
Speaker 1: twenty seven you we Did you go to college? Did
Speaker 1: you get out of college? I went to CUNEI. I
Speaker 1: went to the College of Staten Island. So I always
Speaker 1: did really well in school, but albeying culture is one
Speaker 1: that we're at the time. It was like you have
Speaker 1: to be home, you can't really go away to school,
Speaker 1: and so I went to the College of Staten Island. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I graduated in three years. I had a bunch of
Speaker 1: college credits from high school. I don't know why, I
Speaker 1: think just I've got this way of memorizing things. I
Speaker 1: guess um, But yeah, I finished school pretty quickly and
Speaker 1: then launched the tech support company, got it. And did
Speaker 1: you always love technology? Yeah? I think I can when
Speaker 1: you're a little kid, even in Macedonia or is this
Speaker 1: like no, definitely not in Macedonia. Now there is. But
Speaker 1: I think what really led me to embrace and kind
Speaker 1: of have passion for technology is sometime maybe I was
Speaker 1: thirteen or fourteen years old and my older brother got
Speaker 1: a computer. My older brother who's five years older, he
Speaker 1: was just starting three of you, three boys, three of us. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So my older brother, um started school, he's an architect, um,
Speaker 1: and his freshman year of college, he got a computer
Speaker 1: and we were not allowed to touch it, my brother
Speaker 1: and I. And so the moment you're told you can't
Speaker 1: touch so the moment that that became the rule meant
Speaker 1: that we you know, you obviously want to go and
Speaker 1: play with So whenever he would be in school, because
Speaker 1: it was like a desktop, we were just yeah, we
Speaker 1: were just like mess around with it, and um, it
Speaker 1: became a real passionate for me. So when I went
Speaker 1: to college, it was a computer science truck, so a
Speaker 1: computer science to me. So you sold NERD Force correct right,
Speaker 1: And you did not go back to Macedonian retiring the beat.
Speaker 1: I did not. I boots strapped nerd Force. In fact,
Speaker 1: I didn't really know what it meant to raise venture
Speaker 1: capital and investments and things like that. Did you raise
Speaker 1: money with nord Force? I did not know. Is just
Speaker 1: started from day one, just franchise it because people are
Speaker 1: calling and wanted to franchise. Yeah. Yeah, we started getting
Speaker 1: so many calls. Um, well, we were named one of
Speaker 1: the most thriving companies post nine eleven at the five
Speaker 1: year Anniversity. So in two thousand and six, five years
Speaker 1: after nine eleven, we were on the centerfold. Back then
Speaker 1: it was a big deal of the New York Daily News. Um,
Speaker 1: and it was sort of this company's thriving in New
Speaker 1: York Post and so that gave us a lot of
Speaker 1: brand awareness at the local level. And so again as
Speaker 1: a geek squads started launching on a national scale, we
Speaker 1: just we got bombarded with calls for franchising. Yeah, how
Speaker 1: did you figure out how to franchise? Oh my god.
Speaker 1: I went to an attorney in State Island and I said, Hey,
Speaker 1: I want to franchise my business. And I said, well,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be two and fifty tho. I was like,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't have two. Um. I locked myself
Speaker 1: in my office for three days. Literally, it was like
Speaker 1: a Friday on Monday, learned everything that there is to
Speaker 1: know about how to franchise your business, including trademarking your
Speaker 1: logo and brand, and I did it myself and within
Speaker 1: ninety days we had our first franchise. E wow. Wow.
Speaker 1: So the answer to everyone who's listening to this is
Speaker 1: just be smart, be super smart, get through college in
Speaker 1: three years and learned that. What you just said reminded
Speaker 1: me of like, uh, Leonardo DiCaprio, catch me if you can.
Speaker 1: Have you seen that with Tom Hanks at the end
Speaker 1: of the movie Tom? I said, don't you know, how
Speaker 1: did you? Like? What? What was it? Like? How did
Speaker 1: how did you get into law school? Or how what
Speaker 1: was it to become a lawyer or something. He's like, no,
Speaker 1: I just studied and took the test and I passed.
Speaker 1: It's like what, No, but you're a con artist. You
Speaker 1: had a separate way to get about it. He's like, now,
Speaker 1: I just I just studied and took the test, and
Speaker 1: I would say that's Um, it's actually less complicated than smart.
Speaker 1: I think it's just put an effort. I don't know
Speaker 1: that I'm smarter than anyone, that we all have the
Speaker 1: same abilities. But it really is about the input, the
Speaker 1: effort you put in against that you know ability, and
Speaker 1: that gives you an advantage or not. So it's really
Speaker 1: more effort than it is smart. And do you remember
Speaker 1: where your first franchise wash. Yeah, I was in Fort Lane,
Speaker 1: New Jersey. Nice. And so that person then paid you
Speaker 1: a fee and opened up their own nerd force. Look, yeah,
Speaker 1: I got it where people doing these like out of
Speaker 1: their own homes and garages type thing or opening up
Speaker 1: retail stores. No, it was a mobile. It was like
Speaker 1: a you know, man in a van mobile on side
Speaker 1: tech support in home business. And you know, we grew
Speaker 1: to about nine hundred technicians. So these franchise e s
Speaker 1: started hiring their own technicians and we went from about
Speaker 1: thirty technicians to nine hundred. And you were getting a
Speaker 1: small percentage of all other sales. We were getting four
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty dollars a month as a flat feed royalty.
Speaker 1: There was a marketing fee and that was it. And
Speaker 1: were you taking a percentage? So the royalty fee was
Speaker 1: on top of that right. So then you sold the
Speaker 1: franchise and the rights to nerd Force right correct to
Speaker 1: a public company called Nexus Management out of the United Kingdom,
Speaker 1: public company where they just knock on your door. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: they provided enterprise level support to larger companies, and they
Speaker 1: wanted to get into the SMB space too, small business space,
Speaker 1: and they viewed nerd Force as their wedge into a
Speaker 1: small business and then they were going to provide their
Speaker 1: enterprise level products to small businesses. Did you have to
Speaker 1: stay on board once you sold? I did. I had
Speaker 1: to stay on board for a couple of years. Um,
Speaker 1: I got really lucky. So I sold in June of
Speaker 1: two November of two thousand eight. The world changed economically
Speaker 1: and access to capital just completely went away. And the
Speaker 1: franchise system is highly dependent on small business loans, which
Speaker 1: became impossible. And so I would say the next year
Speaker 1: year and a half became pretty challenging. Um, and eventually
Speaker 1: I ended up leaving got it to do what you're
Speaker 1: doing now, or something totally different, to do what I'm
Speaker 1: doing now? So where is that mindset switch for you?
Speaker 1: You're sitting there, you just sold a company to a
Speaker 1: public company. You're in the middle of a recession, things
Speaker 1: are really really tough, and you're like, you know what pizza? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so your family has been in pizza for a long time,
Speaker 1: so I get correct, correct. So I've got a lot
Speaker 1: of family members that own pizzerias, being albeying this is
Speaker 1: what albeings do. That or construction, which is what my
Speaker 1: twin brother does. Um. Yeah. And I started getting a
Speaker 1: lot of family members asking me for help to build
Speaker 1: in websites because we were because of the Nerd Force
Speaker 1: experience and just my background and the consistency with which
Speaker 1: these asks came across was kind of jarring. And you know,
Speaker 1: I knew everything about the franchise model. So I'm looking
Speaker 1: at Dominoes and I'm watching commercials and they're like order online.
Speaker 1: Every commercial they stopped advertising phone numbers. Everything was e commerce.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to learn more about what was going
Speaker 1: on there, and I also wanted to learn more about
Speaker 1: the pizza industry more holistically. Um, but I didn't really
Speaker 1: I'll be honest, I don't really think about challenges Like
Speaker 1: I didn't really think, well, it's a recession, like maybe
Speaker 1: I shouldn't start a business. I don't my brain isn't
Speaker 1: wired that way. My brain is more just like what
Speaker 1: is what is the opportunity and what's the current sort
Speaker 1: of data set? And so um. Anyway, learned a couple
Speaker 1: of things. One, you may be surprised, but the pizza
Speaker 1: industry in the US is forty seven billion dollars. That
Speaker 1: is revenue that passes through seventies seven thousand locations in
Speaker 1: the US. That's a massive, massive industry, forty seven billion. Two,
Speaker 1: only twenty of all locations are the big chains combined Domino's,
Speaker 1: Papa John's, Little Caesars, Pizza Hut. Everyone else is independent
Speaker 1: for the most part. And three, Domino's locations were starting
Speaker 1: to really outperform independence because of the e commerce play exactly.
Speaker 1: And so I UM, I was like, wait, going back
Speaker 1: to my experience with nerd Force, these independent operators, these
Speaker 1: mom and pop locations have the same problem that the
Speaker 1: independents who were competing with us did as well. But
Speaker 1: let me go and talk to them. Let me see
Speaker 1: why did why did my uncle not open up a
Speaker 1: Papa John's, Why did he open up John Anthony's Pizza.
Speaker 1: So what you learn is that most small business owners
Speaker 1: are really passionate about a craft, and so they go
Speaker 1: into the business because of that, and they inherit all
Speaker 1: these business problems, but they are not really business people.
Speaker 1: They don't know marketing, they don't know technology, they don't
Speaker 1: know you know, finances and all those things. They just
Speaker 1: kind of have to figure that stuff out. So the
Speaker 1: artists first. Yeah, and so I realized that there's an
Speaker 1: opportunity to create a new model called a reverse franchise,
Speaker 1: where instead of doing sort of recreating the franchise, I
Speaker 1: wanted to unite all the independence and in essence create
Speaker 1: the world's largest pizza chain, but this time instead of
Speaker 1: all of them being the same brand, for them to
Speaker 1: be independent brands but have the same benefits. So that
Speaker 1: was the moment I realized that those three things and
Speaker 1: and sort of that lesson for why independence go into
Speaker 1: business or mom and pop sort of owners go into business. Um,
Speaker 1: I went and bought a domain name called my pizza
Speaker 1: dot com, which was the brand of my company for
Speaker 1: the first five years. Did you to buy it for
Speaker 1: somebody else? I did. It was for sale for one
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand dollars. Yeah, my pizza dot com. Yeah
Speaker 1: it was. It was. I mean, this is two thousand
Speaker 1: nine billion names were pretty popular. Pizza dot Com, which
Speaker 1: I tried to buy, was on sale for four million dollars.
Speaker 1: So it's like, I'll take the mine, and uh, but
Speaker 1: I negotiated that down to you are a good salesman.
Speaker 1: I mean that you can't see the storyteller, you not
Speaker 1: get down. Yeah, and so UM got that on board
Speaker 1: and we started, um yeah, we started scaling quickly, bootstrapped again,
Speaker 1: no investments, but it started as my Pizza. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: then obviously, so this is two ten, so creating an
Speaker 1: app wasn't even an idea yet. No, it was still
Speaker 1: super early. I mean, in hindsight, I probably should have
Speaker 1: invested there early enough, but I did not. Instead, we
Speaker 1: for the most part built websites for the pizzeria powered
Speaker 1: by my Pizza, and then we have the platform and
Speaker 1: and so you would just cold call independent pizzerias and say, hey,
Speaker 1: we're gonna help you sell more pizza online. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: well we tried doing that and they were like, what
Speaker 1: are you talking about? Who needs to sell pizza online?
Speaker 1: It's again, it's two thousand nine. No one really wants technology.
Speaker 1: And so UM I went and got three cars, these
Speaker 1: like little Nissan cubes. They look like pizza boxes. UM
Speaker 1: branded them with my Pizza and I would park them
Speaker 1: in front of pizzeria's literally just moving around with my
Speaker 1: twin brother and we would leave him around town and
Speaker 1: it would give us credibility because we were a brand
Speaker 1: new like who knew my Pizza dot Com and UM.
Speaker 1: And then after leaving them, you know, in front of
Speaker 1: a pizzeria for a day or two, I would go
Speaker 1: inside the pizza and say, hey, I'm with my Pizza
Speaker 1: dot Com. If you guys want to want to work
Speaker 1: with us, here's what we do. And that's how we
Speaker 1: got probably the first locations. But you build them all
Speaker 1: their own individual websites, correct, because that's what your friends
Speaker 1: and family were having you do, because that's what you
Speaker 1: asked somebody who starts a company called nerd force, did
Speaker 1: you exactly? But what we did was and the unlock
Speaker 1: here is that all these PiZZ threas are almost identical.
Speaker 1: They just don't know it. They all operate the same way.
Speaker 1: And so what we did was we built a system
Speaker 1: where as long as I can enter a PiZZ reas,
Speaker 1: information on the back end, on the front end of
Speaker 1: website would be created automatically. But it was just like
Speaker 1: a cookie cutter website, same one, just different photos and
Speaker 1: different stuff. What how do you make money? So we
Speaker 1: basically charged two dollars per order. For every order we
Speaker 1: generated online, we will charge two dollars and can building
Speaker 1: the website. You're knowing what orders you're coming through. So
Speaker 1: we built a website, We had my pizza dot com.
Speaker 1: We created some advertising channels, the marketing channels online through Google,
Speaker 1: and so for every order that would pass through, the
Speaker 1: restaurant would pay us two dollars. It would cost us
Speaker 1: on so literally like it was like create something for
Speaker 1: for a dollar, sell it for two, and do that
Speaker 1: as many times as possible. Got it good? Think people
Speaker 1: buy a lot of pizza though, And you started just
Speaker 1: east coast to start, Yeah, just mostly in New York.
Speaker 1: And I'll tell you a story. By the way, my
Speaker 1: mom was like, what is this new thing you're doing.
Speaker 1: Why don't you go get a job, And and I
Speaker 1: was like, okay, I'll explain to you what we do.
Speaker 1: We we partner with pizzerias, We build this website, we
Speaker 1: enter all their menu items, we go and advertise, and
Speaker 1: then somebody orders. And then when somebody orders, we make money,
Speaker 1: and she's like, okay, not bad. So the orders like
Speaker 1: thirty dollars, so you make thirty dollars. I was like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: we make two and in fact it costs us one.
Speaker 1: So we make a dollar. And she's like, all that
Speaker 1: work for a dollar a lot of exactly you read
Speaker 1: scale of lots of dollars. So then where do you
Speaker 1: go from there? Like you just okay, now you're just
Speaker 1: gonna tackle all the independent PiZZ to reas in the
Speaker 1: United States. Yeah. So then you know, once we started
Speaker 1: UM sort of creating some critical mass on the on
Speaker 1: the restaurant side, words started to spread. UM. Really the
Speaker 1: unlock for us was when we figured out how to
Speaker 1: turn online orders into faxes to the pizzrea automatically. So
Speaker 1: there's technology that converts um something in in you know,
Speaker 1: something digital to a facts within like thirty seconds, so
Speaker 1: that they could get like the paper order and they
Speaker 1: would print it out and deliver it. Yeah, because a
Speaker 1: lot of pizzrea's were like, hey, I don't want all
Speaker 1: this technology, you know, they're sort of there's a lot
Speaker 1: of anxiety around that, but they all have a fax
Speaker 1: number on their menu. And so we started asking, Hey,
Speaker 1: how many times this is fax machine print in order
Speaker 1: for you? And they would say once every two weeks,
Speaker 1: and so we were like, what if that printed out
Speaker 1: like thirty times a day. They were like, you know,
Speaker 1: it's great, and it it meant that they didn't have
Speaker 1: to change their workflow. And so we started selling my
Speaker 1: Pizza as a facts ordering service to the restaurant, but
Speaker 1: an online ordering product to the consumer. Crazy and the
Speaker 1: moment that happened, it just kind of took off. And
Speaker 1: pizzeria is just kind of because they all talk to
Speaker 1: each other, right, they all talk to you, and they're
Speaker 1: all very connected. If if you own a pizza shop,
Speaker 1: so does your brother in law and maybe your sister,
Speaker 1: and so there's this sort of community effect and then
Speaker 1: they just all want to be a part of the
Speaker 1: same system because you're also you're making ordering easier, but
Speaker 1: we're also making them more money where they sell more pizza, No, definitely.
Speaker 1: So the big unlock here is that online volume, e
Speaker 1: commerce volume is more valuable than offline volume. So if
Speaker 1: you compare to Pizza Rea's, one of them is on
Speaker 1: phone based where you're calling in the orders. The other
Speaker 1: one is e commerce. The difference is going to be
Speaker 1: three x yeah. One because the phone channel is the
Speaker 1: same person who's making the pizza has to answer the phone.
Speaker 1: It's busy, it's all these things, taking down the credit
Speaker 1: card numbers, all that stuff too. Once you call a pizzree,
Speaker 1: they never call you back. There's no CRM, there's no
Speaker 1: like retention marketing. They don't remind you to reorder, they
Speaker 1: don't upsell you. There's none of that. And then um three,
Speaker 1: it costs a lot more to serve that customer because
Speaker 1: you need people to answer the phone and so, and
Speaker 1: you make a lot of mistakes and all that good stuff.
Speaker 1: So really the primise here is that if we can
Speaker 1: flip all of these independent pizzreas, these family owned businesses,
Speaker 1: to e commerce businesses, they'll make a lot more money
Speaker 1: and they'll save a lot a lot of money. Nice
Speaker 1: and so then take me up to switched. So a
Speaker 1: couple of things happened between then and one is first,
Speaker 1: did you raise any money? We didn't raise money, just
Speaker 1: operating purely off cash flow, purely off like yeah cash
Speaker 1: flow bootstrapped started to build out a team in Macedonia,
Speaker 1: so you're profitable. Yeah, we were hiring some family members
Speaker 1: in Macedonia to do some of the menu work that
Speaker 1: we spoke about. Because you wanted to do this for
Speaker 1: p thres No, it's all us. But I wanted them
Speaker 1: to help me do the work, and so I went,
Speaker 1: yeah off shore. I went to visit family in Macedonia
Speaker 1: and they were asking me about this new company. And
Speaker 1: one of my relatives said, hey, why don't you give
Speaker 1: us that work and we can do it for five dollars.
Speaker 1: It was costing us a hundred here and so. And
Speaker 1: by the way, five dollars over there five dollars per
Speaker 1: hour is maybe five times the national average. So you
Speaker 1: get this amazing job in an office, you get paid
Speaker 1: really well. Um. And so we started hiring people there,
Speaker 1: and by we had a team there of about twenty
Speaker 1: or thirty people doing a lot of the admin work, yeah,
Speaker 1: the back office operations. And then I picked my head
Speaker 1: up February. I'm in Starbucks in stud Island and I'm
Speaker 1: looking at these um at my books, at my financial books.
Speaker 1: And in January of twenty fifteen, we had profited two
Speaker 1: and fifty thou dollars just for the month, straight to
Speaker 1: the bottom line. UM. I started doing some silly things
Speaker 1: so I went to Manhattan Motor Cars in Bora Bentley
Speaker 1: just cash, and I was like, I'll make it up
Speaker 1: next month. So so some silly things like that, where
Speaker 1: where's that Bentley? Now I sold it in three years later.
Speaker 1: But you know things you do that you're like, you
Speaker 1: know what am I going to do with this money? Um?
Speaker 1: Then I realized, wait, I'm being kind of silly. I
Speaker 1: need to reinvest this thing, and could you to reinvest
Speaker 1: in the company. Six months later, I got an offer
Speaker 1: to sell the company for eighteen million dollars and it
Speaker 1: would have been you know, life changing. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: almost did it. Who makes it kind of over private
Speaker 1: equity fund interest. Couple of brothers had sold their own
Speaker 1: tech company and they were starting to create a portfolio
Speaker 1: of companies and they saw what you guys were doing
Speaker 1: and just came to you. Yeah, yeah, came to us,
Speaker 1: and UM got really close. They took me out to
Speaker 1: dinner and the whole thing got really close to selling.
Speaker 1: And my twin brother was like, well, what are you
Speaker 1: gonna do next? That I was thirty five, and and
Speaker 1: you know I thought to myself, I was like, you
Speaker 1: know what, I'll probably do the same thing again. The
Speaker 1: third time around, and for me, it was like, you
Speaker 1: know what, Um, this is still the beginning are We
Speaker 1: were growing so fast that I kind of asked myself, Hey,
Speaker 1: what if I treated this company as the new thing
Speaker 1: and I don't sell, But what if I really come
Speaker 1: in with that level of energy of like launching something
Speaker 1: brand new? What would happen? And so I turned down
Speaker 1: the deal and I reached out to one of the
Speaker 1: founders of Seamless who had sold the company on Twitter
Speaker 1: and um they responded and they're like, yeah, let's jump
Speaker 1: on a call. Get on a call. He's like, hey, like,
Speaker 1: what is this business? My pizza dot com? I've never
Speaker 1: heard of it. I don't even know what this is.
Speaker 1: But hey, when you have like five restaurants on your platform,
Speaker 1: just call me back and we'll we'll work together. I
Speaker 1: was like, well, I've got three thousand. I had three
Speaker 1: thousand restaurants by then, and he's like, come to my
Speaker 1: office tomorrow. UM. I go to the I go to
Speaker 1: the office. Um. They got really excited and invested a
Speaker 1: million dollars. For me, it was access to their network
Speaker 1: to help the scale the business, and that was kind
Speaker 1: of the beginning of the second phase of the company,
Speaker 1: but it was still my Pizza. It was still my Pizza.
Speaker 1: This was late October November. So when did you make
Speaker 1: the switch from all the different websites into the one
Speaker 1: app platform. Yeah, so that must have been a huge
Speaker 1: that's a huge planned shift. Yeah, well everything changed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we we still actually power all the websites. So
Speaker 1: we we decided to go from just being websites only
Speaker 1: to being omni channel. So one is we made a
Speaker 1: deal with Google, so we are a direct partner of Google,
Speaker 1: where if you are a pizza shop and your partner
Speaker 1: with Slice, the consumer can order through Google, Google Assistant,
Speaker 1: Google Food, Ordering, your name it all these channels freely
Speaker 1: without you having to do anything extra. And then we
Speaker 1: started to invest in a director consumer app um and
Speaker 1: we launched that in October of and that was that
Speaker 1: coincided in parallel with us going from the My Pizza
Speaker 1: brand to the Slice brand, and it was kind of
Speaker 1: crazy business business inside. I wrote this article that said,
Speaker 1: this one man company is so profitable that they've hired
Speaker 1: one hundred people in like ninety days and now it's
Speaker 1: called Slice kind of things. I think it's still still
Speaker 1: out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is still out there.
Speaker 1: It's such a cool, such a crazy cool story. Um,
Speaker 1: why did you do all this? Like? What's your mission?
Speaker 1: Is it to takedown dominoes? Is it to empower? I listen?
Speaker 1: You know, I could have nine hours of question for you. Um,
Speaker 1: but your story is just so unique and inspiring to
Speaker 1: a lot of people are listening, Like I have a
Speaker 1: lot of ideas right now, um, and so I know
Speaker 1: a lot of other people are probably thinking, you know,
Speaker 1: for themselves too. But like you, you now are at
Speaker 1: a point where is the goal just to completely shift
Speaker 1: the way people order food? Is it to change the paradigm?
Speaker 1: Is it just to build something as big as possibly
Speaker 1: can be? Because have you had other offers come to
Speaker 1: you to try to buy you out? Left? And we have? Um,
Speaker 1: we we did. We had another offer in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: Haven't made this public, but I'll share it here. I
Speaker 1: won't say who, but we didn't have an off trailer
Speaker 1: and the trailer I haven't that's great, But we did
Speaker 1: have an offer to sell for fifty million dollars in
Speaker 1: nineteen that I turned down. You turned it down? Did
Speaker 1: you tell your mom? I did? Okay? So to make
Speaker 1: sure because maybe she'll listen to this. We are and
Speaker 1: at the time I own more than fifty percent of
Speaker 1: the company still, so it would have been that would
Speaker 1: have been life changing as well. But uh, in hindsight,
Speaker 1: it was absolutely the right idea and it was the
Speaker 1: right decision um because again we're incredibly early in this
Speaker 1: digital transformation e commerce transformation phase. And to your question,
Speaker 1: like what what motivates me, it's you know, money is
Speaker 1: a is a lagging indicator of wealth that you can
Speaker 1: create for the world, and I don't. Wealth isn't defined
Speaker 1: as money. Wealth is making people, making things people want,
Speaker 1: and so that's one too. I also don't like, I
Speaker 1: don't operate with the mindset of in order for me
Speaker 1: to win, I gotta make sure somebody else loses, because
Speaker 1: that assumes that wealth is a finite pie. That's not
Speaker 1: true either. Wealth in fact, is an infinite um game.
Speaker 1: If you create wealth, it's incremental to everything that already
Speaker 1: exists um. And so I admire dominoes, I admire some
Speaker 1: of these chains. I think they're doing incredibly well, and
Speaker 1: I take some inspiration from what they're doing. But I
Speaker 1: want to make that accessible and democratize that. As much
Speaker 1: as I don't like that word UM to everybody else.
Speaker 1: So for me, what I'm really passionate about is how
Speaker 1: do we keep the debate of what is your favorite pizza? Going?
Speaker 1: Because that debate will be gone if local family owned
Speaker 1: businesses go out of business, of course, and the only
Speaker 1: way for these family owned businesses to have a shot
Speaker 1: is for there to be an operating system, ultimately a
Speaker 1: platform that will allow them to focus on what they
Speaker 1: do really well but solve all the other problems. So
Speaker 1: having said all of that, the way I think about
Speaker 1: the opportunity looking forward is instead of somebody going and
Speaker 1: wanting to open up a franchise, I want someone to
Speaker 1: open up their own local brand, their own authentic brand,
Speaker 1: with their own recipe, their own story, their own history,
Speaker 1: UM and focus on what they do best. But everything
Speaker 1: else is sort of saw for by slice, which is
Speaker 1: the real estate side we should talk after um. The
Speaker 1: financial side, so access to capital, the entire technology platform, brand,
Speaker 1: creative marketing, all those things. Do you give small business loans? Now, company, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're we're actually launching two locations this month with great
Speaker 1: operators who have had one location for a long time,
Speaker 1: have always had a dream to open up their second location,
Speaker 1: but they don't have access to capital or had a
Speaker 1: lot of anxiety about where and how to do it.
Speaker 1: One of them will be in Greenwich, Connecticut, and another
Speaker 1: one is in a small town in Massachusetts. And are
Speaker 1: you taking ownership stakes? And those we are not now
Speaker 1: they're just exclusive customers to Slice. Interesting. So what's your
Speaker 1: what's your daylight now? I mean, are you hiring and
Speaker 1: managing this entire time? Is that like your Monday through Friday? Yeah?
Speaker 1: You know, for a while it became really reactive, and
Speaker 1: I'm not really it's not really a great feeling to
Speaker 1: to react to things at this scale. So I've actually
Speaker 1: put some structure to my week, and so I've created
Speaker 1: themes for every day. Um, and so you know, Mondays
Speaker 1: are my days with my direct management team, so with
Speaker 1: our chief business officer, chief technology officer, you know, and
Speaker 1: so on and so forth. And and also we have
Speaker 1: our exact team meeting. So I know what Monday is about. Um,
Speaker 1: Tuesday's sort of a focus on products. Wednesday we've got
Speaker 1: no meeting days like we don't we just don't meet.
Speaker 1: It's it's a data to do. Get it done. Can
Speaker 1: I say that? I don't know if I can um,
Speaker 1: and then you know, so every day has the theme.
Speaker 1: But um, you know what's been pretty awesome is meeting
Speaker 1: a lot of different people and learning about different stories
Speaker 1: being here today and you know, learning hopefully learn more
Speaker 1: about you know, your journey as well. But um, and
Speaker 1: I think that's most of most of how I spend
Speaker 1: my time. And then on the weekends, I literally live
Speaker 1: inside pizzerias. I just go drive around and I'll sit
Speaker 1: at a pizzreia. They don't really know who I am,
Speaker 1: but I'll order a pie. And when you order a
Speaker 1: pie from a from an owner and you tell them
Speaker 1: it's good, they start they start talking, so you can
Speaker 1: ask him questions. They're like, well, what are your baby challenges? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so I try to stay really close to the
Speaker 1: customer because the last thing I would want to do
Speaker 1: is loose touch with what exactly is happening in the market.
Speaker 1: Big Money Energy is hosted by me Ryan Sirhant. It's
Speaker 1: produced by Mike Coscarelli and Joe Loresca, an executive produced
Speaker 1: by Lindsay Hoffman. Find more podcasts like Big Money Energy
Speaker 1: on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts.