A Slice of Advice

Smart Pizza Marketing Magazine was created to inspire, educate and shine a light on entrepreneurs making waves in the pizza industry. What better way to foster community than with an advice swap?

Below, the featured restaurateurs in this issue share either one piece of advice they’ve received that they have carried with them throughout their career or advice they’d give someone new to the pizza business.

Bruce Irving (founder, Smart Pizza Marketing):

Start small. One of the best things you can do when you start your business is to start as lean as you can. It’s a lot easier to manage and train staff to make a few things versus hundreds. I’ve seen it so many times. People open a pizzeria and have a giant menu and it becomes a nightmare all around.

It’s much easier to add a menu item once you’re up and running smoothly than it is to take something off the menu once you’ve started. Start small, master what you have then add if needed. 

Erica Barrett (founder, Dough Boy Pizza Co.):

The one piece of advice that I give to anyone that’s in the pizza business it’s just the same things that I tell my franchisees on a day-to-day basis is we want a consistent product a great product and agree you know a great tasting product I think that’s very important because pizza is already It’s already sells itself the world loves pizza it’s not you know one group of people that love pizza is not a specialty food.

It is something that everybody loves in the world so we have a consistent product and a great tasting product that we’re going to win in the pizza game.

Khanh Nguyen (founder and CEO, Zalat Pizza):

The advice that I was given from an old hand in the first few months of opening my first location, as I was lamenting the fact that I had chosen a bad location was “many restaurant owners get lucky with their first location and they think they know what they are doing, only to crash and burn when they open their next locations.

Know that if you can make it out of a bad location, you will have learned the lessons you needed to learn to be successful in this business.”  

Ric Gruber Jr. (CEO, Billy Bricks Restaurant Group LLC):

That it’s never too late to chase your dreams and to make one come true you need to block out the noise from those who are sitting on the bench or the sidelines. Also, to be innovative, creative, and relevant for the long haul, you need to be flexible and know the difference between fads and a marketplace that is changing.

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