Restaurant Growth Strategy: Old Scratch Pizza & Eric Soller’s Path from One Location to Multi-Market Expansion

Anthony Codispoti (00:00)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codaspodi and today’s guest is Eric Sola. He is the owner of old scratch pizza, a community focused restaurant offering casual Neapolitan style pizzas and craft beer. Founded in 2016, this welcoming spot emphasizes quality, traditional recipes in a friendly atmosphere. Steered by the mission to welcome everyone, they are renowned for consistency and respect for pizza traditions. Under Eric’s leadership, Old Scratch Pizza has earned recognition as one of the best restaurants by Dayton Eatery, and it was named Pizza Company of the Year by Pizza Today. They’ve also made Yelp’s top 100 pizza spots in the Midwest, and they have plans for an exciting expansion in 2026.

Before running Old Scratch, Eric spent over a decade in marketing at ITW, focusing on the food service equipment sector. He brings a deep understanding of customer needs and a passion for delivering great food. We’re going to hear how he built a thriving business and the challenges he faced along the way. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Adback Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits.

Eric Soller (01:02)
Okay.

Anthony Codispoti (01:26)
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Now back to our guest today, founder of Old Scratch Pizza, Eric Seller. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Eric Soller (02:02)
Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for the great introduction. You make us sound awesome. I love it.

Anthony Codispoti (02:07)
I think you are and I want to hear more about that. One correction I want to make is that you guys are recognized as one of the best restaurants in eight and Dayton by Eater. I think I said by Dayton Eatery. eater.com. Okay, great. I wanted to clear that up. Okay, so before we talk about how awesome old scratch pizza is, tell me what first drew you into the culinary space.

Eric Soller (02:08)
Yeah, well, thank you. think we are. I think we are, too, and I’m excited to talk about it.

Yeah.

⁓ I mean, I started fairly young. started working in my, kind of age myself because I say that, ⁓ my first job in the restaurant world was at subway. And, that was when we were really excited that subway was coming to town. You know, I lived in a small town in Michigan and we’re like, my God, we’re getting a subway, which is like not that big of a deal anymore. But, it was a big deal back then. And, was 15 at the time and, ⁓ I just kind of.

Anthony Codispoti (02:48)
Uh-huh.

Eric Soller (03:00)
you know, latched onto restaurants. And honestly, I was not a great student. My parents wanted me to go to college. I went to college and I showed them I flunked out my first semester. ⁓ I went back and started working in restaurants again. And eventually I did. And so eventually I convinced my parents and I went to culinary school when I was 19 and everything clicked for me. Yeah. I mean, everything was just, ⁓ it made sense. And it’s just what I’ve been doing ever since.

Anthony Codispoti (03:13)
teach you.

So started out with the excitement around first subway in your small town in Michigan. And yeah, and a sandwich artist. I love that. And I remember, you know, here in Columbus, Ohio, when I first came to town back in 92, there was a subway and I’d never seen anything like it before. I’m like, this is amazing. You know, telling my friends back home about it. so yeah, I get it. Like the initial excitement back then long time ago, it was it was pretty cool.

Eric Soller (03:34)
Yes, I was a sandwich artist.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (03:58)
Okay, so then you went to culinary school, not great in sort of a traditional education environment, but something clicked about culinary.

Eric Soller (04:04)
Yeah, I-

Yeah, I ended up with a degree and I have a degree in, I have an associate’s degree in culinary arts and a bachelor’s degree in food and beverage management. So I went, I went to culinary school for a while. I went to culinary school, went out, worked in kitchens for three, four, five years, went back to school to get a bachelor’s degree in food and beverage management. And, you know, I’ve sort of been in consulting and, and then corporate marketing and then this ever since then.

Anthony Codispoti (04:36)
So let’s talk about the corporate marketing. You had a substantial role at ITW in their food service equipment sector. Tell us about that.

Eric Soller (04:38)
Yeah.

Yeah, I was in, I was,

yeah, I worked for several of, ⁓ I T W is a parent company of several of the brands that people in the restaurant industry know Hobart, is mixing and food preparation, ⁓ Vulcan range, which is stoves, friars, things like that. Trolson refrigeration. And, ⁓ I was the, I had many roles, but ended up in director of marketing for the ITW food equipment group. So I was sort of in charge of, ⁓

brand level marketing for most of those brands. So web, trade show, press, all the go-to-market marketing. So I did that for about 10 years before I started Old Scratch.

Anthony Codispoti (05:21)
And you had a good job and a nice corporation, know, steady paycheck. ⁓ Why fly out on your own? Where did the idea for Old Scratch come about?

Eric Soller (05:25)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I, you know, so I didn’t open Old Scratch until was, let me see, until I was 44, you know, maybe a little bit late in life for opening your first restaurant. But I, you know, I always joked that I was a wantrepreneur, you know, like I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wrote business plans for fun, you know, and kind of still do. And I just had this idea

You know, in that, in my, mean, honestly, this probably happens to a lot of people. mean, I had a bachelor’s degree. had an unconventional entry into the world of corporate marketing with my background. And, you know, I mean, in what was actually happening around me was that people who started to get hired into similar roles in the larger organization.

younger than me, had a master’s degrees, MBAs, I just didn’t know where my future was going. But primarily, I just had an idea that I couldn’t get out of my head. I started down a path of wanting to, I used to travel a lot for work, and when I would go, I would go to different cities. And I had this idea about pizza. I would go to,

Every time I was in a city, I’d go to three, four rep pizza places in a night to try and get, like see how other people were doing pizza places. Even though pizza is a super crowded market, I thought there was an opportunity. then, I mean, how did we come up with the idea for Old Scratch? Like, I mean, everybody, there’s some saying out there, I don’t know it exactly, but most good entrepreneurs are thieves, you know, like.

We’re just stealing other ideas and repackaging them in new ways. We’re borrowing. Yeah, we’re borrowing these ideas and repackaging them in new ways. And there was a place, I mean, the first one I saw was a place in ⁓ Atlanta called Antico Pizza. It’s kind of famous. And ⁓ they had these big wood-fired ovens and they had sort of picnic tables in the room. It was class sort of sea real estate, know, industrial real estate. And I just fell in love with it.

Anthony Codispoti (07:24)
Barwing!

Eric Soller (07:50)
I saw another place in Nashville that was similar. And when I saw them, they had these big, long, ⁓ like communal picnic tables. then as soon as I got this idea in my head, I said, Neapolitan pizza beer hall. And as soon as I had that idea, that, I saw these, I’m like, they didn’t have full bars. Actually, Antico at the time was bring your own BYOB. And I thought, this looks like a beer hall. It’s like a German beer hall. And I thought, old.

Anthony Codispoti (08:06)
⁓

Yeah.

Eric Soller (08:19)
Neapolitan Pizza Beer Hall. So we have a similar vibe today. have ⁓ relatively large restaurants between 6,000 and 8,000 square feet. have, yeah, they’re big. We have ⁓ large communal tables, a lot of big tables that seat 10, 12 people. We have three big ⁓ Neapolitan ovens in

Anthony Codispoti (08:28)
That’s huge for a pizza shop.

Eric Soller (08:44)
like right on the edge of the dining room, right in the kitchen, right in the dining room and all of our locations. We have 20 taps of beer, six taps of wine. So ⁓ it’s just a big, yeah, it’s just a big friendly, ⁓ you know, family oriented environment. I mean, in the beginning, when I first opened, was like downtown Dayton. I thought it was going to be, I don’t know, urban hipsters. I don’t know. I don’t know how many of those we have in Dayton, Ohio, but I had this vision. It was like college kids. But as it turned out,

Anthony Codispoti (08:54)
You have wine on tap too.

Eric Soller (09:13)
We’re family place, know, your customers find you and we’re a family.

Anthony Codispoti (09:14)
Okay. Uh-huh. And what do you think it

is that draws families in? What are they really attracted to there?

Eric Soller (09:21)
I think

it’s a variety of things. think we’ve got a great, the way we do our kids pizza, we sort of squish it and it comes out looking like, as I always say, a non-trademarked mouse ⁓ when it comes to the table. it’s like mouse ears, kids love the way the pizzas come out. We give away free ice cream, which I’d like to talk about at some point ⁓ and why we do that. These big communal tables, really the big communal tables made it so that.

When I first started, I said, oh yeah, we’re gonna have these communal tables. Everybody said, you know what, people don’t want that here. Maybe in Europe that works, but it did a couple of things. One thing it did is if you have big family, 10 to 12 people, and you need someplace to go where you know you’re gonna be able to get in, you know everybody’s gonna like all the food, it’s a fun environment, you don’t have a lot of options.

Anthony Codispoti (09:57)
That’s what I would think. ⁓

Hmm.

Eric Soller (10:19)
doesn’t matter if it’s that or it’s a sports team or it’s a work party or whatever. these, this sort of big party environment ⁓ is just something that I think created success and it made it successful for us.

Anthony Codispoti (10:34)
You know, and as you’ve been talking here, Eric, I’ve been checking out your website. You’ve got some, you know, a handful of really great pictures from each location. And it’s exactly as you described, like big, like open air ceilings. Yeah. Lots of like longer seating options, a bar. see these beautiful, you know, wood fired ovens. Am I seeing, is this a drive up at one of them? There’s somebody who’s like holding a beer out of a window.

Eric Soller (10:53)
Yeah, well,

yeah, well, we yes, we do have a we have a we have a like a that you’re probably looking at our Beaver Creek location. We have a window that opens from the bar onto the patio. So it’s yeah. So that’s like, it’s like a.

Anthony Codispoti (11:11)
⁓ Okay. That makes a lot more

sense than somebody serving a beer to like an open air beer to like a car coming through the drive thru.

Eric Soller (11:17)
No, yeah, no.

Yeah, I think you have to live in Montana for that to work. I think you have some weird laws there like that.

Anthony Codispoti (11:26)
Well, this is beautiful. Yeah. So tell me about the free ice cream. How did that get started?

Eric Soller (11:30)
Well, one of the

things we started early on, was really kind of my wife’s idea. You’re thinking about a pizza place, you want dessert. We actually, we have soft serve ice cream. You can get any flavor you want as long as it’s vanilla. And it’s technically free, but 100%, we call it Cones for a Cause and 100 % of donations go to charity. And so, so far to date, we’ve given a

about, we just crossed $300,000 that we’ve donated to charity just from ice cream. So, and the more the locations that we get and the more that we grow, the more impact that has. ⁓ So, and that has been just, it’s been a total unlock for the business right from the beginning. I mean, in addition to obviously, you know, it’s great for the community, employees get behind it. ⁓ It’s fun because we have these

big money boxes at the front of the bar. you can have like, it’s all counter service. So there’s a, you know, there’s one line for food and there’s one line for adult beverages. But in that same line for adult beverages are also kids who are waiting for ice cream because the same bartenders get ice cream and they also get beer for adults. And ⁓ so it’s, it’s just, it

Anthony Codispoti (12:46)
Okay.

Eric Soller (12:52)
That like is another thing that kind of ensures this like family friendly, everybody’s included environment. So yeah, so we have a, we have a foundation that we started called Cones for a Cause and we give away money to sort of micro grants throughout the course of the year to all kinds of different, a lot of it around food insecurity, you know, homelessness. There’s a lot of, there’s, there’s a lot of different causes that we’re focused on.

Anthony Codispoti (13:13)
Mm.

Eric Soller (13:22)
⁓ So that’s a big thing for us.

Anthony Codispoti (13:24)
Yeah. Tell me what it means to serve or to be Midwestern-ly Neapolitan.

Eric Soller (13:32)
Well, you know, I hope that it’s something that I said a long time ago, we started putting it on our t-shirts and I hope that people can envision what it means. I’ll tell you a real quick funny story. I was at the International Pizza Expo and there was a guy, Scott Wiener, who’s a big guy in the pizza world and he was giving a talk, was like 400 people in the room, giving a talk about new styles of pizza.

During the presentation, he put us up on the board with this midwesterly Neapolitan thing. And I like gasped. I’m like, my God. No, I came up with it. It was an article. It was an article about us. And he put it up on the board and said, this is exactly what I’m talking about. This is somebody who has said, and I didn’t, didn’t, he never talked to us before. He just read the article. And it is basically that we are taking Neapolitan tradition.

Anthony Codispoti (14:06)
That was his word. He came up with that, his term. You did come up with it.

Okay.

Eric Soller (14:28)
If you went to, if you were to come certified for Neapolitan pizza, which is a thing out there in the world, we would meet that certification. We would meet that requirement. But the only word that’s Italian on our menu is margarita, right? There’s no other Italian words on the menu. It’s everything about it. You can get chicken bacon ranch pizza, but it’s cooked in the style in a way they would have in Italy, in Naples.

Anthony Codispoti (14:55)
And so what does that mean

to be a Neapolitan pizza then? What’s that criteria?

Eric Soller (14:57)
Well, Neapolitan

pizza, in the traditional Neapolitan sense, have to, ⁓ the regulations, there’s an organization in the world that regulates Neapolitan pizza, and you can pay to be a member, certified by it. We don’t, but you can. And Neapolitan pizza traditionally has four ingredients for the dough. It’s water, flour, yeast, and salt. That’s it. It’s naturally fermented.

⁓ You have to use a particular style of oven, either wood or technically now you can use gas, ⁓ that is of a temperature around 800 degrees Fahrenheit. ⁓ They have to be cooked in less than, in somewhere around 90 seconds in the oven. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (15:41)
Wow. So the idea is that

this oven is so hot that the dough cooks quickly and there’s certain texture crispiness to it. Okay.

Eric Soller (15:45)
Yeah. Bam.

Yeah, texture.

⁓ actually, one of the things that’s interesting about what we do is why we call it Midwestern linear politan. If you if you go to Naples and eat Neapolitan pizza, it is so soft. mean, it is they don’t even they don’t cut it. I mean, it’s served with a fork and knife in most places when you eat it. ⁓ We try to add we the way we formulate our dough, we add a little bit more structure to it. Most people don’t want floppy pizza.

in the Midwest. mean, they want they don’t sort of crisp, you know, you can pick it up. Ours is softer than most, but we still try and we’re trying to build a pizza that you know, people in the Midwest want to eat crispy, delicious, but we do it with, you know, we have organics, where you have organic tomatoes, we have the finest cheeses, I mean, all of our ingredients are

top quality. have no freezers, we have no microwaves, everything is made from scratch, every dressing, every sauce, everything’s made from scratch. So it’s just, you know, we’re trying to do the best version of what we can.

Anthony Codispoti (16:55)
Tell me about the Angry Beekeeper Pizza. That’s quite a name.

Eric Soller (16:59)
Yeah, so we, years ago, that was on our first menu. The very first menu was the Angry Beekeeper. you know, again, we borrow ideas. At that time, you know, mid, you know, 2016 at the time, there were some people out there that were starting to experiment with hot honey. It’s kind of like everywhere now. Everybody’s got hot honey on their menu now. But 10 years ago, it wasn’t as big of a thing.

And there was a guy, Paulie G in Brooklyn, who actually had a location in Columbus. He’s kind of started that whole thing and we wanted to do a variation of that, make our own hot honey. So we started a hot honey brand. ⁓ We sell hot honey in our stores as well as in locally. ⁓ In our version, it’s Calabrian chilies. So that’s sort of like the Italian version of it. We steep honey in.

Anthony Codispoti (17:44)
And what makes it hot? you just like drop it in some?

Eric Soller (17:54)
and Calabrian chilies from Italy and garlic, ⁓ which gives it this very sort of spicy, sweet flavor. we put, and what an angry beekeeper is, basically a margarita pizza, margarita, classic pizza, is ⁓ crushed tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, basil, olive oil, very simple Italian cheese pizza.

Anthony Codispoti (18:04)
Stay.

Eric Soller (18:18)
We had a spicy soppressata, which is a spicy salami, and then we drizzle it with spicy hot honey, house-made hot honey at the end. So it’s sort of our signature pizza. It’s the best seller. Some weeks it’s pepperoni pizza. Some weeks, most weeks, it’s Angry Beekeeper is the top seller,

Anthony Codispoti (18:33)
and great beatkeeper. It’s a great

name in addition to a great culinary concept.

Eric Soller (18:38)
Yeah, on the back of our bottles of hot honey, says, you know, it just says, made by one angry beekeeper.

Anthony Codispoti (18:47)
I like that. So how did you scratch together enough money to open up the first location?

Eric Soller (18:48)
Yeah.

You know, I mean, I think that for me, mean, everybody has a different story about how they did that. And I, you know, I didn’t have enough money to do it. but I had, one of the things I’d say that I had was, I had a large social group and I’d, and from being a professional in our city for a long time,

I had a large social group, had a large network of friends. And I talked about opening a restaurant a lot and a friend of mine, one of my close friends, and I was always complaining about money and he’s like, I said, he’s like, I guarantee you that’s not going to be a problem. Like, you know people and there are people with money and they’ll give it to you. And I’m a very detailed person and I wrote a highly detailed plan with

Lots of data, lots of spreadsheets and a presentation. And because of my marketing career, I used to have to do presentations and pitches all the time. And so I was sort of good at that. And I went out, I went to three people who I knew well. One of the people introduced me to somebody else. ⁓ Somebody else introduced me to somebody else. And I pitched five times and five people said yes.

Anthony Codispoti (20:21)
What? That doesn’t happen. You realize that, right, Eric? I was just at a big event with a lot of venture capital, know, people raising money and that kind of hit rate is, they would laugh. They wouldn’t believe it.

Eric Soller (20:22)
And so, ⁓ I know, I know. And so.

We just

did another round because we’re going to grow and a similar thing happened. ⁓ we’re just, but you know, again, I credit it. Obviously we’ve proven ourselves now, but I credit it to, know, you can’t have, you can’t have, you can’t do too much planning. I mean, once you plan, you got to live within, you got to, you know, you got to go live in the world and things change, but.

know, planning is the key. Creating a great plan is really the key to success.

Anthony Codispoti (21:07)
Well, I think the other key that

we’re sort of uncovering here is the power of your network. Right.

Eric Soller (21:13)
Yeah,

I mean, I was also a 43-year-old professional with a respectable job who had years of experience. And the thing about opening a restaurant to this day, I talk to a lot of people who want to open restaurants. it is, in the world knows how tough of a business it is. But the thing that you don’t realize when you open a restaurant is it has something to do with food, right?

but it also has something to do with just general business operations. has to do with facilities. It has to deal with vendor management. It has to deal with math. It has to do with motivation. There are so many, it to do with marketing. So you have to, when you’re a small restaurant and your first restaurant, you have to be everything. You’re in charge of marketing. You’re in charge of financials. You’re like any other small business operator, except for it’s one of the most complex businesses out there with so many moving parts. And so,

You know, I just think it took for me to really find something that I was good at and to be successful at. mean, it took me to have a, have a, have a culinary degree, have a food and beverage management degree, have your, years of experience at it, then 10 years of corporate marketing and also understanding, you know, the bigger one is ITW is a world-class manufacturing operation. And in essence, that’s what a restaurant is. You know, we.

take raw goods, we add value to them, and we deliver finished goods, right? And so thinking about all sorts of things that I learned in the corporate manufacturing world about that I apply now to how to run a restaurant, ⁓ you know, just for me, it took me that long. There are a lot of people I see that are young, have less experience than me that just crush it and they do a fantastic job. But for me, that’s what it took. It took me to have the confidence of all of those different skill sets in order to make a restaurant.

Anthony Codispoti (23:09)
So you had a really good foundation of skills from the experiences that you’d had, the degrees that you had earned. But you start this business, it’s the first time that you’re owning and running your own business. What was maybe the biggest surprise to you? Like, ⁓ here’s an area that I need to level up and fast.

Eric Soller (23:30)
Wow.

In the beginning, when I was running the restaurant, I’m very well suited for what I’m doing right now, which is managing multiple restaurants. I’m not a great individual restaurant operator. I do fine at it, but I am too quickly moving on to something else. And what I had to learn how to do.

is focus. Like I had to learn how to, okay, I can’t move on from this thing. can’t, you know, whatever this issue is that’s in front of me, I just have to grind every day and do the job of a restaurant operator. Even though I want to be thinking about, ⁓ and we think about this marketing idea that I have, and maybe we’ll start a new restaurant. And if we had this new menu item and all of these things, there’s so many detailed structural

step-by-step processes that have to happen every day in a restaurant that is not in my nature. And really focusing in on that was something that was hard for me.

Anthony Codispoti (24:42)
you know, and that makes a lot of sense, even though you took until, you know, your 40s to become an entrepreneur. It’s clear that that that spirit was in your blood. And that is what you’re talking about, like the problem of focus is such a classic, like entrepreneurial trait, right? Like one of the things that makes us really good at what we do can also be an Achilles heel of like, I’ve got this idea, and I want to move on to this thing and create this other.

Eric Soller (25:08)
Well, I today,

one of the techniques I use is I go to my staff. There was something I was, I had an idea about something about dough fermentation this morning. And in the morning I like had the idea, called the vendor, called the refrigeration specialist that I knew to see if this thing was possible. And then got on a call and I was, I just had another call with my team and I’m trying to explain it. And I have to say, I just want you to be clear that I’m just talking about something.

Anthony Codispoti (25:35)
Yeah.

Eric Soller (25:35)
Like I’m

not saying we have to do anything. I’m just telling you like, cause I just have this way of, just have to talk through all of these ideas that I have, is, you know, and it can be exhausting for the team. that’s something.

Anthony Codispoti (25:50)
I’m glad

you said that word. It’s exactly what I was thinking of. I’ve been guilty of this myself in the past. A lot of other people I’ve talked to. ⁓ And here’s a process that I’ve kind of implemented for myself. Be curious to hear if you’ve ever tried anything like this, if you think it would be helpful. Yeah, so I got this new great idea. Before I go and I talk to anybody about it, I have to write it down or type it out, whatever. That process of writing it down, typing it out.

helps me flush out like, there’s a hole here, there’s a hole here. Just helps me kind of think through the process of it more, kind of see where the gaps are. If I get through writing it all out, top to bottom, somebody could read this and we explain everything to them and I still feel good about it, I stick it in a drawer for a week, one week timer goes. And if I come back to it a week from now and it’s still a good idea, something I’m excited about, then I approach my team.

Eric Soller (26:42)
They probably love that. am I bet. Yeah. Yeah. I was with you until you said hold on to it for a week because the thing is, I usually I usually I’m here. I could use some discipline. I could definitely use some discipline in that area because

Anthony Codispoti (26:44)
Yeah. And I saw the look on your face as I’m talking about that. You’re like, I don’t think I could do that.

Eric Soller (27:00)
⁓ I do have a lot of ideas. ⁓ But I think that, ⁓ one of the things that I, I don’t know, everything we have is, all of our traits are strengths and weaknesses. there was ⁓ one of the personality type indicators that we were working on, a consultant I was working with said,

⁓ your weaknesses are often your strengths overused, you know, and, ⁓ and, and one of, one of my strengths and weaknesses is just when I have an idea, just such a confidence that it is right, you know, like, and, and, and, and so you, and not, it’s not about confidence. It’s just like an intuition that this thing is right. And so usually when I’m talking to my team, I’m usually not.

Anthony Codispoti (27:34)
interesting.

Eric Soller (27:58)
I’m selling, you know, I’m usually selling ideas all the time, right? As opposed to like trying to get consensus and you know, it’s more, which is also a weakness, right? I mean, it’s, mean, the strength is that I have such, know that this thing is going to work. Like I just have a gut reaction. Usually it’s in the business. It’s usually right. The weakness is that I probably could, I need, and I have people in my group, in my organization that are, they can say, Hey, hold on. Like, yeah, I mean,

Anthony Codispoti (28:26)
That’s great. You’ve got sort of a check

and balance built in. Yeah.

Eric Soller (28:29)
Yeah,

every team needs gas and breaks, you know?

Anthony Codispoti (28:33)
Yep. So

what percentage of the time do you go to your team confidently with an idea that later on you’re like, I probably shouldn’t have done that? Or does that not happen? Because by the time you go to them, you’re ready and you know it’s going to work. OK.

Eric Soller (28:44)
Well, ⁓ no, I’m usually ready,

often there’s something because the farther away from daily operations you get, the more you might be missing some thing that somebody who’s like one of our operations managers will say, yeah, but there’s this thing that happens in the course of that process that

You know, we have to address that. Like if you want to do this thing you want to do, we got to address this other issue first. So there’s a lot of that that goes on, right? It’s never like I just come in with some ideas like, all right, let’s move forward with.

Anthony Codispoti (29:22)
Yeah.

So let’s talk about one of these entrepreneurial ⁓ skills, positive traits. As you mentioned that there’s growth coming. Tell us about that. know, because that doesn’t happen in a vacuum without strong leadership to say, hey, we went from one to two to three to four. Now we’re ready to go to five. Is that what I’m hearing?

Eric Soller (29:35)
Yeah.

Yeah, so

we’re making the next big jump, which is that we’re in Dayton, Ohio. The market is kind of saturated for us. We have four locations in this market. And so next year in 2026, we’re going to open two new locations in 2026. One of them I can talk about. And so we’re going to open in Columbus in 2026, which is where you’re back. What neighborhood in Columbus do you live in?

Anthony Codispoti (30:08)
My backyard.

So I’m in Victorian Village, short north area. Where are you guys going? Yeah.

Eric Soller (30:16)
Okay, all right. You’re right in the heart of it all. So

there’s a new development called TruePoint in Hilliard going on right on 270. So it’s 300 apartment units, big new hotel, medical center, a thousand person office complex. So, and we’re going to sort of be the freestanding anchor tenant on the park at the center of the development. So

Anthony Codispoti (30:22)
Okay.

Okay.

So cool.

Eric Soller (30:45)
Yeah, we’re really excited about it. Equity development in Columbus is who’s developing the project and we’ve had a great relationship so far. And we’re really excited to bring this to Columbus. Like I don’t think there’s anything, like there’s no city that you can go to that’s short on pizza, right? Everybody’s got plenty of pizza that there’s no doubt. But

Anthony Codispoti (31:07)
Yeah.

Eric Soller (31:12)
We bring, I think that we bring an experience that’s beyond pizza. And I think we’re gonna do something, it’s gonna be really exciting. It’s gonna be an exciting project.

Anthony Codispoti (31:23)
So let me ask you this. ⁓ When you guys went from one to two and then again to three to four, it was all in relatively the same geographic region, kind of all in the Dayton area. And so I’m going to guess that you had some name recognition, some credibility built up. So as you go into a new neighborhood, you’ve got some clients or some customers that are there or have heard of you guys. And so that kind of helps. Now you’re going into click.

Eric Soller (31:41)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (31:53)
Columbus isn’t that far away, but you know, probably an hour down the road and it’s a whole new group of customers. Are you going to borrow some ideas from what you did to open your very first location in terms of how do we get the word out? How do we, you know, fill the seats like right from the very beginning or what’s the strategy here?

Eric Soller (31:56)
It’s a brand new market. Yeah.

⁓

Well, first of all, we’re going to do from an operational standpoint, we’re going to do exactly what we do here. Right. So it’s to be the same concept. ⁓ And from a seeding the market standpoint, ⁓ one thing we’ve done over the last couple of years is we’ve just become way, way more sophisticated about ⁓ marketing and digital marketing. And so ⁓ we’re using

pretty sophisticated, ⁓ graphic data to understand exactly who our customers are and how to reach them. and then reaching them. basically when we go into a new market, we know exactly who the customer base is that comes to old scratch pizza.

Anthony Codispoti (33:01)
When you say that,

mean like, they’re 35 to 45, they’ve got two kids or?

Eric Soller (33:04)
Yeah, we use like, I’m not

sure if you’re with like, ⁓ like Experian mosaic data, if you know what this is. This is like, you know, Experian, Experian. ⁓ Yeah, they know everything about you. And they have broken the world up into very specific demographic segments. ⁓ And through other services, like we can track

Anthony Codispoti (33:14)
Explain it.

The credit, yeah. Yeah. ⁓

Eric Soller (33:34)
exactly the exact mix of the people that are walking into our restaurants and the frequency of those people. We know exactly where they live, who they are, what are their demographic profiles, how do they want to be reached by media, what are their spending habits, what are their interests? And then we can take that specific data, plug it into Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, different channels, and directly reach those customers with a message that’s relevant to them.

Um, so that’s part of how we’ll that’s, you know, but we’ll do all kinds of other things. You know, got to do influencer marketing. You’ve got to do, you know, we’re going to also have, um, as part of our deal at, um, TruePoint, we’re going to have, uh, large. Spine edge right on two 70. Um, so we’re going to get lots of traffic every day, seeing our name. Um, you know, it’s going to take, we, we do actual very, we do a lot of paid digital media. do.

very little advertising other than social media and paid digital. But we know that going into a new market, we’re going have to do a lot more, right? There’s going to be a lot more work to introduce us to the community than we have to do when we open a location around here.

Anthony Codispoti (34:45)
Mmm.

And so,

and so when is the Columbus location opening? Is there a date? Like 2026. Okay. And wait ⁓ 2026 or 2025.

Eric Soller (34:57)
late 2026. So late summer, probably late summer 2026.

2026. We’re in late summer 2025 right now. Yeah, so it’s a year from now.

Anthony Codispoti (35:09)
Yeah, okay.

Okay. And there’s, did say there’s another location coming?

Eric Soller (35:16)
There

is another location that we’re working on. We’re in lease negotiations right now, so I’m not ready to announce it, we’re gonna, so we’re gonna open two in 2026. That’s the goal.

Anthony Codispoti (35:21)
Okay, a little too early for that.

Are there any other, I don’t know, of evolutions of the service and the customer experience that you’re working on that you want to give voice to?

Eric Soller (35:35)
I you know, I think that in our newer locations, one of the things that limits us in our current locations is ⁓ food to go just continues to grow for almost every restaurant. And actually our facilities and where our buildings are structured right now, there’s limitations there. So I think we’re going to continue to put way more effort into making

pick up in third party delivery even easier and also increasing the operational capacity of our restaurants so that we can put through even more product during those peak hours than we can now. I today we’re turning off limiting online ordering, turning off DoorDash because we just can’t handle the volume during peak hours because it’s just math. These ovens, these Neapolitan ovens only fit so many pizzas. There’s just a math equation, you know.

I say, yes, they cook in 90 seconds, but you might have 40 pizzas in front of you. So just because they cook in 90 seconds, you could be waiting 20 minutes for one because there’s just a lot of them. I think that the evolution, I mean, I think the evolution of takeout, I mean, digital or even in-store digital. I I don’t know that we’ll ever do kiosks or table side ordering, but I mean, you know, all of that is happening. mean, you know.

The younger people that work for us, they love it. They wanna order on their phone. They wanna order at a kiosk. They’re into it. But I believe in hospitality and I think that no matter what happens with AI and kiosk ordering and ordering at the table and all of those things, people want to gather. People want to be together in a place that makes them feel good.

Anthony Codispoti (37:06)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Soller (37:29)
that they feel like they’re part of a community, that they feel like this is a place that’s meant for them. And people will always want that. And so I think there’s always gonna be a place for restaurants like that.

Anthony Codispoti (37:41)
You know, obviously, as we’re talking here in late summer 2025, you guys have got quite a bit of momentum, you know, four locations, another one coming next year, and probably another one after that still least negotiations, like things are going well. At what point when you open the first one? Did you feel like, okay, we’ve really got something here? Because for some folks, it happens right away. For some folks, it takes a while sort of like tweaking the dials kind of ironing out the wrinkles before

things really start to catch on.

Eric Soller (38:14)
Yeah, I mean, it happened. It happened pretty quickly. I mean, we were fairly popular from the beginning. mean, businesses, you know. We’re doing 40 % more this year than we did our first year, so or 50 % we’re doing way more this year than we did our first year, so like businesses grown and grown and grown over time, but.

I would say, you know, when I first talked to initial investors and we talked about a second, like multiple locations, I would have just been happy if the first one works. And it was, we opened the second one about three years in. I mean, it took a year to be like, okay, this works. You think we have a system and we know how the system works. looking back on it today,

I feel like we were flying by the seat of our pants back then compared to how detailed that our systems and our operational standards and everything now. I mean, when I look back at the way that we ran the business back then, I mean, it was, ⁓ you know, it was a much different thing. It was a much different thing.

Anthony Codispoti (39:26)
What do you

think is the biggest change that you’ve made that time?

Eric Soller (39:29)
⁓ just structure, just, you know, standard orders of procedure, documentation, lots and lots of systems. mean, my, my staff is probably my team is probably like, my God, not another app, you know, like, you know, we have apps for all of our training programs. have apps for all of our, ⁓ you know, checklists for everything in the restaurant throughout the course of the day. have.

You know, they’re just systems for everything. I mean, that’s the difference. You want to know the difference between like, you know, any business, I guess, but probably, but a restaurant that’s kind of, you know, in its early stages and something that’s just starting to get more refined is just systems. mean, is it documented? Do you know your costs? How often are you meeting about financials?

how often, know, what is the process for every job in the restaurant? ⁓ And then how do you measure it? Then how do you go back and measure it and make sure you’re actually doing those things? What sort of system do you have for measurement? So those are really the things that make you capable of growing. And because you can grow, but you’re gonna go crazy. Like if you’re, you know, if you’re working in the business,

all the time in multiple locations trying to make things run properly. It’s almost impossible to grow. And you need systems that can be monitored, can be adhered to, that people understand what they are, that can be measured, can be repeated, replicated. So that’s the big difference.

Anthony Codispoti (41:13)
And I’ve heard you talk a lot about your team. ⁓ in today’s environment, it’s hard to find good folks. It’s hard to hold on to good folks. What are some things that you found success with when it comes to recruiting and retention?

Eric Soller (41:22)
Yeah.

well, I mean, recruiting, we’re known as a great place to work. ⁓ we, ⁓ and we monitor that, you know, we do like ENPS scores, which are employee net promoter scores on a regular basis to understand the sort of temperature of the staff and how happy they are. And if you really don’t know, ENPS score is where you would just ask on a scale of one to 10, how likely are you to recommend?

to a friend or family member working at Old Scratch Pizza. And so just that simple measurement of whether or not people are promoting you or detracting from you. So we kind of measure that a lot ⁓ to make sure that we’re doing the right things. One of the things that we did, which is harder for a smaller operator is that we, ⁓ on the recruiting side is we’re very picky. We actually don’t make it easy to join the company. ⁓

especially for the type of employees that we’re hiring. we, like back in the beginning, so this is how you become more sophisticated. In the beginning, you needed a cook, you need a runner, you need a dishwasher, and you’re kind of desperate. And the managers are going on Indeed, and they’re looking at all the applications, and then they’re, only so many people will talk to you, then you get them in. If I need a dishwasher tomorrow, and,

this person came in today and they’re available and you’re a manager and you’re desperate, you’re likely to hire them. Well, we maybe at three stores, we stopped doing that. we, so we have somebody whose job it is, somebody in HR whose job it is, which is kind of what bigger companies do. They just pre-screen candidates. And because the statistics for us are, if you put an ad on Indeed for an employee, you’ll get it.

Let’s say you get 100 applications. Maybe 20 of them are, meet the qualification in some way and are worth talking to. Of those, only 10 will actually talk to you, even though they applied. You can’t get in touch with them, they won’t reply, something won’t happen. And of those 10, really only one or two you really wanna talk to. so that’s one to 2 % of the candidates, like fit all of your criteria.

So now we pre-screen those all of them. They have to get on a video call with a HR person, which is in our business is some friction. Like we just put some friction in place to make sure you’re really want to join the company. And then we only send those one or two people to the store to talk to the manager. So once they’ve talked to the manager, we’ve already pre-screened them for culture. We’ve pre-screened them for qualifications. We pre-screen them for kindness, which is like one of our core attributes.

⁓ and then once they get in the company, you just, you know, we, we try and treat them right. We try and pay them fairly. We try and be clear about their roles and responsibilities. And, ⁓ and as a result, know, we have about 280 employees now. and some of them, you know, the first employee we ever hired still works for us. And, and our management team.

But our operations team, which is three people on our operations team have been with us for nine, seven, and six years. it’s, you we’ve got, we keep people around. We like to. Yeah, we like to. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (45:00)
You’re doing something right there. People enjoy the workspace.

So let’s take a little detour for a moment, Eric. I’d like to explore a serious challenge that you’ve overcome in your life, whether it’s personal or professional. How’d you get through that and what did you learn?

Eric Soller (45:20)
Well, it’s a, you know, there’s a couple of things. One, we’ve already touched on some is that I made a decision to, you know, with a very good job with benefits and insurance and, ⁓ you know, all those things to, against the guidance of many people with a house and two kids and a family, you know, to, ⁓ put that all on the line and start

pizza restaurant, you know, in Dayton, Ohio, which in a questionable location, which we didn’t talk about, ⁓ you know, and the I mean, the general terror that anybody feels during that period of time is just, you know, you have to be somewhat delusional about your chances of success, you know, and ⁓

⁓ you know, somebody said, you know, an entrepreneur needs to be somewhat forgetful about the past, realistic about the present and delusional about the future, you know, which I like that because I think that that’s true. and getting, you know, getting through that, you know, waking up one day and being like, my God, you know, I, I, I’m working all the, I’m working all the time, you know, every weekend I’m working nights.

have no help. I you know, I have to pay for my own health insurance now. I don’t have any 401k anymore. You know, all of the things that, you know, sort of are the measurements of success in the traditional world. All of a sudden, just have that all go out the window ⁓ and have the uncertainty, just the uncertainty in your life of that ⁓ is something that, you know, it took an emotional toil. But every time I open a restaurant now,

You know, I mean, think that my. Oh, for sure. I mean, I think that you you, you know, there’s a period of a couple months before a restaurant opens where I’m probably not, you know, I don’t know what my wife would say, but I’m probably not. I’m not. certainly not 100 % mentally here, you know, and those are, you know, those are.

Anthony Codispoti (47:19)
Do you go through that same like emotional turmoil every time?

Eric Soller (47:45)
tough times. I would think that any entrepreneur when they make some big advancement in their business, that’s that’s takes a lot of risk, takes a lot of capital takes a lot of effort and focus. I think that most people most people would go through that. But I think that you know, the other challenges that the business faces, what I personally face is just, you know, it’s just, ⁓ it’s really like what, and I think this project for most opportune entrepreneurs is like,

When asked what is the biggest challenge to your business? It’s just me, you know, like it’s my personality. It’s it’s it’s you know the.

Anthony Codispoti (48:21)
Say more

about that because obviously it’s your personality ⁓ and they got you here, right?

Eric Soller (48:25)
that got us here also. I mean, but it’s,

you know, but it’s my impulsiveness. It’s how ⁓ it’s how confident I am that an idea is real and maybe overwhelming my staff with my own confidence that they don’t aren’t able to tell me the truth, you know, and maybe it is ⁓ that I, you know, I, I, there are certain parts of the business that I probably should pay more attention to that I don’t because I

⁓ I have very limited, I very, actually I have very limited focus. know, I’m sort of all over the board. And if I always think that if I, you know, had a partner, I’m a lot, you know, a of people have business partners and I’m alone in this. And sometimes business partners, if you know, if one person’s like a outstanding like salesperson and another person’s a great financial person, like that’s a great, you know, and for me, I’m sort of everything. So there’s, of course I have weaknesses. There are things that I’m not as good at as other things. And so.

Anthony Codispoti (49:06)
Mmm.

It’s a good balance.

Eric Soller (49:24)
you know, those, whatever those things are.

Anthony Codispoti (49:25)
Have you found any

mentors or peer support groups or?

Eric Soller (49:29)
You know, I

I talked, I am in multiple groups. I’m in one of the things I find the most value in is being in groups that are other restaurant operators because it is so refreshing. I mean, and what I usually find is that I am what I find is that I’m so hard on myself and that nobody has this figured out. I mean, I talked to people with 50 units that

don’t have it figured out, right? You think like, they’re surely using some software system where like everything comes wrapped up together in a nice bow at that, know, in your financial, it’s all just like feeds. No, everybody hates their payroll system. Everybody hates their, ⁓ you know, back office. There’s some limitation to their back office system. Nobody has a perfect way that they’re like.

Anthony Codispoti (50:24)
Everybody’s got

duct tape behind the scenes.

Eric Soller (50:25)
their

kitchen screen doesn’t give them exactly the information that they want. And so being a part of organizations, I’m on a customer advisory board for a POS manufacturer. And I meet four times a year with 20 other restaurateurs to talk about that. So refreshing to hang out with those guys. And I want a couple of other peer groups that I meet online. And that above all is… ⁓

you know, probably the thing that helps me. I have some, then I have some, friends locally at, you know, when you, when you, in the restaurant business, when you have a couple, like multiple units, it sort of narrows the group of people that are doing the exact same thing you’re doing. Right. And so I do have some friends of mine that are operating independent restaurants around here that we talk a lot. I have friends that are opening, have multi-unit restaurants that we talk weekly about, you know, different issues. So.

Yeah, I mean, that’s certainly something that helps. Yeah, for sure.

Anthony Codispoti (51:24)
Great support system, right? Be able to share those stories. If nothing

else, you hear, hey, we’re not alone in this. But then also, a lot of times you’re getting ideas on, hey, we had the same kind of problem. Here’s how we solved it. Maybe there’s a nugget for you in

Eric Soller (51:31)
Yeah.

Well, this is an example

of where I come in so confident about, I’m telling my friend of mine the other day about this thing that I’m going to do that I’m like so confident about. He’s like, yeah, we did that three years ago and this is what happened. And I’m like, thought, oh, okay, well, maybe I should, maybe I should take, I should think about that a little bit longer.

Anthony Codispoti (51:58)
Yeah. And I think you highlight, you know, one of the challenges of you’re, you’re alone, like you’re on an island, like you’ve got a great team with you, but you’re the only owner, right? And so you’re all things.

Eric Soller (52:09)
Well,

everybody, almost everybody on our team came up with me, right? So they all came through the company. So we only know what we know, right? We don’t know what anybody else knows. We only know what we know, right? So, I mean, I’ve been in the business long enough to know a lot, but, you know, I’m always, that’s why I’m always trying to talk. I’m always trying to talk to peers because I want to know how they’re doing things because.

Anthony Codispoti (52:21)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Eric Soller (52:38)
We just do things how it works for us. And what we do is not easy. One of the things I say about our business is that in some ways, as successful we’ve been, have the world’s worst business model. That’s like a joke that I have because I say, we’re trying to do world-class pizza in the most difficult way possible, as fast as you possibly can, right? Which is like not a recipe for success.

Anthony Codispoti (52:40)
There’s a ton of value in that.

Eric Soller (53:08)
I couldn’t have had a more difficult way. There’s really no more difficult way to make pizza than what we’re doing. mean, teaching 16 year old kids to hand stretch dough, top Neapolitan pizzas, manage fires in ovens that have to, you don’t just, it’s not a conveyor. You don’t put it on and comes out the other side. You got to turn them halfway through. You’ve got to be constantly managing temperatures. They can only go to the right place. In Italy, they say, you know, you need 10 years to become a pizzaiolo.

Anthony Codispoti (53:14)
Yeah.

There’s a skill to it, yeah.

Eric Soller (53:35)
And we teach 16 year old kids in about three weeks how to do it. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (53:41)
You’re stretching the laws of pizza and business physics, sounds like.

Eric Soller (53:44)
Yes, this is yes, you’re right. You’re right.

What’s the whole thing about like, you can get it fast and cheap and quick, but you can’t have all three. It’s like that kind of a rubric. You shouldn’t be able to do all those things at once.

Anthony Codispoti (53:55)
⁓

Eric, if you were going to recommend a resource for our audience, call it a podcast, a book, maybe a course, a class that you took. What’s been helpful for you?

Eric Soller (54:08)
I mean, in our industry, it’s about, you know, we’re very focused on hospitality. There’s a book that’s out recently, Unreasonable Hospitality by Lou Garderia. I just sent her operations, he just did a conference in Nashville. I sent our operations director to it and she was blown away. It was a great weekend for her. classic is Setting the Table by Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality.

Anthony Codispoti (54:18)
I just read it. Yeah, it’s great.

Eric Soller (54:38)
You know, I mean, the resource I use as much as anything now is AI and the chat GPT. mean, one of the ways you were talking about your little process of how you write stuff down. I I, I’m not sure if this is legal or not, but anyway, when I drive in the car, I talk to chat GPT and I have it talk through scenarios and things that I’m considering and have it.

Anthony Codispoti (54:44)
Hmm.

this day.

Eric Soller (55:04)
and it listens to me and I say, and it’ll tell me something and I’ll say, no, no, don’t, don’t be nice about this. Like, don’t just tell me that’s a good idea. Tell me why this isn’t a good idea, you know? And it’s good. It’s pretty smart. mean, of course it’s not perfect, but I mean, I’ve, I’ve, I leave as a matter of fact, I use AI a lot in our business. And at the, Columbus in October at the international P ⁓ the

well, I guess it’s the Midwestern, whatever. The Pizza Expo put on by Pizza Today Magazine. There’s a big conference coming up and I’m doing a presentation on AI in pizza restaurants because I just think that there’s so many ways you can streamline your operations with it.

Anthony Codispoti (55:40)
⁓ cool.

Well, what’s cool about the use case that you talked about there about talking to it in your car, I love because like a big way that I use it is like as a brainstorming partner. And that’s exactly what you’re talking about. And I haven’t thought about, hey, I got 20 minutes in the car driving my kid to football practice. I’ve got this idea that I’m noodling on. Why don’t I just turn it on?

Eric Soller (55:59)
Yeah, exactly.

Well, this is the thing. mean, you can,

can, anytime you do it, it, not only helps you brainstorm the idea, it documents the entire brainstorm, right? So now you might come to some conclusion at the end and you can go back and you can see, well, this is, this is why this is how I got to this result, you know, in my mind. So I find it just, you know, again, it’s, it’s not, it’s an expert on a lot of things. It’s not an expert on everything, but I find that it really helps me organize my thoughts.

Anthony Codispoti (56:14)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And that’s great. It’s not an expert on everything. And not everything it gets back to you is something that you should run with. Right? You have to put it through your filter. It is just a brainstorming tool. Consider it a co worker who, you know, they gave you an idea and it didn’t sound right. So no, that’s not for me.

Eric Soller (56:39)
Right.

Right. Absolutely.

But there’s a lot of things like

this, the speech that I’m giving at the conference. It’s, it’s the whole idea of it is 10 things that every pizza operator can do today and chat GPT to make their business run better. so we’re going to, well, the most obvious one is like answering your reviews for you. So, I mean, creating a brand voice that answers your reviews. That’s a pretty straight. That’s like, that’s like level one.

Anthony Codispoti (57:07)
Mm.

Give me one. Can you give me a preview?

Hmm like that

Yeah.

Eric Soller (57:25)
We’ll get to like level 10, which is having it interpret data out of your POS system. like that’s like level 10, but, ⁓ or level, Hey, actually today’s world is like level five, but, ⁓ there’s, there’s, and there’s a lot of things in between.

Anthony Codispoti (57:36)
Okay.

Yeah. Eric, setting aside all humility, what is your superpower?

Eric Soller (57:46)
How many times have I said confidence? Like I just believe, like my ability to delusionally believe that the thing that I think is right is correct and is possible, right? I mean, I think that’s the biggest thing is that when you go to your team and you say this thing that all of them, what they’re thinking is that’s a lot of work. Like that’s going to be a lot to implement.

Like, do we really know that’s gonna work? To be so confident and to keep pushing the boundaries of like, is this thing, this thing we can, I believe that we can do this thing. We can be better than we are now. Like this thing, like not settling and being, not settling and then being overconfident in what we should not settle on. Like, I think it’s that combination.

Anthony Codispoti (58:40)
You know, I mean, obviously, anything can be taken to extremes. But I think in general, most people in the world suffer from a lack of confidence rather than too much confidence, right. And I think it’s that lack of confidence that holds a lot of people back from pursuing really good ideas.

Eric Soller (58:57)
Well, I mean, it’s not that I don’t have a lack of confidence. I I am unsure of myself all the time. But once I once I know something to be like once I’ve worked through it, my wife will say this about me all the time. Like. I can’t I can’t also I can’t come to a decision unless I’ve really talked it through, thought it through, done a bunch of research. But once I know the thing like.

once I know it, then we go out and I’m like, I’m so sure that we can make this part of our hospitality better. And if we do these three things, like we’re gonna get better. And I think it’s, think it’s, that is the part of confidence that you need to have. It’s like, once you’ve done the research, you believe in the thing to go out and sell it with confidence and, and be confident that it’s actually possible. You know, that this week we can do it, you know.

that all of the little things that get in our way is that we can persevere and make this thing happen.

Anthony Codispoti (59:59)
I love that. love that. Eric, just one more question for you. But before I ask it, I want to do a couple of things. First of all, everyone listening, pause for just a second. Go ahead and flip to your open podcast app and hit the follow or subscribe button. want you to get more great interviews like we’ve had today with Eric Soler, the founder of Old Scratch Pizza. And if you take just an extra second and leave us a review or a little bit of feedback, that really helps other people find the show too. Make sure that they are getting the benefit from it as well.

Eric, I wanna let people know the best way to get in touch with you, to follow your story or that of old scratch pizza. What is that?

Eric Soller (1:00:37)
You can follow us at oldscratchpizza.com on their website, oldscratchpizza on Instagram.

Those are the big places to find us.

Anthony Codispoti (1:00:46)
Okay, and we’ll have links to that in the show notes. Last question for you, and I think I have an idea where this might go, is a year from now, you and I reconnect, and you’re super excited because you’re celebrating something big. What’s that big thing you’re celebrating one year from now, Eric? Yeah.

Eric Soller (1:01:03)
new restaurants,

know, growth and open and by then having announced more. So.

Anthony Codispoti (1:01:10)
I love it. So growth is on the horizon. It’s on the mind. You guys are marching forward. Terrific. Well, Eric Soler, founder of Old Scratch Pizza, I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Eric Soller (1:01:12)
Growth is on the horizon. Yeah.

Great. Thank you so much. I appreciate it too. You have a great day.

Anthony Codispoti (1:01:27)
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.