Creating the Third Space: Lazy Moon’s Recipe for Success| Restaurants & Franchises Series

Anthony Codispoti: 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 Codispoti and today’s guest is Tim Brown, co-founder of Lazy Moon Pizza. He co-founded Lazy Moon Pizza with a close friend, Matt Griffiths. Founded in 2004 near the University of Central Florida campus, their goal was to create a third space which refers to a social environment that’s distinct from the two spaces where people spend most of their time, home and either work or school depending on where you are in life.

They wanted a place where people could gather to relax, connect and build community outside of those two traditional settings like a coffee shop, a park or even better a pizza shop. We will hear how a failure is not an option mindset propelled them through the early difficult days and how that same mindset became very useful again during COVID. They pride themselves on not taking themselves too seriously which is immediately apparent if you visit the our story section of their website LazyMoonPizza.com and I’ll explain shortly. But before we get into all that good stuff today’s episode is brought to you by my company, AdBag Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at adbackbenefitsagency.com. Now back to our guest today, co-founder of Lazy Moon pizza, Tim Brown. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Tim Brown: I appreciate you reaching out. It’s uh it’ll be exciting to do it so thank you.

Anthony Codispoti: So Tim, did you have a background in pizza or the restaurant industry before deciding to start LazyMoon?

Tim Brown: So I had no pizza specific background nor did my business partner Matt neither about he had worked at a place you know putting pizzas through an oven but it was also like a burger joint and fry joint but they weren’t making the the pizza in that place.

So we jumped into it at first without having specifically made pizza but we were coming from fine dining and like a more classical culinary setting so the idea of creating a tomato sauce and pairing it with a cheese and pairing it with a bread for us was familiar enough to jump into without knowing what we were jumping into but you know we hadn’t had any formal experience in that. At the time when we started it I want to say both Matt and I between us had maybe about a decade and a half of restaurant experience so it was okay you know but we were really about two to three years only into the fine dining and like the full culinary perspective before we jumped off into LazyMoon.

Anthony Codispoti: And what was that prior experience like you were working in another restaurant maybe servers, managers, bartenders?

Tim Brown: Yeah both Matt and I were managing we were waiting tables we were managing like their catering program with one of the other owners of the restaurant. We’d actually helped it restaurant called Food Glorious Food in Tallahassee and we had helped the two owners of that open that restaurant. There was an opportunity that just came and with an interest to one day open my own restaurant it seemed like a really good opportunity to try to do that and learn it with someone else and kind of on their dime but but respecting that you know not not like oh it’s your money we really wanted to learn it and see it through someone’s eyes who had done it before. And so Matt and I both jumped into that with the owners of that restaurant and so we were doing catering, pastry, we were cooking line cooks you know so we were making like stocks and sauces and fillets and things like that. We were doing a lot of catering at the time for because it’s the capital so we were doing a lot of catering for different members of the Florida house and Senate and it was just it was a really intriguing and kind of like cool experience because we got to learn management. We got to learn how to really make and execute a lot of cooking styles you know because so many of the chefs in there were trained we had classic french trained chefs we had some people who had a lot of like Asian background and so it was a fusion restaurant that we were just learning everything and it was a really kind of a cool experience to be able to do that and we weren’t just working 40 hours a week. The owners were paying us for 40 hours a week but both Matt and I were tucking into about like 60 or 70 hours a week because we just wanted to learn and the other option for that was to go out and pay for culinary school or for an experience where you get that experience and we found the better way for ourselves was to just go garner the experience kind of get paid for it and really get it you know.

Anthony Codispoti: Rather than shelling out a lot of money to pay a culinary institute to learn you’re getting paid something putting in tons of hours but getting same maybe even better experience because it’s real world you’re getting all the warts and wrinkles and struggles that you know go along with opening up a real business.

Tim Brown: Right and that’s that’s how we looked at it. My dad had done the culinary institute you know he had opened a restaurant when I was really really young and he sent me all of his old books so you know I graduated college in 2003 and I just immersed myself in those books for the next year and a half two years. I still I still have them and look through them but I made it a point when I was working at Food Glorious Food to when I got off of my shift if it was an eight or ten hour shift I would just go to Publix and pick an ingredient I’ve never worked with or go to a market and pick an ingredient I’d ever worked with and find it in a book and start working with it and see seeing what it did. Then we would take that back into the restaurant and kind of play with it further there and it was a really you know for for Food Glorious Food it was a really cool experience because they were willing to teach us and we came into it as willing participants to say like well wash dishes we will you know clean the floor whatever you have for us we will do it if you will teach us this trade you know and really teach us how to how to execute on food the way that that restaurant was doing so it was a neat little internship is kind of how we played it.

Anthony Codispoti: So it’s interesting you were getting some really good experience in fine dining how do you move from that to an idea for a pizza shop which is still a dining experience but very different.

Tim Brown: Yeah well we were doing casual fine dining so it was all fine dining execution on the food but it was in a more casual environment and we started to see that and we also did fine dining in that same town and proper fine dining establishments and we found that we liked the clientele and the casual fine dining more than we liked the approach in the fine dining and it was the same people but it was the onus that they put on you when you stepped into that really that really reserved space it was it was you know it didn’t seem as personal you see more of a mechanism to get them their food whereas when we were in the casual fine dining it was more of a partnership of bringing them on a journey through the food and we really liked the idea of working with the people at the table to see what they wanted rather than them coming in and just you know we were treated differently because it was a fine dining establishment than we were in a casual environment we really liked the casual environment so

Anthony Codispoti: we started glumming on it had a little bit more I don’t know social interaction

Tim Brown: yeah yeah it did it it felt more genuine we would have more families coming in and and you know they were well to do but they were just really cool and collected you could talk about wine with them without you know being too snooty of a thing it could be more of the story of the where the juice came from then getting into you know how much the bottle costs and they would pay for a high bottle but it was really the it was the connection made that that kind of was it was more rich it seemed more rich in the in the casual environment so we wanted to take that step back even further and offer what that was good food in a casual environment to a place that hadn’t seen something like that Tallahassee has a lot of that going on and for like UC or for Florida UF Florida has a lot of those establishments kind of already happening but Matt had gone to UCF for two years and we really recognize that UCF still hadn’t developed that college type of feel and most of the offerings that came for UCF students were inexpensive and poor quality and we we saw or they were expensive and poor quality and it wasn’t really like a genuine offering so we wanted to give them a pizza shop that wasn’t a traditional pizza shop one thing that we found when we walked into traditional New York pizza shops is you always kind of got stared down by the guy working the oven until you finally got what you want and I don’t put I I love New York pizza shops and my wife is from New York so we’re like I’ve had some of the most rich and genuine experiences in some of those pizza shops but when you get down to Florida it’s like everyone’s got a chip on their shoulder that’s a New York pizza shop what do you want you know like what’s your and so we wanted something that was more engaging and inviting into the the customer you know we wanted to we wanted to get to know the customer hey we didn’t we didn’t want it to be a quick fire like all right here’s your slice you go on here

Anthony Codispoti: we want to sit there and talk to you or like a

Tim Brown: relationship and and I mean that’s how we approached it we approached it as if we were waiters in a restaurant having a dialogue with someone you know whether it was five minutes or 10 you know an hour we would sit there and because we were the people working the counter we wanted to get to know the clientele coming in and understand the rhythm of why they were coming in what they liked about it all that so yeah that’s really we just wanted to kind of create that that setting and be able to give that to UCF and and give the students something that was worthy of them and worthy of their time that wasn’t there wasn’t a chain restaurant and it felt specific to them and so that’s where we you know we we took from at the time micro brew beer wasn’t as big as it is now I don’t think it was big we took from a pub that we saw you know and we had gone to a couple pizza places that we liked and then we took our cooking and service approach from our fine dining experience and we tried to mash it all together into one restaurant and so when we first opened you know our first lazy moon in 2004 we were making our own ice cream for milkshakes we were making we still make our own stocks and stuff for soups but I mean we were making everything from the ground up and we still make everything from the ground up but we stopped doing milkshakes because it was you know it’s a whole other process not because of the ice cream but it’s just a whole other process you to really be good at it you need somebody who’s just there making milkshakes for for the demand you know

Anthony Codispoti: so tell us about some of those early days you made the decision this is the direction you’re going to go you’re going to open this restaurant what was it like as you’re working to get the restaurant open and it’s open in those first days tell us about all the hard work that went into it

Tim Brown: yeah for for the opening stuff I mean it was really Matt and I leaned into our friends and family harder than we ever had before we had family members who would who had given us I think all in some was maybe like 60 or 70 thousand dollars worth of family investments across maybe like seven to nine different people and then we had taken out a line of credit for 30 thousand dollars that my dad had co-signed on and so between Matt’s family and my family we had all of the you know as much help as we could we opened the place for about 110 thousand dollars which was pretty was really good because we ended up doing all the labor to to get it to that space you know we had a friend who had done some house renovations so he showed us how to build walls he came in and did a lot of build out with us and Matt and I both learned a lot about construction and in about five months we took a restaurant there was a pizza restaurant and turned it into a new pizza restaurant so it wasn’t a far stretch but it was really leaning into a lot of friends and family and we worked it up until we opened we opened the doors well we didn’t open the doors we got our first food shipment never having made a pizza between the two of us and I know I wouldn’t it’s not wise it’s just the way it worked out we didn’t have a mixer at the time nor could we afford one that would like mix dough in that size and then that you know it was this was 2003 so the internet was pretty nascent and all the you know amazon didn’t exist in the way it does you couldn’t just get a stand mixer we could go to to a store but it was you know it was a $600 mixer I think both of us moved to Orlando with like $2,400 in our pocket you know so we weren’t trying to buy a mixer we were just like we’ll figure it out when we get there we took the first week really figured it out got it to a good place and then started serving pizza ran about another two or three days and realized like our recipe is a little salty started kind of peeling that back and then and then really moved forward with a better product after about day two or so and it was you know we listened to customer feedbacks we listened to our friends feedback it was really just our friends and family coming in this first couple days and then we kind of opened it up mass it was opened up but people started to pick up to it a little bit more after that

Anthony Codispoti: so and for those first sorry to interrupt Tim but I’m curious on something why did you to start decide to start a pizza restaurant if neither one of you had ever made pizza before why were you connected to that

Tim Brown: uh because I think in when we were in school that ended up being the place that we hung out like you know like we were always at a like a pizzeria that was cheap and we were always trying to find a like a micro brood beer bar that was we were just taking the pieces of things that we love like we found that we you know would eat mostly in in a pizzeria because it was cheap and it would feed our day and then we liked the product but so we really wanted to just

Anthony Codispoti: we create that hangout space yeah

Tim Brown: we knew that it was missing and we knew that it was viable like you know hot dogs aren’t really an everyday college student type of thing but pizza is kind of a you know it’s a strike down the middle of the lane there I feel like more than a burger or anything else we saw that there was a a repeat value to it and so we didn’t think there was a repeat value just a pizza we thought there was a repeat value if we could add salads and add soups and make them really good salads and make them really good soups so that if you wanted to come there and eat like you could do that if you want to come there and eat heavy you could do that and we wanted to make it an offering that was genuine because most places we had gone to and pizzerias that we had gone to in college would just have a standard like here’s a spinach salad with like some onions some carrots and a couple olives maybe it’s made or two and it didn’t feel like a genuine offering from a food perspective from a culinary perspective and I think that’s something we picked up in the fine dining was it should be a genuine offering and so we wanted that pizza because we felt that that was approachable daily we wanted the microbeer beers because we were really excited about that in 2003 we felt that that wasn’t going to be the next big thing and it was you know and so we wanted to take all these things and mash them up into a space that we felt would be successful for UCF because they were just missing it they were you know it wasn’t it was just a place where chains popped out of the ground and so it just missed college students and we felt that that was that so we could have done anything you know we were pretty headstrong and I think having come from from a kitchen where we were doing such large things pizza just felt like it was still approachable I mean the cheese is you find a good cheese you make a tomato sauce there’s only so many renditions of a tomato although there’s a lot but there’s you know we’re in a lane and then we figured you know we know what type of bread we want we just have to recreate this bread and get it to a kind of a sourdough texture and a sourdough flavor without being a full sourdough and get a like a bread texture and so we knew how to do that we had just never done it you know

Anthony Codispoti: you’d never done it and specifically for a pizza

Tim Brown: yeah we knew that we knew the techniques and tactics to get the thing to the place so there was a learning curve the the early days we were learning I didn’t I didn’t know how to toss a pizza and Matt couldn’t put a pizza in the oven and get it out round you know so each of us had a skill set that the other one needed and we were continually for the first month month and a half trading off on that skill set so we both had to be there at 8 30 every morning because we had to set up we had to be there when 11 o’clock happened because if they needed a pizza they needed both of us they shouldn’t have but they definitely did so there was a definite you know that that would probably be the piece where there’s a lot of inefficiency built into how we approached it because we were both serving a function of this thing that neither of us had done

Anthony Codispoti: so Tim you know you guys are known for your very large pizzas right and when I first found that information I thought oh okay these guys are more of like a bulk value play you know big pizza probably tastes all right but as I’m listening to you talk about all of your fine dining experience and how you’re taking a lot of those lessons and bringing them into your new pizza restaurant it seems to me that maybe I’ve misjudged what the pizza is like I get the sense that there’s a lot more from a culinary perspective that’s going on in the kitchen behind the scenes that probably doesn’t get the attention that it deserves am I on the right track here

Tim Brown: for sure and I think a lot of that was just us kind of being humble about the approach we didn’t our mentor and boss at Food Glorious Foods who is still a friend of ours his whole approach is just do it right don’t worry about the guy behind you or next to you you know like not not in like a ignore them type of way but don’t worry about the word what they’re doing if you’re doing your thing correctly and you’re approaching the food correctly and you guarantee that all of your staff are upholding that value it’ll just people will come they’ll they’ll find it they’ll figure it out and so we came from a place where again social media wasn’t big so the idea of putting that billboard out there for everyone to pick up wasn’t something that we were trying to do our way of putting that billboard out there for people to pick up was when you come into the place you’re going to find the value in it because we’re going to assure that it’s sitting there on your plate and that’s the billboard you know it wasn’t like hey look at us we you know we age your dough for three days we’ve been doing that from from you know since 2003 and we slow fermented so that there’s a larger flavor build it’s like a lager versus an ale the complexity and development of what comes out of a lager is greater because of the fermentation method the type of yeast used all those types of things so you can get so much more complexity to what you have and that’s what we’re doing with the bread is putting that in there and so we’ve always had like a you know a starter that gives it its flavor we’ve had all these things and it’s just kind of we’ve never really been good at hanging it out on the you know on the window to let people know that that’s what they’re getting but for the first you know up until 2020 our sales trajectory was always up and so we felt that the billboard was working in that way you know and so that’s what happened in 2020 well 2020 obviously you know COVID happens and we are a space that is set up for pure social engagement we didn’t deliver we did 25 percent of our overall sales and pickup and the rest of it the remaining 75 to 77 on any given month was purely in house dining and we were doing anywhere from 4,800 people a week to 7,000 people a week through each restaurant and so we got to a point of refinement where while we’re doing this quality and we’re doing all of this all of this with the food we move from a space where we were really focused highly on quality to then speed and that really happened because as our trajectory kept going up we had to find ways to make sure that the pizza met the timing the quality the crisp all that thing that it needed to in order for that to happen so we took a we took a beat back from actually developing menu items and moved our efforts into internally making sure that we were able to execute for a thousand people the same or a thousand people a day the same way we would for 500 people a day and so that became kind of our challenge between 2013 and 2020 was just keeping up with the speed of growth and keeping that ability internally operationally to get it to be able to where if you walk in the door today Anthony and you walk in the door three months from now you should have the same experience and so we were we were really focused on that prior to COVID and then we were getting ready 2020 that’s pretty wild 2020 was going to be our big growth year you know we were planning on the the mid to back end of 2020 to start really picking our new markets for footprint and stamp out acquiring our investment you know from really putting together an investment strategy and and trying to take our footprint and stamp it out so but that offered its own challenges and I think it has changed a little bit of the trajectory of where we are internally and externally and I think it’s been you know as rough of a time as it has been since COVID for everybody I think we’re finding a niche in a footprint within that to be able to you know come out of it this similar to how we went into it so we’re now doing delivery through third party services and all that type of stuff which has been a help for it but really I think COVID just shifted the landscape because people couldn’t come in and engage socially and our entire model was built on that idea and that hurts a place because everyone inside I mean we had 115 employees going into COVID and we were able to keep a majority of them but a lot of that leaned into some of that government funding and things like that and there’s a whole host of like up and down within that process so we can even talk you know more more in depth about that there’s so many different directions with that

Anthony Codispoti: do you feel like you guys have come out of it and people are back in the restaurant like they used to be or has it not come back to as many people being back in shock

Tim Brown: yeah so that’s a we are actually starting to get back to pre-COVID like our sales numbers but I think because we exist in the space where we’re very affordable and there’s a quality aspect we I think have been able to because I think people are still getting hit economically pretty hard at the grocery store and you know all the different things in the day-to-day construct for person I think they find value in what our offering is and that you can come in you can have a sit-down dinner it will be quality and you can have an experience like a like a sit-down dinner at any other place but it’s fast casual there’s not a necessity to tip but most people tip to some degree it could be a buck it could be two bucks it could be 10 bucks it doesn’t it doesn’t matter what that is but I think there’s a value in it as opposed to it gives the feeling of an experience and it is an experience without it being a hundred dollar experience so we found that there’s a lot of we’re starting to pick up traction on the back side of COVID from that and we’re also picking up traction from just the labor market being there you know that really came back in about fall of 2023 I know that COVID ended and you know or subsided a little bit in around late 20 or early to mid 21 but the labor market never really recovered until about I want to say we started to see it around August to September of 23 and that’s when you could really go and say hey we’re hiring and you’d have people coming to the door prior to that for about two or three years it was really hard to hire and within that space that’s hard to it’s hard to really run defined standards when you don’t have personnel at every position you know or any of those things happening so we’re happy to have personnel again we’re happy to be at that place where personnel is back in and we’re setting our standards hard and fast again to like you know this is exactly what has to be there’s no negotiating on this and that’s that’s where we existed before COVID we existed there because of the volume coming through the door the demand was so much we had to be on point we couldn’t fall off of that or you’d miss the business that day and then when we hit COVID everyone just kind of it was I mean you went from 100 miles an hour to 10 and everyone just kind of in the car like what do we do so for us it was a

Anthony Codispoti: yeah I’m hearing you say that the excuse me the labor markets have been coming back you you know you put that there’s a job available you get people showing up I’m curious what kind of strategies you guys have found once you find some good folks how do you hold on to them?

Tim Brown: We we try to keep really good communication with them through through the employment process for them so in you know their first three months we want to round up with them and find out how their intake and experience has been with the team we try to make sure that we’re really hiring not on experience but on personality we want you know you don’t have to have a restaurant experience I mean we got into it without even making pizza one can learn that it doesn’t matter where you’re coming from I think it matters most how you are with people if you’re excited by engaging people if you’re a positive person and so we try to really hone in on the people who are more positive or we really try to get just kind of a we’re looking at the overall company as an organism that’s living and we want the most important part of that ecosystem which is our employees to be harmonious with each other and I think that’s one thing that’s hopefully set us apart over time and and kind of helped to create that lore or story over time that we started with you know is that I think a lot of people who have passed through our organization have found lifelong friends and their workmates I don’t think that’s I don’t think that’s unusual for a workspace but I think the mass and numbers of which that’s happening in Lazy Moon is really wild I mean I’ll see entire groups of people just moving and living with each other it’s like generations and you’ll just see each of the, you know, we’ve got a generation in New York, we’ve got a generation in LA or San Francisco of these groups of people that have all worked together and are now like in a different space. So I think the way that we’ve always done it, Anthony, is really good communication, picking the people that are going to gel with the people around them and the idea of a common respect in the workspace is really upheld.

We try not to, you know, mess around with it. And I think that’s one of those standards they got messed with is like before COVID, you would not call out to a shift without someone, you know, covering it or the onus was on you because that’s your job, you know, and then during COVID it kind of switched to the onus is on the employer if you want to do business that day, you know, like you have to clean up this mess if you want to sell enough pizzas to keep your lights on. And so that’s really where we, you know, I think that was a hard part for us because there were some watering down of standards and I think that impacts sales over time. And it wasn’t for long, we did it in stride with the rest of the world, but for us it was too long, you know, it never felt good to, you know, that person’s tardy. Okay, well, we’ll give them another chance. That person’s tardy seven times, we’ll give them an eight time, you know, it should have happened at three, but you know, we’re going to go to 10. It’s just not something we want to do.

Anthony Codispoti: We want to hold. And to downshift your standards just because, I don’t know, that’s how the world has sort of shifted for the moment.

Tim Brown: Yeah, and it hurts to say it because nobody wants to say that, but I think there were a lot of companies that did that in a lot of different ways. It may not have been like, you know, over, but I think a lot of places did and you could see it as a consumer.

Anthony Codispoti: It’s certainly a recurring theme that I’ve heard from the folks that I get to interact with. So you guys weren’t alone in that respect. Sure. I got to tell you, Tim, you know, when I was doing my research for this interview, I had a little bit of a hard time finding info on you guys, you know, no social media, no LinkedIn page. You know, I went to your website and there’s an our story section. I said, okay, great, I’ll get some good background here. But, you know, the first thing that I saw there was it talks about how someone named Guido Brown Zini was exiled from Italy to America for taunting pizzas that were too large. And there’s a follow up. A single one of his pies then served everyone aboard the Mayflower. And you had me until about the second sentence when I said, hang on a second, what’s going on here?

Their story goes all the way back to 1620 with some guy who served everybody on the Mayflower. So it was clear to me that you guys were taking a, we don’t take ourselves too seriously approach to storytelling. But, you know, with everything that goes on behind the scenes into the quality of your pizza and everything that you’ve been doing to try to build community, why have you guys maybe not been more out in the forefront to tell your own story?

Tim Brown: Yeah, I think we were just, you know, we were evolving from a time where social media wasn’t a heavy presence. And so most of the stories that we ever read from restaurants were posted on their website. And we never saw fit to do that by the college because we found that most college kids being there for four years weren’t terribly interested in our story. We felt they were kind of self centered in their own lives at the time.

And they, you know, they were the center of their universe, which is cool. We’re totally down with that. And so we didn’t want to be the boring old people like, Hey, here’s how we start. Check us out. Like, we’re, you know, we just wanted to be the cool friend who they came in, they got to see us. We weren’t born on a lot of details. We gave them what they wanted. And we made it fun for them. And so we never delved too deep into our story until we did a website back in like 2006 or seven, was when we did our first website. And we put a story up there at that time, which felt fun. And it felt like it could have more grab for the students curiosities than, you know, what our story is. Although I think our story is really cool.

It didn’t feel like they really would have cared. And I think for us, we did ourselves disservice and not because I think there are some relatable points to our story. You know, we didn’t, we had some help, but a lot of the things that we did were really on our own back. And so we, we just kind of took that. And we’re like, Oh, people won’t really care about that.

Everyone works hard, you know, like it’s, we didn’t, we didn’t think to hang it out there in a way. And we thought it’d be more fun to just give people an ability to create their own war around it. Because we started to see that getting wound up with our customers in year one and two, they would now be like, Oh my God, this place has started like, you know, this, my wife, my wife was a student coming into UCF. And she thought that it had been there for like half a decade, and we were only there for like two years, maybe, maybe even a decade. Just like everyone who came when I came in, everyone said you had to go to laser moon, like they thought it had been there for forever. And we were fine to let people think that now we’re 20 years deep into it. We kind of have been there forever. But yeah, we like the idea of people creating their own lore, because it felt more exciting probably for them to tell their friends this like, tall tale rather than to get like, Oh, it’s these kids who came in and opened a place by UCF. They didn’t know what the hell they were doing.

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah, we couldn’t wind it up at the time, you know, but so we found it was cool to let people have a lore and then to add to the lore. And we always just wanted to insert ourselves into history and various points that way. So if you guys thought more about being a little bit more out front with the story, or do you like sort of the the way that it’s been unfolding?

Tim Brown: No, I think we would like to be upfront with the story. I think there’s more of a compelling nature to it than just the like what we get out of the, you know, people going on. And I think people like to go on and get a little bit of humor out of it.

But I think there’s also still a rub where people want to know like, Okay, yeah, I see that. But really, like, what, what is this? How did how did any of this come to turn? Like, obviously, it wasn’t on the Mayflower. So like, we don’t want to we weren’t ever trying to like just be, you know, to obfuscate it or to keep it obscure. We just wanted it, you know, we’d be fine to put it out there. And we’ve started to put it out there. This is actually maybe the second or third interview, I think we’ve done in 20 years that talks at all about our story, you know, I think it’s exciting to get out there and talk about it.

And it’s exciting to kind of recall back all of the chapters and ways in which it got here. So I think we’d be open to it. And we’re going to start getting it out there where we talked about having our slider, you know, a slider for the history where you could get the pure history, or you could kind of slide to one that’s a little more tuned up to a, you know, fiction, fictionalized history, and really, really wild one.

Anthony Codispoti: So, I’ll take into your path and maybe Iliad in the Odyssey and see how many other historical events that, yeah, that would be passing future. Oh, that’d be fun. Yep.

I’d like to see that. So what’s the future hold? What are there still growth plans on the horizon? Are you guys in a position to do that yet coming out of COVID?

Tim Brown: We are currently setting ourselves up for that position. You know, I think we we opened our third location in June of this, about 2024. That took a lot to get out of the ground. It was, you know, again, I think that being on the heels of COVID, the costs on it were so much more, the timing on it was so much greater. We got mired in the back end of, you know, everyone thinking, when COVID happened, everyone thought, you know, well, is it going to end? When it started slowing down, everyone said, all right, well, it’s ended. Now let’s get back to, you know, business as usual. And it took about a couple years for the labor market and everything to reset to kind of business as usual and even coming out of it.

It’s, you know, not so I think, like, right now, I think people are getting economically hit by like groceries and wild other things that are on the heels of COVID on the heels of all these rising costs. So we’ve been able to find a nice footprint in there again, the same as when we started UCF, we offer a value within that space. We, and so we’ve been building, we’ve been working through our teams, we’ve been building up our teams internally and working through our training and working through all of our process so that when we come, you know, when we get to this point where we are now, we have the third restaurant open and we’re moving that we’re building our profit and loss and we’re building our balance sheets to at the end of this year really procure financing and start the growth step anew. We are really keen to just kind of make sure that as we’re going through 2025 that we’re conscious of our growth and scale and taking from the lessons that we were shown in COVID, you know, when you are at this point of growth and scale and then you pull back from that edge, you know, what that takes to wind down and wind back up. And so I think that’s where we are right now. We’ve found profitability again within the stores and away where it’s driven by sales alone and not sales and government initiatives to help buffer that.

And we’re having those standards, the standards have been reset for our organization and the dialogue for all of our, all of our staff and all of our corporate team members is really reset to the place where we were going into COVID. And we started that really about a year and a half ago, so it’s not new in that way, but we’re finding that the traction on it’s really been hitting in the past year. So we’re excited. We’re at a point where we’re looking forward to growth. We’re trying to establish how that’s going to come, will we grow corporately, will we franchise, will we, you know, there’s so many opportunities and options on that.

And so I’m going to people that I know in the industry to kind of find out the best way to approach that, because some of them approach that pre COVID and then now would have different responses after COVID. And so we’re just taking this moment to kind of gather all of our resource internally scrub through our processes and make sure we’re as clean and refined as we can be. And that when we come out of 25, we have a model that is really scalable, because that’s kind of where we want to go next.

I feel like, you know, after 20 years and we’ve walked down the road, that’s we’re teed up for that, you know, and not not just because, but we have teed ourselves up for that.

Anthony Codispoti: So, so, you know, I hear you talking about refining your processes, making sure the PNL looks really good. And, you know, as business leaders, as we look at that PNL, at least in my mind, I kind of think about it in, there’s two levers that you can kind of pull to affect it, right? You can do something to help boost sales, you can do something to help decrease expenses. As you think about those two levers, Tim, are there creative things that you’ve tried and found success with in the past that might be interesting to talk about?

Tim Brown: For hiring and things like that, we found that, you know, referral programs seem to work really well, internal employee referrals. If you have employees who are really, you know, approaching it with earnest and they’re getting good people on the other side, we found a lot of success with that. And it helps internal employees by putting some cash in their pocket.

And the new person coming in is almost, that’s not a guarantee, but they’re better to gel with the group because they already gel with this person who gels with the group. And so we found some success there. We have, I tell you, I think we’re also blessed to be by a college campus. So we have a lot of opportunity with just young people by that campus.

And so there’s, I think there’s a lot of resource within that. But we’ve found that the hiring piece of it is moving along at a nice pace for the sales build, you know, we’re always trying to build top line sales. And that’s kind of a neat thing for us with now all the third party delivery and availability for online access to our product, which is something we never even touched on pre 2020. We see it as another opportunity to develop into those top line sales and new strategy. And we’re, we’re really with our teams focusing on building top line sales. We’re just kind of beating the market and getting out there and talking with communities and sponsoring groups. And our approach to building top line sales has always been that it’s more of an outreach piece to bring social organizations groups and find people who are under not under funded, but, but don’t really have the backing, but have a social structure and an engagement point and giving them a place from which their platform can originate or where they can congregate to develop their ideas. And so a lot of our outreach really comes from inviting people in sometimes we’ll pay for an entire group just to get them to come in and have that space and to create that like excitement and setting for them. And it’s, we have a layered approach, I guess, we really, we have a team of people who kind of work on a couple of different community aspects in order to like just keep building top line sales. So, and we’re now starting to get into retail. We’re doing our own like hot honey that we make. And we are getting ready to launch like a t-shirt retail for ourselves. So we’re always looking to build the experience or build something that has a value within the brand that customers will pick up on.

Anthony Codispoti: The hot honey and the t-shirts, is that just going to be sold within your locations or elsewhere?

Tim Brown: We’ll have it on our website. It should be up there in about the next week or two. And the hot honey we started making about six months ago and have got a pretty good setup and response with that. And, you know, we’re really just looking to get back to as many, like we used to have retail on the site. We used to have all these things there and then we redid everything. And so we’re really just kind of like, we are at that point reset Anthony. This whole year, the past year has just been reset all these things that kind of fell off, get the whole team recharged, change the habits of the people, move it all forward and get, and that that in of itself has been the biggest, the biggest thing. Getting back to our standard is the biggest top line sales builder. And we tell our teams that all the time, you know, that if you just do this thing right because of the value of the product and the offering, people will not be able to look away from it.

Anthony Codispoti: People will come back and they’ll tell their friends about it, which is that word of mouth is the best form of marketing that you can get.

Tim Brown: That’s how we started, you know, being by college. That’s all we had to do because if someone tells you go to a place that’s going to take five times, if they tell you not to go to a place, that’s like a one time. Someone tells me not to go to a place. I only need to hear it once. I may go there at some point, but you’ll probably have to tell me a couple of times to go to a place before I go to it. And so we realize that the value of that word of mouth is so big.

Like, if you mess it up with one customer or, you know, a group of customers, like that could be an additional 20 to 50 people in there, you know, that you’ve hit without even realizing it.

Anthony Codispoti: Tim, what’s a serious challenge that you’ve overcome, whether it’s something personal, professional, a mix of the two? How did you get through that? And what were some lessons you weren’t coming through the other side?

Tim Brown: I think probably the hardest thing that we’ve had to overcome. I mean, initially it was, you know, setting up a restaurant under like days where there’s a lack of sleep and just a heavy ask from your mental register, you know. And so that was a really hard piece initially was, you know, for three or four months, my partner and I were working 21 to 21 and a half hour days. And, you know, it was like six days a week doing that. So that becomes hard personally to maintain.

But then you get to a mentality and it’s like, okay, well, this is just this. I think the hardest piece for us as an organization or hardest thing we’ve had to overcome would definitely have to be COVID, you know, and what happened in 2020. For us, our whole reliance was on social engagement. We closed down in March before any other restaurants because we felt an onus as an operator, not knowing what was coming down the, you know, down the pike, we felt the onus to not be the place that was like ground zero, because we had five to 700 people in close proximity in that place every single day, you know. And so that was hard because we had to almost preemptively just turn it off and stop selling pizza. And then about two to three days later, we started to see other restaurants doing it.

And then it just, everything, all the dominoes fell. And when you go from a place where social engagement inside the space is almost 100% of what you do, you know, it’s like 77% of what we do. And the people who are coming in to get their food aren’t getting the same experience when they come pick it up, you know, it’s a subtly different exchange because now they’re waiting outside or any of these things. So we just had to change our whole format on how we approach service. So many of the things that we had done as an organization where we were like, you don’t have to worry about that customer coming in and sitting at that table right now, like just worry about them at the door, you know, think about them 10% instead of 90%.

And so you strip away like all these things that are good in there. And I think it’s hard for an organization that’s built on that much speed to slow down, do a 180 degree turn and end up in a direction where you’re, you know, you found a new business model that’s kicking and running. So we really struggled through COVID to make our model work when you don’t have people passing through the environment. And because our pizza is so big, and our product is so big, and we never bet, we never banked on to go being such a large piece of our organization and business model, we didn’t even have storage for boxes. You know, like you go into Domino’s and you see they built storage in for boxes because that’s X% of their model. You know, we were consuming our dining room with our pizza box because in order to do your, you know, to get there, we had to be there. And so then, you know, when the world merged back in, it’s like, you need the online, but you also need the space in your dining room to store all these products for online.

And you need the dining room for people to come and sit in the dining room. And so we found a really hard place to merge that back together. And to, you know, again, like I said, we, you know, it’s only been about the year, past a year and a half to two years that we’ve reset that standard and value in our organization, since we’ve been able to really hire and, and hold that standard in the way. And so that was a really hard piece for us to get to just the finance of that, you know, and how you make each of those shifts run in an atypical functioning organization. You know, it wasn’t what we built.

It wasn’t what we set up at all. We had, at the time we were doing late nights before COVID. And so we would stay up until midnight, or on Friday and Saturday, we’d stay up until 2 30 a.m. And when we shut that off, we realized that it was such a large piece of our business, not actually what was coming through those hours, but the billboard that that was the amount of people who would come there because you were the place that was open, and you were there after some event that they went to.

And so what it did was it drove sales through the rest of our day parts, lunch, dinner, and all that, because these people would see you at this time of day where no one else is really present. And so it became something where all of that, everything that we did basically shifted our model. And I think that was, I know everyone went through that. People lost loved ones. There was so much that happened out of COVID that was like, it’s really tough. But this kind of like shook the whole, for us, it was what shook our model. It was what was the toughest for us, because we couldn’t exist how we were. And resetting it back when the opportunity was there took so many steps.

And personally, that was hard, you know, because it, I think my wife and I had just had our second child in 2021, and we were anticipating a lot of reset of the world. And, you know, it’s, it wasn’t necessarily that. So I found that I felt very, I felt half, like I was giving half of myself to each side of what I needed personally and business wise. I didn’t feel like I gave everything I needed to the business, because we also had, I had this personal thing going on. And I didn’t feel like anyone was really like getting what they needed from my time. And I think that was hard for me for about a year to kind of get to that idea and exist in that space where it’s like, I feel like I’m failing at home, I feel like I’m failing at work. And you’re probably not, you know, just, you don’t feel like you’re your most efficient step. And a lot of us on the heels of that, you know, I know everyone has gone through that at some level. So I don’t think that we’re on an island or that it’s you know, just us.

Anthony Codispoti: But what did you do to cope through those difficult times? You feel like you’re stuck at work, you feel like you’re not showing up in the way that you want at home. That can be, you know, those, those are the two biggest fears of our world, right? That can feel pretty destabilizing if you’re not satisfied in either of those realms with the people that you can lean on. How did you kind of work through that time?

Tim Brown: We have a lot of people in our organization who I was able to, you know, really open up to and be vulnerable with on that. And I don’t think it was something where they necessarily felt that way, you know, but it just felt that way for me to, to how I normally am. I think at times it felt that way at home just because there’s so much necessity for the development of a child, you know, the same way as there is a business.

But it’s so important for the child. I think I coped really, I would wake up earlier in the morning, I’d wake up anywhere from four or five in the morning and just start working, you know, it’s like, if there has to be more hours in the day, I’ll just carve them out. And so there was about a three or four month period where I was like, until, until I feel adequate in either of these departments, I’m just going to keep doing this. And then, you know, eventually you feel like you’ve gotten ahead of the things that are just trailing off in your, in your mind.

And we got to a pretty good point. But for me, I think coping is really kind of results back to that same thing we did in the original days of lazy men. It’s just the only way out is through.

So just start digging and go, you know, like, what else can you do? And and I think it worked, you know, it, it, it calmed my mind. I don’t think that the fires were as hot and either at home or in the business, but it’s all about standard, you know, it’s, it’s a standard I held for myself that was failing or faltering. And so it, it feels nice to reset that it feels like we’ve reset that in all spaces. And exercise, I think is a big thing for me. If I’m not, you know, being physically active, then it, it’s hard for me to calm, calm my day or the mind.

Anthony Codispoti: So Tim, I’ve just got one more question for you before I ask it. I want to do two things. First of all, everyone listening today, I know that you love today’s content. Tim has had a lot of great stories for us today. Please hit the like, share, subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. Tim, I also want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you. What would that be?

Tim Brown: Well, we have a, we have a couple of intakes. It’s there. We have a community at laserman pizza.com. There’s obviously my email, Tim at laserman pizza.com. But really we’re, it’s just a, I’ll reach on our website. We try to make sure that we hear everyone who comes into that and that we’re reaching back out.

Anthony Codispoti: So last question for you. I’m curious how you see either your business or the industry as a whole evolving in the next couple of years. What do you think the big changes are that are coming?

Tim Brown: From what I can see so far, it appears to be automation. I know everyone’s talking about AI, but it’s interesting to watch it, you know, kind of permeate the restaurant culture. From what we found since 2004, restaurateurs are not typically reaching towards tech until about 2020 when COVID hit and everyone’s reaching for tech. So it’s kind of neat to see it happening now, because you’re seeing so much more intelligence into the actual software that’s driving the industry. And there’s so much more finance behind that. So I think artificial intelligence driving everything from like financial platforms up through scheduling and all that type of thing will be a thing. I think that the automation of personnel is going to be something that everyone seeks given the labor market. But I don’t know how successful everyone will be with that, because that’s such a big piece of the engagement and restaurant experience, I think, is that human connection. And to diminish that, I think can be smart in certain ways, but I think if you cut it just wrong, the general public will pick up on that.

And psychologically, it’ll be a just suddenly an off experience for that like social setting in space. So we never really look into the automation pieces that way. I don’t know that we would try to refine, but I think a lot of that’s coming through, like automated fry droppers or burger flippers or dining room cleaners and all this kind of stuff like that. So it’ll be interesting to see what plays and what is just future bad tech.

Anthony Codispoti: And what really plays in June of 2020, or I’m sorry, January of 2025. Are you guys using AI in any way in your business right now?

Tim Brown: We are currently hooking in with a company that has a wound into their like, like reporting and finance platform in a way. I think that some of our tech uses it, but it’s not really pervasive. We don’t feel it on the front end as heavily yet. You just see it coming through on the back end and all these little initial phases. So all of our purveyors are really hanging from the windows that they’ve got this new AI thing going on.

And it’s going to be this, that or the other. So we haven’t seen it, but we haven’t seen a ton of it that we’re implementing and utilizing yet, but it is everywhere. So it’s starting to come through the doors already.

Anthony Codispoti: Well, Tim, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Tim Brown: For sure. Thank you. It was really nice to do this, Anthony.

Anthony Codispoti: Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories Podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.