41 : The Difference Between Leadership vs. Management : Insights from Industry Icons

This is what sets a great leader apart from an effective manager in the restaurant industry.

Join us as we uncover the secrets with insights from James Beard Award-winning chef Janos Wilder, Rocco's Little Chicago Pizzeria owner Rocco Di Grazia, and Gabe Gardner from Local First Arizona.

Understand the qualities that make a true leader and learn practical strategies to overcome current challenges like retention issues, rising costs, and competition. This episode is packed with valuable tools to enhance your leadership skills and ensure your restaurant's success.

Here's how this episode unfolds:

0:08-Restaurant Leadership and Management Panel

8:35-Insights on Restaurant Leadership and Management

16:17-Effective Leadership and Management Strategies

23:27-Cultivating Vision and Restaurant Culture

35:38-Adapting to Technology in Restaurant Operations

49:20-Expanding Restaurant Support and Networking

Journey with Rocco and Janos as they share their compelling paths from humble beginnings to becoming influential figures in the food industry. Hear Rocco’s transformation from his early days in his father’s bar and grill to running incubator kitchens that nurture small businesses.

Janos reveals how he went from working in a pizzeria at 15 to founding multiple restaurants and contributing significantly to initiatives like Tucson Originals and the City of Gastronomy. We delve into the importance of vision, communication, and operational systems for sustained success in the restaurant world.

Leadership styles in the restaurant industry are evolving, and we discuss how this impacts team cohesion and turnover rates. Learn why supportive management systems foster a positive work environment and reduce chaos, while outdated, fear-based methods fall short.

From the shift towards technology in restaurant operations to the importance of maintaining a clear vision, this episode offers rich personal anecdotes and strategies for cultivating a successful restaurant culture. Plus, discover the resources and support available through Tucson City of Gastronomy, Tucson Originals, and Local First Arizona, designed to help your business thrive.

More Resources:
Tucson City of Gastronomy
Tucson Originals
Local First Arizona

More from Christin:

Curious about one-on-one coaching or leadership workshops? Click this link to schedule a 15 minute strategy session.

Transcript

Christin Marvin: 0:08

Hi everyone and welcome to the show. Today I'm excited to bring you a very special episode that was recorded during a panel discussion on leadership versus management in restaurants, which I led for Tucson's City of Gastronomy. On this panel, I had the pleasure of interviewing James Beard, award-winning chef,Janos Wilder, the owner of Rocco's Little Chicago Pizzeria, R rocco Di Grazia and Gabe Gardner, the director of food entrepreneurship for Local First Arizona. Join us for this robust conversation that includes topics such as the difference between leadership and management in the restaurant industry, identifying what qualities make between leadership and management in the restaurant industry, identifying what qualities make great managers and leaders in restaurants, and resources that organizations like Tucson City of Gastronomy, T tucson Originals and Local First Arizona can offer to local business owners. Welcome to N the no Hesitations podcast, the show where restaurant leaders learn tools, tactics and habits from the world's greatest operators. I'm your Christin kristen Marvin, with Solutions Christin by Kristen. I've spent the last two decades in the restaurant industry and now partner with restaurant owners to develop their leaders and scale their businesses without wasting time and energy, so they can achieve work-life balance and make more money. You can now engage with me on the show and share topics you'd like to hear about leadership, lessons you want to learn and any feedback that you have. Simply click the link at the top of the show notes and I'll give you a shout out on a future episode. Thanks so much for listening and I look forward connecting to connecting.

Christin Marvin: 1:59

Okay, perfect. Thank you all so much for being here today. It's an absolute pleasure to be able to spend some time with each of you. We are super excited to engage in a very important topic of conversation today and one of my favorite things to talk about on the entire planet restaurant leadership and management. We've got an incredible panel of guests today. Thank you all so much for being here. We've got Rocco from Rocco's Little Chicago Pizzeria, we've got Gabe with Local First Arizona and Rocco's also with Tucson Originals, and we've got Janos Wilder from Studio Janos and City of Gastronomy. I will say, rocco, I was disappointed to learn two days ago that you had a last name.

Speaker 2: 2:40

I put you in that rock star celebrity, yeah, like Cher and Madonna. So I think. I'm going to try to keep you there, but yes, I was bummed to learn Gatos can still stand. C

Christin Marvin: 2:53

I figure, since you were in bands, we could still keep you in that rock star status. So I am Kristen Marvin. I've spent the last 20 years growing local restaurants. It's what I love to do and where I've had the absolute pleasure of spending the majority of my life. I now partner with local restaurant owners and operators to develop their leadership and prevent burnout, increase retention and help them grow their businesses, whether that's within their four walls or getting ready to scale their operations.

Christin Marvin: 3:24

Who in here is in the restaurant industry? Restaurant owners, operators Okay, perfect. How about business owners? Other entrepreneurs in the room Okay. City of Gastronomy people. Tucson Eric is like, embrace my hand for everyone. Tucson Originals. Anybody here? Okay, perfect. And City of Gastronomy or no? I already said that. One Local first. Some local first Okay, perfect. Love to know, kind of who the audience is in the room.

Christin Marvin: 3:54

The topics that we discuss today obviously are going to be around restaurant leadership and management, but just know that leadership and management really transcends any industry and any business. That leadership and management really transcends any industry and any business, and so we're really hoping today that you're able to take away some key items that can help you develop yourself as a leader, to help you grow your business, and I would really offer you a challenge today to set an intention of one thing that you'd like to walk away with this time learning, whether, again, it's for yourself or for your business. Today, your time is incredibly precious and valuable, and you've taken time away from your businesses and your families to do a little bit of investing in yourself today. So congratulations and thank you for doing that. That's awesome. So let's talk about what we're going to do today. We are going to let these gentlemen share their incredible stories and give us a little bit of insight into their backgrounds and career. We're going to talk about the differences between leadership and management and the importance of both in running a really successful restaurant, especially in today's climate. We're going to give you some tools and resources from their experience that are going to help you in your business and on your leadership journey. We're also going to offer some tools and resources from each of the organizations that can help you grow your business, and then, at the end of the session, we're going to open it up for Q&A. So start thinking about some questions you'd love to ask these gents.

Christin Marvin: 5:15

Let's talk a little bit about the restaurant business real quick. The restaurant business is one of the most dynamic and exciting industries out there. It's beautiful, it's fun, it really serves us in terms of building connections human connections but it's also one of the hardest industries out there. Restauranteurs wear all the hats, right. You are the marketers, you are the operations, you are the accountants right. We all in HR we hate those things, right, but you do everything and that takes a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of strategy and a lot of reflection time looking at your data and making sure that you're making the right decisions.

Christin Marvin: 5:56

The climate is incredibly tough right now. Right, coming off the pandemic, a lot of restaurants have really bounced back, but full-service restaurants are really still struggling. Retention is harder than it's ever been before. The generation of people coming into the restaurant industry no longer have the experience that they used to. The career. Bartenders and servers are less and less. Cost of goods are higher than they've ever been, with little relief coming our way.

Christin Marvin: 6:27

And competition is growing right. We're continuing to see chain restaurants pop up all over town and in the local segment we have around 900 or so local restaurants. We opened about 70 last year and we closed about 30. So more competition just means more opportunities and options for guests to dine right, and it just means that we have got to operate at a higher level of excellence to get those people in the door, first and foremost, but also keep them coming back time after time. Right, and that's forcing us to really get creative and innovative, and we're going to talk about some of those ways that these operators have been able to do that today. So, without further ado, I will stop talking for a little bit and introduce our panel here. So, rocco, let's start with you. Would you share with the audience a little bit about your background and your involvement with Tucson Originals?

Speaker 3: 7:22

Sure, yeah, I was born in Chicago, grew up there, and my first job was in a pizzeria when I was 16. I went to college at University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and studied things, but ended up working in pizzerias when I moved here. I was going to go to grad school and then worked in restaurants here and then opened a pizzeria. So I think that was the path, that was always going to be my path, and I tried to do other things but it turned into that. What was the other question? Sorry.

Christin Marvin: 7:54

Just your involvement with.

Speaker 3: 7:55

Tucson Originals. I was persuaded by Pat Connors, who was one of the founding members of Tucson Originals and a friend of mine from Cafe Terracotta, that I shouldn't do everything by myself and should join with the community. And Tucson Originals was the obvious fit and has been instrumental in getting me out of my own way and developing me as a better restaurateur and businessman.

Christin Marvin: 8:24

Thank you, gabe. Yeah, hi, thank you, gabe.

Speaker 2: 8:26

Yeah, hi everybody, gabe Gardner, I am. First, I just want to thank everybody for asking me to do this, and I'm just delighted to be here. I started working in restaurants when I was 13. My dad owned a bar and grill and he told me I had to wash dishes and I said OK, and so I started washing dishes and then, um, I worked my way up, um, and then my parents sat me down, uh, when I finished high school and had to told Rocco this story. But I said we have to go to college, and so I had noticed two things about the restaurant industry that were very appealing to me the line cooks all smoke cigarettes at will and got to flirt with cocktail waitresses. So I thought that was a really great career path, um, and so I went to culinary school and um pursued that with great fervor for a long time.

Speaker 2: 9:13

Um, the cocktail waitresses right, right, right, right, I don't smoke anymore, um, and I'm currently married, so, uh, anyway, um, but I had the good fortune to work in a lot of really kind of high-end fine dining places and country clubs, and then I started teaching in culinary schools and did that for gosh about 13 years and taught in culinary schools all over the country Came to Arizona to run the program at Central Arizona College and then was promptly snapped up by Local First Arizona. And what I do now is we run a series of incubator kitchens four of them in fact and we incubate small food businesses that are just getting their start. So farmers, market folks, pop-up vendors, food trucks, that sort of thing and we give them the technical assistance to be able to grow their operation. Glad to be here.

Christin Marvin: 10:01

Thanks, Gabe.

Speaker 4: 10:02

Giannis. So I think I could just repeat what Rocco said and say ditto. After almost everything, from beginning in a pizzeria when I was 15 to going to college and realizing that that wasn't my career path. And my LSAT books after I graduated from college just sat by my bed stand at the bottom of the stack of cookbooks and I've been cooking all of my life. Came to Tucson in the late 70s, opened my first restaurant here in 83, and have been doing that ever since, and also was one of the founders of Tucson Originals with Pat and with Don Luria back in. I guess that was late 80s or early 90s or something like that. It was a long time ago. We used to travel around the country, starting in different cities, the Council of Independent Restaurants of America, which were originals all around the country for a while. Will you talk about your role? The City of Gastronomy with Jonathan Mabry and Gary Navahan and others. So did that became, got on the board one of the original members of the board of the City of Gastronomy and now chair that board.

Christin Marvin: 11:22

Great.

Speaker 4: 11:23

And work with Jonathan Mabry. He's our executive director, so we work very closely together with the City of Astronomy.

Christin Marvin: 11:28

Awesome, thank you. Let's lean into our questions here. Janos, I'm going to start with you. Will you define the difference between leadership and management in restaurants?

Speaker 4: 11:38

Yeah, so there are different sides of the same coin. If you were to draw a Venn diagram, there would be a large section of interaction, of overlap between the two of them. But I think it starts with leadership and completes with management. So leadership takes the skills of inspiration, of having vision, of understanding what the goal may be, and that starts as a singular sort of thing that you, or maybe you have a group that you're working with, of friends or colleagues or whatever, but have to have a share, a common goal, a common vision. To share a common goal, a common vision, and you have to be able to communicate that vision really well to all of your employees, to the public, and have a really clear understanding of what you're looking for. That piece of it goes on while you're operating. Your visionary doesn't stop, but it changes. It continues in the way of mentoring, instilling the standards, communicating with the public about what it is that you do in your restaurant, what makes you special, what makes you different, what's the point of distinction between you and the restaurant down the street? You become the voice and the face of the restaurant, as well as all the other hats that you might wear inside the restaurant.

Speaker 4: 13:11

The restaurant management piece is. So setting that stage is vital, and being really clear about what your intentions are going into it. What is it that you want to start? What does success look like for you? And then, what do you need to build that? What do you, what's the support structure around you need to be?

Speaker 4: 13:33

And that doesn't necessarily start with management, because in small, small businesses, the restaurant owner, the visionary, may be the manager, and and so then, as you grow, maybe, maybe you're able to hire managers.

Speaker 4: 13:47

In my case, I was very lucky very early on to be able to identify a manager, and the manager's role is different.

Speaker 4: 13:55

The manager's role is to help you to create and instill the systems that allow the business to run well, and so that can't be overstated.

Speaker 4: 14:08

That piece of having internal systems, controls, some sort of job descriptions though people know what your expectations are of them is critical to running a smooth operation, so that when somebody comes into work, they know what the expectations are, they know what the standards are, but not only what the expectations, but how to do it, how you want it done, so that your vision can be achieved, so that overlap between the leader or the visionary and the managers it could be the same thing, but if it's not the same person, they have to work really closely together, because that piece of creating the vision and then achieving the vision successfully achieving that vision really is in the hands of a manager who is really doing the work to make sure everybody's on the same page. The visionary, the leader, can be doing that as well, but the manager really handles the nuts and bolts of the operation. That piece is as important as the visionary, because without that, whoever that may be maybe yourself that you can't be successful. That really the diving into the nuts and bolts, is super important.

Christin Marvin: 15:30

Hey there, listeners. Before we jump back into today's episode, let's shine a light on a pressing issue in the restaurant industry employee retention. If you're grappling with the challenges of keeping a solid team together, you're not alone. I would like to extend an invitation for a quick 15-minute discovery call to discuss your specific situation and explore strategies to boost restaurant retention. Your team is the heart of your business and retaining great talent is crucial for your mental and physical health, as well as the health of your business. Visit my website at kristenmarvincom slash contact to schedule your call. Let's collaborate to enhance your retention strategies and create an environment where your team thrives.

Christin Marvin: 16:17

Now back to the show. Thanks for tuning in and I'm eager to connect with you soon in and I'm eager to connect with you soon. Yeah, I love what you said about leadership and having the vision to back it up. I think so many employees coming into restaurants and working for any business really want to know why they're doing what they're doing and where they're going right, and when everybody's following the same vision, same mission, it makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 4: 16:42

Yeah, and the leadership thing in that way is super important, because there's lots of different types of leaders. There's charismatic leaders, there's autocratic leaders, there's legitimate leaders, and all of them can be successful. But in our industry, an autocratic leader is going to be less successful. A charismatic leader is going to be successful for a while, but after a while everybody gets to know your warts, right. So then everything needs to turn in to legitimate leadership, and that means it has to come from the bottom up.

Speaker 4: 17:20

In our country, we elect our representatives, we elect our senators, we elect the president. That's legitimate authority. It comes from the bottom up, it comes from the people. Well, it's similar in a restaurant People have to have buy-in, they have to have steak, they have to have agency, so that they can feel that they're part of something. And that can come in all sorts of ways and it becomes part of the management protocol and the systems that you put in place that give people that. So that's one. As you're talking about so much turnover in the industry, that's one way that you, that you can help to eliminate turnover is give people something that they believe in and they feel that they have some level of saying in.

Speaker 4: 18:03

Owners never stop owning, managers never stop managing, but you can certainly leave room for your team to have some places for input.

Christin Marvin: 18:13

Yeah, I would also add that creating systems really offers your team support, because there's not a lot of chaos, they don't have to ask a lot of questions, they know what the expectations are, and that just opens up the ability for them to be able to spend more time with each other and with the guests.

Speaker 4: 18:29

And that sets the stage for them to succeed. That structure you think, well, I'm applying a bunch of structure to this. Yes, it's not. Everybody can do whatever they want. That structure is what allows them to succeed.

Christin Marvin: 18:41

Awesome. Thank you, Gabe.

Speaker 2: 18:50

I'm just making some notes from the Oracle over here. Seriously, yeah, I'd be happy to the thing that I think is crucial to leadership. In my opinion and maybe this is a function of having spent as long as I did teaching, cooking and working with people trying to pass on what I learned, and that's even still what I do today, although in a different capacity, incubating businesses but I really think a lot of the leadership comes down to being a teacher and being able to share what you've garnered with the folks that are willing and able to learn it. Janos mentioned that this upward mobility is possible if there is a management structure right. That idea of bringing people from the bottom up I really, truly believe in, and it wasn't present in a lot of the restaurants and in places under which I toiled under cruel masters for a long time when I was in culinary school. I will illustrate that by saying so.

Speaker 2: 19:51

When I was in culinary school, one of the first things that we did was we made omelets French-style omelets right which takes a great deal of skill, and the very first class at my culinary school was taught by a master chef, a French guy, and the last class was taught by him, and I'm pretty sure it was meant to inspire fear, both at the beginning and the end. So, anyway, so we're making these omelets right and I'm cracking eggs and whisking them and putting them in my pan with my butter, and he would walk around with this clipboard and he would stand behind you like this. He's burning his eyes into the back of your head and I remember this clear as day and this is mercy to me. Just over 20 years ago, I flipped my omelet right and like, in slow motion, I can see it it's going to land in the pan. The chef's going to be so pleased with me and he's standing right behind me and, of course, it misses the pan and falls into the burner and catches fire, as you might imagine, given my skill set. And he comes over and, like out of the blue, takes a wooden spoon out of his pocket and raps me across the knuckles. He's like that's not how I show you.

Speaker 2: 21:00

And I'm like, yeah, and so I tell that story because what that did is that made me fearful of him and I was so scared of him.

Speaker 2: 21:08

And here's the. I mean, this guy had worked in some of the best you know k this guy had worked in some of the best kitchens in Europe, and I never learned anything from him because I was so terrified of making him angry. So what that taught me was that, when I was in a position to be a leader, that I was going to share and lead and educate the folks that were ultimately executing the vision right. So if I'm going to be a leader and have that vision, I can't do it alone. And so to pass on whatever I've managed to figure out to them in a way that not only pushes forward the agenda of the restaurant or the program or the kitchen, but also gives them agency and gives them a way to create that upward mobility, I think is just as crucial. And so I think that age of the angry French guy hitting me on the knuckles, I hope, is long past, or at least is leaving the industry, and it is much more focused on what we can do together.

Christin Marvin: 22:13

Unfortunately it's still around a little bit. I had somebody call me last week and say that they had a chef throw a pan across the room at them Wow. I thought those days were gone, but probably not French.

Speaker 4: 22:25

We have a lot of homegrown prima donnas too, I always tell them when we were hiring in the restaurant. I would say tell the new hires, we have room for one prima donna in this restaurant. That's me, I love it.

Christin Marvin: 22:40

Yeah, I think we can learn a lot of lessons from the really bad leaders that we've worked with, right of the things that we don't want to do as we move forward. So thank you for sharing that. Rocco, will you talk about over your 25 years of owning a business, which is incredible? What qualities you've seen great managers have.

Speaker 3: 23:02

Yeah, I've learned so much from bad managers and 12 years of Catholic school gave me a lot of benchmarks of how not to be a leader and manager. And I was not a born leader at all. It was very little introspective and stuff as a teenager and in my twenties and stuff. But, yeah, you have to kind of own it, Otherwise you can't do it Right. In any case, I had to listen to people who knew more than I did before I could actually do things right.

Speaker 3: 23:35

There's a single, there's a monomania. You need to open a restaurant that you can't fail. You know you believe in yourself to a point where, like, you're going to do anything to make this happen, but after a while you have to be like, OK, I can let this fail and I have to figure out how to do this right. I have to figure out how to do this right and all of that stuff, including poor managers and business owners and role models in my past gave me a benchmark of what not to do and I had to figure out what the good things were. And, as my other panelists have said, you have to instill leadership and teach people stuff and also be humble enough to learn from.

Speaker 3: 24:18

I wasn't in every good restaurant ever. Like you said, I've been standing next to the pizza station for 25 years, largely doing one thing and enjoying people who come in from outside and have brought you know things that we can put in place in our restaurant to have those be the policies and those be what we teach the new people. And you know I'm always looking for a new way to peel an egg or, you know, skin a cat or whatever. As long as you can be open to that and you can put your ego aside, which you may have needed to open your place, then you're able to move past that and then find out what the good operations are and then implement those.

Christin Marvin: 25:06

Yeah, absolutely. I love what you said. I mean, you've been doing the same thing for over 25 years. You know what you're good at and you're honing that skill, which is incredible, and you've also been humble enough to surround yourself with people that are smarter than you and have different skill sets, so you can learn.

Speaker 4: 25:21

Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 25:21

Yeah.

Christin Marvin: 25:21

Okay, please don't put cat on your menu. Okay, yeah, no. So let's go back to you. One of the things I love about knowing you and working with you is your mindset, and I've never seen you stress. I've seen you irritated once, and the only reason I knew that you were irritated was because you stopped laughing and I got a little quiet, I was like, oh shit what's it.

Speaker 4: 25:47

Sorry, what's happening? Do you remember what that was? Yeah, my recollection is that I didn't feel like we were reaching our guests, yep, that we weren't communicating. We needed to find a way to communicate with them. Yeah, and I didn't feel like we were doing it. And we did. Yeah, we ultimately did, but I was just okay. How do we reach these people? How do we serve them in the way that's going to be most appropriate to them?

Christin Marvin: 26:13

But you had spent so much time you have at Studio Llanos creating this vision of what the experience is that you're going to offer, and that vision wasn't translating to the guests.

Christin Marvin: 26:22

we thought in the very beginning and it ended up being beautiful, right, we didn't say sit down, we're going to talk about the vision right now. This is your job, of course. Yeah, it just came to be through your actions which was really, really powerful. But anyway, would you talk about how important mindset is to success in the restaurant business and would you also talk a little bit about how you continue to cultivate a growth mindset?

Speaker 4: 26:48

Yeah, so the mindset really comes from. As we talked about leadership, it comes from the vision and if the vision is honed enough and pure enough, that's your guiding star forever. My guiding star started when I started my first restaurant. That was 1983. It's the same guiding star. It was really simple and it's still really simple.

Speaker 4: 27:15

I wanted to create a place that I could do my best work. I didn't know what that was. I was 27 years old. I didn't know what my best work was. I just wanted that environment and I wanted to be able to be surround myself with people who felt exactly the same way. And sometimes that's harder, sometimes it's easier, but if you keep that vision and you don't lose sight of it. So that means for me it means getting better at what I do all the time, because my best work is always ahead of me. It's for looking for people and gaining experience and intuition to understand who they are and whether they can fit into that mold and help me to achieve that for myself and help them achieve that for themselves.

Speaker 4: 28:09

It's simple on the one hand but, as we talked about leadership and management, the way to get that is through some real nuts and bolts pieces. It's putting together the processes, the procedures, the system in which people can succeed. You don't have to force it upon anybody. It becomes really quite natural and your staff helps you to do that because they're in the trenches. You don't have to force it upon anybody. It becomes really quite natural and your staff helps you to do that because they're in the trenches. They know what works and what doesn't. So you don't have to put yourself above you shouldn't put yourself above your staff. You have to listen to your staff and understand what it is and what are the things that you can do to help them, because they want to help you. They want to succeed.

Speaker 4: 28:54

If you've succeeded in getting people with that same mindset, well you're all on the same page. But it's not always possible, and so you know, as you describe the workforce right now, when we work together and we have a small team, we don't have the biggest problems, but I have certainly, over the years, it can be tougher and less difficult at various times in order to hire staff, but you can't let your standards fall. You have to be true to your standards, whatever they are. That was my vision. That's not everybody's vision, but whatever that vision is, you have to stay to that and that's how you become resilient, because every morning you can get up and do that again. Do that again, no matter what happened the night before. And not every night's perfect, not every day's perfect, and that's life right, but to keep that vision in mind and then that's your guiding light.

Christin Marvin: 29:49

Yeah, sounds like you are really checking in with that vision often and making sure that you're consistent with holding that vision as your true north.

Speaker 4: 29:59

The most important part is introspection. You know, am I really doing that? What am I learning today?

Christin Marvin: 30:06

Awesome. Gabe, I want to have you piggyback on something that Yano's just mentioned about surrounding yourself with people that are really bought into that vision. Would you talk a little bit about building culture in restaurants and how that can help retain employees?

Speaker 2: 30:22

Yeah, for sure. I mean as somebody who works with restaurants all day, every day, and restauranteurs. One of the great challenges facing the industry particularly on the other side of COVID, let's hope right is this idea of keeping and retaining good staff and you have to pay people. Well, right, like there's no way around it.

Speaker 2: 30:47

And restaurant workers, if nothing else, talk to other restaurant workers and they know what the guy or the girl down the street is getting paid right, whether that's shared over a Miller High Life at two o'clock in the morning or a cup of coffee at 10 o'clock in the morning, like they know.

Speaker 2: 31:04

And so the competitive pay is crucial.

Speaker 2: 31:08

But what I think is more important is creating a culture at a restaurant that people want to be a part of, and this really ties to that leadership and management piece that we were talking about earlier, which is, if you have a real visionary and they're cultivating a I don't know what you would call it an atmosphere in that space, in that restaurant, it makes people fiercely loyal to that owner, to that operator, to that chef, to that restaurant.

Speaker 2: 31:40

And I think, while pay is important, I think that the culture that lives and breathes in a restaurant is as important. Often we spend more time working with these people than we spend time with our own family, right, that was certainly my experience, and so I think doing things like making sure everybody has two days off, right? Or closing the restaurant on Sundays, or, you know, taking them to dinner, or buying food in, or you know, there's all sorts of things that one can do to create that culture, and it's not always just about better pay. I really do think it's about creating this place that people want to be and that becomes something that attracts better folks.

Speaker 4: 32:28

I want to just chime in there for a second. The piece about better pay is important. It's a double-edged sword. You want to just chime in there for a second. The piece about better pay is important. It's a double-edged sword. You want to pay well, but you don't necessarily want to be at the top of the market all the time, because that employee who's looking for pay only as the motivation, there's always going to be somebody who's going to pay a dollar or an hour and that's not going to work for you. You don't want to be somebody who's going to pay a dollar or an hour and that's not going to work for you. You don't want to be competitive. You want them to stay there because they believe they buy in, they can do the best work or achieve the things that are important in their lives, and if it's purely money, you really don't want them. You want them to go on to the next job For sure.

Speaker 2: 33:07

For sure. The last thing, guys, something Rocco said that I think should be on a t-shirt Ego is needed to open a restaurant. Humility is needed to stay open, absolutely.

Speaker 4: 33:18

So put that on your next t-shirt. Put it on a little signboard.

Speaker 2: 33:24

There you go. Anyway, I thought that was genius.

Christin Marvin: 33:28

Thank you so much, gabe Rocco. I'd love to switch gears a little bit and talk about management and innovation, and technology is coming at us full steam ahead, more so than it ever has been before in the restaurant industry, and you you know, online orders are called carry out, call in orders, right, and delivery have been around in pizza for gosh ever Right. They're the ones that kind of started it. You adopted online delivery, or online ordering and delivery right around the pandemic time. Will you talk a little bit about how that's really impacted your business from a from a sales perspective, and some of the benefits and the challenges that you've seen from that?

Speaker 3: 34:10

sure, yeah, it was something we've been putting off for a long time. Our POS system would would support online ordering, but we were, you know, sticks in the mud been open for 20 years 20 odd years and, like a lot of you know more established and possibly ancient places, we didn't do it. And then, when the, when the pandemic kind of opened our eyes to what we needed to do and then we reopened after being closed for like a week, a couple weeks, whatever it was, you know, four years ago, um, we had to turn our phones off because they were ringing so much and we just we were in our own way, we're like, what are we gonna do, like people. And then I had to answer emails that were like did you know? Your phones are off, is there not? And right in front of us was the facility to get online orders. So we adapted that really quickly and now probably I don't know, sometimes on a busy night 20% of our orders are online and you can change the parameters and okay, it's going to be an hour and a half, it'll say on when you're placing your online order. And the good thing about that is, like, you know, then people can opt in or opt out and you don't have to have personnel answer the phone, explain to them what the situation is and then you know interface with them when they could be actually busing a table or, or, you know, helping carry some food out or something like that. So that was really important to us In order to retain all of my employees.

Speaker 3: 35:38

During the pandemic, we did in-house delivery, which was completely a failing business model for us. We had delivered just for lunch for many years when we were first open, and even that just didn't make us any money. So now we farm it out to a third party which they were always calling us to get our business anyway. Uh, we're just doing grubhub right now. We could probably, we could definitely expand that and stuff like that.

Speaker 3: 36:03

But uh, so right now, with zero marketing and me jacking the price of of grubhub up to where it actually covers their exorbitant fees, we're getting like an extra day or two a month in sales just for like zero input from us, and these guys just come up and pick the pizza and they go. They're independent contractors, right, you know? Do I like the fact that you know it's a cutthroat race to the bottom with this? No, but you have to you know, live in the world you wake up in. And there's a lot of people that I noticed during the pandemic that are only going to order from you if they can do it through an app. And Gen Z I mean I have two Gen Z kids right. Neither of them wants to talk to anybody ever.

Speaker 3: 36:50

So, they're going to order on an app. One of my kids delivers for Uber Eats and then he spends a lot of his money on Uber Eats.

Speaker 4: 37:05

That's the race to the bottom.

Speaker 3: 37:10

Embrace whatever technology you need. But I'm saying it takes some of the pressure off of your staff. If you can have, you know, the robot AI world, do some of your business for you.

Christin Marvin: 37:24

Yeah, I was going to ask. It sounds like it's streamlined operations a little bit.

Speaker 3: 37:27

Oh, absolutely Like. Our phones don't ring off the hook, even on a Friday night. They're totally manageable. There's still people like you know my age older probably who I'm going to call my order in. When I order stuff, I call it just because that's what I do. I don't want it, it's stupid. But, yeah, but you have to adapt with the times you do have to adapt and you know.

Christin Marvin: 37:45

It's interesting what you said about your kids not wanting to talk to each other. I was just watching a story yesterday. Chick-fil-a just opened their first grab-and-go concept in New York and you go inside. There's no menus, you place their order right on the mobile app. You go in, you are greeted by somebody, you give them their name and they immediately give you your food. It's the fastest way. They're calling it faster, fast food and they said that 50% of Chick-fil-A. And they said that 50% of Chick-fil-A customers order through the mobile app nationwide and that more and more people want to eat in solidarity. They want to eat in their car, and it pissed me off when I heard that because I was like we're losing everything, right. But I understand that they're doing a good job of adapting and catering to what their customers want, right, which is what we really have got to do too, in order to stay competitive.

Speaker 3: 38:33

And if I see somebody eating our pizza in their car, I know we have won the battle.

Speaker 2: 38:41

That will be my husband one of these days, for sure.

Christin Marvin: 38:44

I love that. Thank you so much, Yanis. Will you talk a little bit about what resources City of Gastronomy can offer restaurants?

Speaker 4: 38:56

Yeah. So that's kind of a major program of ours, our working with restaurants. I would say the biggest program that we have is our certification project, which certifies restaurants as City of gastronomy certified restaurants. And when we started working on that, how do you become a certified restaurant? Well, clearly we're not going to be an arbiter of taste. It's not, oh, this serves the best food, or this is the best Chinese restaurant, or this is the best pizza restaurant, or whatever it was we wanted, because we can't do that, that's a matter of opinion.

Speaker 4: 39:38

But what we wanted to do was elevate the playing field, and so we made the application process very aspirational. So it wasn't just that you obviously one of the criteria is going to be using local and heritage foods and being locally owned and all of those sorts of things. Those are sort of obvious, but the bigger ones that I think are more aspirational is how do you treat your employees? What percentage of your employees are making minimum wage? What percentage? Obviously, the other percentage is going to be making more, not less, so we'll assume they're making more. What are the benefits that you can provide for your employees? So when we sent these people sending these filled-out applications, we provide subsidies for college education, for our kids.

Speaker 4: 40:34

We do lots of things that you know many restaurants can't do, but lots of things that they could do, and that was an aspirational thing. So if you wanted to get points in that you need to do something for your employees above and beyond their bare minimum, what are your practices for sustainability? You know, do you compost, do you use compostable to-go containers, do you have solar energy? There's a whole handful of those sorts of things, and so as you put the application together, you sort of distill that and as we move forward, we get more and more people who want to have that certification to mean something. But we'd start changing the playing field a little bit. So these practices that you want people to have become more prevalent, so that's an important piece in that program. Jonathan, what's our total number now, do you know, of certified restaurants and businesses?

Speaker 3: 41:40

Coincidentally, exactly 100 certified businesses.

Speaker 4: 41:45

So that's a good start and we also wanted to make so. When you have an organization like ours, we want to make sure that we're reaching as many communities as we possibly can, and so we had tremendous outreach, tried to create a tremendous outreach in the South Tucson, and I think that what was it? 50% of our certified restaurants are Hispanic-owned, or something like that.

Speaker 3: 42:13

There's a number there, 50% of our restaurants are BIPOC-owned.

Speaker 4: 42:19

Okay, what's BIPOC mean?

Speaker 4: 42:21

Black indigenous people of color. So, okay, thank you. I hear that term B-I-P, I can't get it. Okay, thank you very, Thank you very much. So that's one of the programs that we have. We do workshops like this one. So we partner with Ford, we partner with the University of Arizona, with Startup Tucson, to do workshops like this. Workshops like this We've had them in issues of sustainability and lots of different issues, so that we can sort of provide frameworks and advice to restaurants.

Speaker 4: 42:59

We do a lot of events around town for which we're able to hire restaurants. We're going to hold our Prevos Del Maiz Festival in April and the biggest event of that takes place a free event that takes place at Kennedy Park. Last year we had well over 4,000 people attend that event and so we had all Southside restaurants providing the food service there and enabling them to make the profit on that experience. We have an artisanal food directory, which was just updated with 150 or something different artisanal foods coming out of Tucson. When we started it was very, very, very, very small.

Speaker 4: 43:40

Jonathan's writing a sustainability guide for where people are. If you're a consumer and you're interested in what are the restaurants that have sustainable practices, it's a guide to those restaurants that score highest of our certified restaurants that score highest. So there's a variety of different resources that we have and I guess one of them is that really sort of underlies the whole thing and I think it's a major guide for restaurants is that artisanal directory or the popularization of heritage foods that more and more restaurants are beginning to use and inform their menus and infuse their restaurants with a sense of place, and I think that particular piece is becoming more and more important to the consumer, and certainly the consumer here.

Christin Marvin: 44:34

Thank you so much, gabe. Same question to you. Yeah, what does Local First offer?

Speaker 2: 44:38

Absolutely so. Local First is a statewide organization that broadly is interested in economic development and we think that economic development happens best when entrepreneurs do entrepreneurial things, that economic development happens best when entrepreneurs do entrepreneurial things. Because of my background in restaurants, that's exclusively who I work with. So we offer a bunch of different things. One would be membership in Local First as an entity. We're the largest coalition of small businesses in North America and my colleague, jessica Barfield, would be lovely to speak to after this. She'd be happy to talk to you about that. But anyway, what that membership does, it buys you one-on-one technical assistance.

Speaker 2: 45:19

So if you're a restaurant that is trying to figure out how do I work a profit and loss statement right, what should my food costs be? How do I get my labor costs down, you would work with someone like me or someone from my team specifically on that issue. We also offer we call it Restaurant Startup Bootcamp. It's a six-week course that goes through on a high level, things like that. So profit loss and food cost and profitability and profitable menu design and that sort of stuff. And then also whether it be our events like Savor or Devour, which happens in Phoenix and I'm happy to say that the Gut Chefs came and kicked Phoenix's ass. Anyway, you guys get a round of applause for that.

Speaker 2: 46:05

That was good, that was cool. But things like that, where we are always championing the small business you know, I don't think that many people go on trips and as they're planning their itinerary like man, that is to me the main, principal reason to come to Tucson is because you have an interesting and vibrant food scene, and Rocco said before we started that you plunge above your weight, and I absolutely feel that is true. So, anyway, we champion small business at every corner, but specifically in the food space, we work on the nuts and bolts of how to make it a business right. Like the folks that wind up in our little kitchens, they know their product, their salsa, their hot sauce, their tamale. That's without question. The part that they are often missing is how do I turn that into a profitable, revenue generating business?

Christin Marvin: 47:07

Love that. Thank you so much, gabe Rocco. I love what you said earlier about Tucson Originals providing you a community and a platform for you to get out of your own way. Would you talk a little bit more about what Tucson Originals does?

Speaker 3: 47:17

Yeah, tucson Originals was started and Janos can probably correct me if I'm wrong to compete with the chains In the late 90s. It was obvious the chains were scaling up and they had their sights on Tucson. They add their sites on Tucson and what we're doing. Well, there's about I think 27, 28 restaurants in Tucson Originals and some of them have up to six locations and different stuff like that. So you know it's in the mid-30s and stuff. So it's not insubstantial and what we do is there's a two-pronged approach. There's a consumer phrasing front which sells gift cards, which you may have or may not have seen, and we sell lots of gift cards and they're good at all of Tucson Originals restaurants and stuff, and that just gets butts in seats, which is one thing that's important for restaurants and also that helps fuel our website and social media posts and all that stuff. And we have people that help, that do reels for us and stuff like that, and that's what you know. You need that stuff to just have a profile in today's age.

Speaker 4: 48:24

So, rocco, can I ask you a question about that? Sure, so when you do that we used to do that that was a way of dues. So when you do that we used to do that, that was a way of dues You'd give certificates to the organization, the organization would sell them and that becomes the budget that you get to work with. Is that still how that works?

Speaker 3: 48:43

Not necessarily. I think it's $300 a year to be in Tucson Originals and you get a lot for that. You can almost not fail with that sort of money, the. But the restaurants get, I think, 95 of each of the, the money that's spent with oh, wow so it comes back you

Speaker 3: 49:03

get a check every month, wow. And the rest is is you know goes for for the maintenance of the program and the breakage is which, which is unredeemed gift certificates if anybody doesn't know what breakage is is enough enough where, like, it's some serious money at the end of the year. That's where some of our operating expenses come up. Also, we do like about half a dozen events every summer which is our off season with, like, the pizza throwdown always sold out, margarita Fest always sold out. We're going to do an october fest this year, first culinary october fest in tucson ever and probably the first like big promoted one for probably like 15, 20 years. And so that's another consumer facing event that we do. And also it's it's a good place to meet the chefs and and get some face time, and people really love that stuff, man, they really do. It's an opportunity for people who just stand in the kitchen all day to talk to their customers.

Speaker 3: 49:57

Also, we have a restaurant support side which we're expanding on, like, if you come to our meetings, we'll always have a speaker that'll give you some nuts and bolts on how to run a restaurant, whether it's, you know, health department or something like like that. Also, right now, as of this year. We have a lawyer on retainer that you can call for 20 minute consult, an HR professional with with a law degree who can help you with stuff. I just called him the other day. And also we're much like we were thinking of in the nineties. We're finally getting some group buys in for for gloves and consumables that all the restaurants use. That's going to save us money in the real world as well. There's a lot of things going on and we're trying to expand our reach and the way that we help our members. That's awesome.

Christin Marvin: 50:48

Thank you.