Ever wondered how a pizzeria becomes more than just a place to grab a slice? Tune into our latest Pizza King podcast where we sink our teeth into the importance of creating a community around your local pizza joint. I'll walk you through our own journey, from the launch of our mouthwatering Pizza of the Week with its bacon weave crust craze, to the anticipation building around our Pizza Tour 2024. But it's not just about the food – I'll share stories from the heart of our business, revealing the friendships and partnerships that have become the real secret sauce of our success.
Get ready to be inspired by our unique approach to fostering local love – we've got community partnerships that go beyond the pepperoni and cheese. Listen as I dish on how linking up with the local YMCA not only skyrocketed our exposure but also made us the pizza place of choice for their events. Plus, I'll slice into an innovative fundraising strategy from another brand that brilliantly benefits both the community and their business. Join us for an episode crammed with insights that could help turn your pizzeria into the beloved heart of the neighborhood.
Ever wondered how a pizzeria becomes more than just a place to grab a slice? Tune into our latest Pizza King podcast where we sink our teeth into the importance of creating a community around your local pizza joint. I'll walk you through our own journey, from the launch of our mouthwatering Pizza of the Week with its bacon weave crust craze, to the anticipation building around our Pizza Tour 2024. But it's not just about the food – I'll share stories from the heart of our business, revealing the friendships and partnerships that have become the real secret sauce of our success.
Get ready to be inspired by our unique approach to fostering local love – we've got community partnerships that go beyond the pepperoni and cheese. Listen as I dish on how linking up with the local YMCA not only skyrocketed our exposure but also made us the pizza place of choice for their events. Plus, I'll slice into an innovative fundraising strategy from another brand that brilliantly benefits both the community and their business. Join us for an episode crammed with insights that could help turn your pizzeria into the beloved heart of the neighborhood.
Yo, let's go. Pizza King podcast we back at it again. Got another good episode. Really want to expand on what we were talking about in the last episode, which was building community, becoming a part of your community and how that plays into the longevity of your pizzeria. But I wanted to expand and give a few tactics and some things, just talk to you about some of the things that we did in our business and how some of those things may or may not help you. Pizza of the Week was crazy this week, so can't wait to talk to you about that one and show that one. You really want to make sure you go to IG and check that one out. Pizza Tour 2024, got some places I'm visiting this year, so I really want to tap in with that and Q&A, just touching on the background and how we got started in the pizza business. So, without further ado, let's get into it.
Speaker 1:
Pizza King podcast. I'm Ty Relry, let's go. All right, we back, we back. I love doing this. I love doing this. It has become almost therapeutic just getting on this mic and talking and sharing these things and meeting more people and open it up. It'sblack you got to haveSome linked HM tostones, meeting more people and open it up. You know it's different parts of the journey and and I'm excited about where it's going. So you know, thank you all for for being here, thanks anyone who listens to this and you know all the folks who interact with me and reach out. I've made so many, so many friends in the pizza business over the last I would say, for four or five years, of just posting and interacting on social media. So you know, thank you to everybody who reaches out to me and who answers my questions when I have them. So, and all the communities that we, that we all share in and get to be, be a part of. So Can't say thank you enough. I can't say thank you enough.
Speaker 1:
Let's start out with pizza the week. Pizza the week was. It was actually funny because we were we're working in the shop I don't know must have been, you know, thursday or Friday a couple of weeks ago and and Alan and I are in the back JR's up front and he was talking to Some customers and he was. He was up there for a while. Like you know, you get that, you know it is. You see something happening and the interactions take. It'll take us 30 seconds a minute to take an order. But when it goes beyond that you start to look at it like all right, well, it's something wrong was going on. But he was up there talking to these folks for a good 30, 45 minutes and they're just laughing and kicking it. And you know we're in the back prep and do I'm doing, we do it and really join in. But at the, you know, as they're getting their order together and I go up there, I find out that these are the folks that he had interacted with on Facebook.
Speaker 1:
When the lady, the wife, had asked a question about we created we always do secret menu items, right, and we created a filly bowl or something like that and a lady at commented and asked about when we were gonna do some keto products or no, we didn't do the bowls yet. She asked about some keto products when we had posted a pizza and we we tried some keto bowls and, you know, tested out a few different things. Nothing that really worked For the way that we do things. But then we we ended up doing the Philly cheese steak bowls. So he, you know, he reached back out to her, found her comment on Facebook and so she came in and she was like I'm the lady on the one from Facebook that you told about the keto bowls, which, first of all, that's dope.
Speaker 1:
When people come in and you know the customers are like you, I'm the one that you talked to. Or they're like oh, I seen the video, you the, you the guy, and so they were. You know it's good to meet people In real life too, for sure, more. It's better to meet people in real life, especially folks that you interact with online, because it's just, you know, it makes the world smaller. So, anyway, she comes in and she's, you know, she's like I'm the lady with the keto bowls and that's when I came up. She's like all two J hours late, all tea distillated out. You know we did the keto bowls for the Philly bowls. I'm like, oh, that's dope. And then they say, well, tell them what we were just talking about. I'm like what he and the husband goes All right, work with me here.
Speaker 1:
We start out with weaving some bacon together and I'm like Say less, you had me at bacon weave. He wanted to do. He's like do a bacon, do bacon as the crust. If you weave it and cook it, that could be the crust for the pizza. Like, sign me up please. But I left him and they you know they ordered their food and all that and you know J Are cause me or. He sent me pictures the other day. I wasn't working. Today he sent me some pictures and these Jews didn't weave the bacon together and started cooking it Bacon weave crust.
Speaker 1:
They did a half and half. It was like half broccoli cheddar With half cream cheese and jalapeno like a jalapeno popper. They said it was fire, fire. You got to go check out this bacon weave. So the crust came out beautiful. So I can't wait to try it myself. I didn't get to a chance to try the pizza. I did show up later but the pizza was gone. I didn't get a chance to try the pizza, but I'm looking forward to making that crust and doing it again.
Speaker 1:
Go check out. Go check out IG. I'll post it on the pizza king podcast page. I'll post it on on my personal page on tower over you senior. So if you get a chance to see and it's on the store page at West Shore Kings away, go follow the store. Go Follow the store. So bacon weave crust. Would you try a bacon weave now?
Speaker 1:
I don't think it's something that could be a permanent menu item for us, or even a even a special, a secret menu item, or I Don't think it's something that we could sell, because it took a, it took a long time, obviously is very expensive, because we know bacon's not cheap, right? So we would have to either sell it for a ridiculous price In order to make it make sense, but stop on the line. Doing stuff like that really doesn't. We try to avoid situations like that. Let's just say that. But either way, cool, cool ass pizza, cool ass pizza. So, yeah, go check that one out on IG, or I probably posted it on Facebook too, if you, if you Are connected with me on Facebook, but mostly, obviously, we do things on on Instagram.
Speaker 1:
Q&a this week came from a customer. I was in the store on Sunday and a customer comes he's you know, he got his pizza and he's walking out the door and I'm there just kind of Doing something with the kids, talking to my. I had the kids there with me, so talking to the kids or Probably taking an order, they treat me like a waiter when they come into the store. But he comes up to me and he's like hey, are you, are you the owner? I'm like, yeah, you know what's going on. He goes I just wanted to ask you what you thought about this business, because I'm retired and I'm looking to find a franchise business to invest in. How did you decide that this was the business for you? And I told him you know, I didn't the business chose me, I didn't choose the business.
Speaker 1:
I've been doing this since I was 19 years old, so my path is a little bit different, meaning I was, I was in this and I was. I started to learn it. I became more intrigued. Opportunities continue to present themselves and that's how we got to where we are today. So my story is a story of sweat equity, time and and betting and investing on on oneself. Right Wasn't like I was looking for that next investment opportunity, or I retired from another career and I'm looking for a way to make some passive income. This was my life, so this was the natural progression of things for me. So my story is a little bit different.
Speaker 1:
But as someone who's looking for a business to invest in, I told him look, if you're looking for passive income straight up, don't do this, because look at me, it's Sunday, 6 7 o'clock in the evening on a Sunday. I got my three kids with me. We in here, you know doing, doing what we need to do. This is not anything close to retirement, you know what I mean. So I'm like he goes yeah, I see that I'm, you know, looking for something, something for my kids and something that we can pass on, like we'll start something that they're interested in, because if the goal is for your kids to take it over, they're probably not gonna want to want to run a restaurant, especially if they don't do it right now. But and he thanked me and we talked about a couple of things for a minute but it leads me to my real piece of advice, which is if you are looking to get into a business, or you are looking to join a franchise or buy a restaurant or open a restaurant, you want to do this.
Speaker 1:
Go do it before you invest your money. Go spend some time, go invest your time and I say this all the time Invest your time before you invest your money. Go learn it. Spend as much time as you can understanding the businesses and the nuances, the seasonality, all of the different components of it, before you decide that this is what you want to dump your money into, because it could be a long road to glory. You know what I mean. It could take a while if you want to build a good business and become profitable and have something that is worth passing on to the next generation. That takes some time to build up and it takes a significant amount of investment in the way of financial investment and time investment, energy.
Speaker 1:
You are going to miss some things trying to build this restaurant business up, but that is not to discourage anybody, because if you want to do it, by all means there is so many opportunities out here to get into the business. We got folks that do pop-ups. We got folks that make pizzas and do a great job making pizzas from home. We got folks that are doing food trucks and jumping into the franchise side or starting their own independence or even just adding pizza as part of something else. I saw there was a donut shop that sell a pizza to.
Speaker 1:
There's a lot of ways to get into it. I would never discourage anybody. It's such a diverse industry that you can do it any type of way. I learned about Argentinian style pizza from shout out to my guy, fernando, up in New York. I met him in Orlando and he was giving me an education on Argentinian style pizza. There's so many different ways to get into this business. You just got to choose which path is right for you. Spend as much time as you can learning and educating yourself on that business. You can be successful. You can be successful, but I would never, for my own ego, lead somebody down the path of, hey, this is going to be great, you're going to be so successful. No, I tell the truth, you're going to work your ass off for a long time. If you really want the most out of it, it's going to take the most from you. So that's just the truth. But hey, I'm not retired, I'm still in it. I want to help the folks that are also in it do their thing.
Speaker 1:
Last week, we were talking a lot about community and the importance of building community for the longevity of your restaurant. Right, I didn't give a whole lot of detail on some of the things that we did and I just wanted to share. Now Let me give this one disclaimer. I'm not saying that Saying these things to say that what we do is the right way or what somebody else does is wrong. I'm just saying that, based on my experience, these are some of the things that I that I have done that have worked to Whatever degree of success we needed at the time, right. So everybody's situation is different, everybody's bills are different, everybody's needs are different, so you got to determine what success means for you. But some of the some of that I'm gonna just give you a couple of tactics that we use that I thought were, you know, very beneficial for both the community and for the restaurant.
Speaker 1:
The first one was Must have been when did we? So? We bought the store in 2000, I think. We bought the store in 2011 and we we bought we pay for a sponsorship at the YMCA. Now, for me, the YMCA is about Half a mile up the road from us. Big YMCA, they got the fields, they got all the notes. It's huge, big YMCA, right down the street. We decided that it was gonna be, it was important for us and they actually approached us and it just made sense for us to Do it about a sponsorship. So we bought the sponsorship. It was probably a couple thousand dollars, you know, and they let you do a monthly pay. Maybe we're paying them a couple hundred dollars a month for it, and we did that for a few years.
Speaker 1:
They put a banner up in the gym, you know, in the, in the fitness area, they put a banner up. You know, thank you and West Shore Pizza, kingsway for the sponsorship. But here's, here's what was great and the banner was you know, you know, man, that's a lot of money for a banner. Well, what's the banner do? The banner gives you exposure to, you know, folks in the community. Look, no one's driving across town to go to a YMCA. It's the people in the community that that frequent and you know, spending money at the Y and and a lot of families, mostly families. That's our target we like.
Speaker 1:
We like families With, you know, with kids, you know, we like the three, twos, the, the three car door, the three bathroom to the three bedroom, two bathroom house folks, the, you know, the two, three car garage. So you know, that's our target. We want, we want, we want families. So who frequents the YMCA? Families? So families will see it. But who also, you know, who uses it? What does the YMCA do? They do camps.
Speaker 1:
That was big for us. So with our sponsorship we became a preferred vendor. So with that preferred vendor they came to us for their needs and what's the best thing? To feed kids, pizza. So For our sponsorship dollars. We became a preferred vendor. We got tons of orders for those camps, tons of orders for those camps every single week, every single week. They need 10 pies, 12 pies, and it wasn't like they were huge, but it paid off over time. But we also got. So you get the exposure of, you know, getting your pizza in front of the kids. So now we become a favorite of not all the kids but some of the kids. We become a favorite of those kids. But who's in there during the day when the kids are at school working up? The parents, the grandparents, the aunts, the aunties, you know, like the family's in there. You kind of get that full 360, right. You get to see the parents, you get to see the kids, you get to be, you know, you get to be a preferred vendor for other folks. So if they have vendor partners or if they have programs, they're gonna recommend us as their preferred vendor because we have sponsored the YMCA and we show that we're, you know, investing in the community.
Speaker 1:
That one was huge. If you got a YMCA, I'm telling you, go do that. Go do that, because spring break comes, summer break comes and it's slow during the year. You're not gonna get. You're probably not gonna get a lot from them from September to May. I mean, you'll get like spring break. It will get like some Christmas break that they're doing camps, but spring break, summertime, it could be every day. It could be five days a week. You know you can get a couple of days. But I'm telling you that one was huge for us and we still have those relationships because it was just so important.
Speaker 1:
The second one is actually came from another brain that I was working with and when I was with Fuzzy's I thought this I thought it was genius that they pretty much eliminated the whole and you done it like the give back. You know we got this is a brain in high school night we're gonna give back 10% of sales for everything we do tonight, and you know those are great and everybody doesn't and you see a lot of brains that do that. But when I was with Fuzzy's we pretty much killed that, that idea, and not because it didn't work, but because we wanted to find a way or they wanted I didn't create it, but they wanted to find a way to give the maximum benefit to the organization. So you know, 10% give back, you know you can make. You might get a couple of hundred dollars. You drive, you know you drive sales to the restaurant, but what the school gets out of that is, you know, minimal. If you do $2,000, you're gonna give them a check for 200 bucks. Was it worth, you know? And that may be great for a PTA, but was it really worth it? Excuse me, I would say yes and no. But if you tell them, look, our space is more valuable than our product, so, like, look, we'll offer you the space and what they did was called Brownie Night. So we'll let you use our space and you invite, you do the work, you invite people and we'll let you work the room and sell.
Speaker 1:
And what they did was the restaurant would provide Brownies and ice cream to the school or to the organization and you invite everybody to come out and say, hey, it's Brownie High School Night at West Shore Pizza. Come on out, enjoy, enjoy pizza. We're also doing brownies and ice cream for donations. So they would sell the brownie tray and ice cream for $5. And if you get a couple and it's always packed when you do this, because my kids do it too they bring the slips home. We gotta go. We gotta do this. We gotta go to Chick-fil-A, we gotta go to the ice cream place tonight. You always wanna support the schools. So if you sell 100 of those, you can make $500. But if 100 people come in order as normal and we do $2,500 in sales, you're gonna get $250.
Speaker 1:
So it was always more beneficial and more profitable and cleaner from an accounting standpoint to let them do the work, and they work the table and they sell the brownies and we just donate them. We'll cook it, we let you set it up, you sell it. We don't run anything through our books or through our register. You sell it, you take the cash, keep it. You have the spaces yours, you have all of our customers available to you. You can go around work, table to table, however you wanna do it, and typically, even if people don't want it, they usually just donate and do stuff like that. So yeah, brownie Night. Brownie Night was dope.
Speaker 1:
If you wanna know more about Brownie Night, I do have an outline on it. I'm happy to send it to anybody if you just email me. And then the last thing is how do you get connected with folks to do things like that? The one piece of advice I wanted to give was when you're dealing with schools. Go after PTA members, pta presidents and assistant principals. Those are the folks who make decisions on where orders get placed from, who orders get placed from, where the need, what the needs are and how they allocate the budget. So work with PTA folks. Build relationships with PTA members, because that'll be your gateway into getting into the schools and some schools require you to become approved vendors through the district before they can place orders with you. It's worth it to do that work. Just go through whatever processes you need to go through to get that done, because it's definitely invaluable. But that's all we got today.
Speaker 1:
It was a good one. Pizza of the week bacon weave Definitely. Can't wait to try that. Go check it out. Let me know if you see it. Question Q&A Don't get into this without getting yourself some experience first. That's just my advice. Go learn it. Go do it the right way. Learn how to do it the right way so that you have a better chance of being successful when it's your turn. And lastly, we talked about some of the tactics that we use to build a community. Find you a YMCA or a community center or something that you know, or a daycare center, somewhere that you can get to kids and parents. That's a good one. And then go tap in with the PTA at your local schools. Tap in with the PTA, because schools always need support, businesses always need customers. It's really a perfect marriage.
Speaker 1:
Before we go, though, I want to talk about pizza tour. I want to go. You know this year is 2024. Obviously, you know I already have some trips scheduled, but I really want to visit more places and kind of go on this pizza tour this year. You know, between shows and expos and just visiting some towns that have pizzerias that I just want to try, and really pizza people that I want to meet in person, folks that I've been talking to and chatting with online, I can't wait to just get out to some of these places. Obviously, we'll be in Vegas. We'll be in Vegas this year at the Pizza Expo, but we'll also be in Orlando for Pizza Summit, pizza Tomorrow Summit. So any spots in Vegas. I know there's a the two guys in Vegas that started the two shops. I can't wait to go try that, and I want to do Orlando. We'll have some spots. That's local for me, so we'll definitely try some spots around Orlando. There's also Western West Coast food show, but there's going to be a pizza summit tomorrow. Pavilion in LA in August. So a lot of shops in LA that I'm looking forward to visiting.
Speaker 1:
I got Houston on the list. There's at least four or five places in Houston with some friends that I've made online, made on Instagram, that I cannot wait to get out to H-Town and try some of these folks. There's a pizza 5K, I think it's in like New Jersey Pizza 5K in September. I'm trying to put myself on the list for that. That's a good one. If there's any other places that y'all think I should visit or pizza reels that I should get into, hit me up, let me know, because I want to get out and meet more folks and expand my pizza horizon. So, holler at me. All right, and that's a wrap. It's another good one. Don't forget to go. Follow us on Instagram. Pizza King podcast. Tap in with me, send me your questions, send me your pizzas. Can't wait to talk and meet all of you other folks. Oh yeah, pizza tour. Send me those cities. Let's stay locked in. See y'all next week.
