November 15, 2021 • 33 mins
This week, Ryan is joined by the king of pizza and founder of the Slice app, Ilir Sela. They discuss growing up putting an immigrant work ethic to use, learning how to be a businessman despite having a tech background and how Ilir built a multi million dollar empire out of a love of pizza.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
What's up, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Big
Money Energy Podcast, Season two with I Heart Radio, the
greatest podcast ever. Obviously, today we have a really really,
really cool entrepreneur, Elier Sela. And now you might be
saying what I don't know? That is I don't but
you know what you do have you know what you
do know? You know you have tasted pizza. Elier Sela
(00:21):
is the new pizza king because he founded a company
called Slice, which has completely changed the way people order
pizza all over the world. He's created it not too
long ago and he's now built it to one thousand,
seventy five employees and they're going to do a billion
dollars in pizza sales this year. The story is totally incredible.
(00:45):
He's a first generation immigrant from Macedonia, grew up in
Staten Island, went to local college and just figured out
what his passion was and so many other things. Also,
he turned down an offer to sell the company once
for eighteen million dollars or he said no. That was
a really really tough decision for him, and then again
for three hundred and fifty million dollars he said no.
(01:06):
We go through the whole thing. I'll be like it
typically there's so much information that I'm like trying to
pare it down. I'm like, all right, how do I
be as efficient with questions as possible? Right with you? Like,
(01:30):
I know just enough, but you're also kind of like
the secret Ninja entrepreneur, Like there's not a lot out there,
and so, um, I kind of want to like dig
into it. People know your background and they're listening to this,
so they've obviously read the caption and the description of
what the podcast episode is. But your first generation, Yeah,
I moved here when I was ten years old. Came
(01:52):
here from Europe. Um. I remember literally vividly remember flying
into JFK. I come from a town in Europe, in
southeastern Europe that has zero traffic lights. I mean there's
no there's barely ading lights. And coming into New York
City from from JFK. You look around, you look out
the window, you're ten years old. I mean it looks
(02:14):
like magic, It looks like anything, anything could be possible,
which is kind of the it's stuck with me from
from that moment forward. And what brought your family to
the US into New York. Yeah, My my family actually
has been um, going back and forth. My um, my grandfather,
my parents lived in the city in the seventies and
(02:34):
they owned a pizza shop called Charlie's Pizza on sevent
and the Wild Story. As a real estate U person,
you'll appreciate this. Yeah, they earned a lot with their
pizza shop. It was seven operation, saved a lot of
cash there at least ran up and the building owner
offered them to buy the building for dollars h five
(03:00):
man and they turned it down so they could all
move back home. Got it to take the money exactly.
But yeah, they moved back, moved back home, and then
um decided to come back again. And I think part
of it has to do have to do with the
fact that my brothers and I we were, you know,
getting older in a in a sort of sense, and
(03:21):
they wanted to provide opportunity for us, specifically on the
education front, so better schools, better opportunities, and they made
a lot of sacrifices to come back. I'm sure. And
you spoke English at the time, No, not really barely. Yeah,
it's like just so classic, right, like your parents put
you on an airplane and take you to the US
and don't really know English, and they're like, go figure
(03:42):
it out, go to school, go on and be somebody.
But fortunately I have a twin brother and identical identical
and are you the twin are you really? You never know?
We are in a lot of places. I am in
a lot of places at the same time. Let me
put it that way. I'm kidding, but we um it was.
(04:03):
It made things a lot easier. Obviously, I have a
twin brother, You're kind of going through this journey together.
You don't feel so alone, and you don't have to
sort of have this pressure of making friends. So it
kind of softened the experience a little bit. What did
you want to be when you were a little kid.
I'm trying to imagine you is like nine years old
in Macedonia and then eleven in New York. Yeah, I
(04:23):
I'll be at my My dad really instilled this sort
of entrepreneurial passion from from the early days. My dad
worked incredibly hard. He was, you know, part of the
family's pizzeria business when he was younger, and then he
became a master tailor and opened up a shop in
Manhattan when we moved back, um and really made a
(04:44):
name for himself because the suits he made were just
are are incredible? I Mean, we've got to we've got
to talk after this. But he's retired now and world
words sort of spread out, and um, you know, John F.
Kennedy Jr. Was getting married and needed a suit for
his wedding and my dad handmade his suit for his wedding. Um,
(05:06):
and that was sort of his own small business, right,
he was just a master tailor. What he sort of
taught us was kind of going back to the same
point I made earlier, which is, when you come to
to America, every opportunity is available to you. Literally everything,
it all is um up to you. It's all up
to you if you want to, um really take advantage
(05:26):
and seize the moment and sees the opportunities. And basically
what he said, what are was that the rules of
this country favor entrepreneurs. Um. Nothing wrong with having a
job and working for others, of course, but but that
is what the system is designed to do, is is
nurture and enable entrepreneurs to launch businesses. And so yeah,
(05:49):
from right out of school, I mean, my my first
job was a my own business where we built websites
in the early two thousands. Um, is that nerd Force
nerd Force A great. I got great, simple to name. Yeah,
I got really lucky. UM Geek Squad launched with Best
Buy nationally and um it was not a franchise, but
(06:13):
people wanted to get into that business. So we started
painting calls NonStop for people who wanted a franchise. I
had no idea what that meant, but if they wanted one,
I needed to sell them that. So I franchised the
model and we launched the hundred and twenty four locations.
That's insane. How old were you? I was twenty well
when I launched those twenty one, so twenty one to
(06:35):
twenty seven you we Did you go to college? Did
you get out of college? I went to CUNEI. I
went to the College of Staten Island. So I always
did really well in school, but albeying culture is one
that we're at the time. It was like you have
to be home, you can't really go away to school,
and so I went to the College of Staten Island. Yeah,
I graduated in three years. I had a bunch of
(06:57):
college credits from high school. I don't know why, I
think just I've got this way of memorizing things. I
guess um, But yeah, I finished school pretty quickly and
then launched the tech support company, got it. And did
you always love technology? Yeah? I think I can when
you're a little kid, even in Macedonia or is this
like no, definitely not in Macedonia. Now there is. But
(07:22):
I think what really led me to embrace and kind
of have passion for technology is sometime maybe I was
thirteen or fourteen years old and my older brother got
a computer. My older brother who's five years older, he
was just starting three of you, three boys, three of us. Yeah.
So my older brother, um started school, he's an architect, um,
(07:45):
and his freshman year of college, he got a computer
and we were not allowed to touch it, my brother
and I. And so the moment you're told you can't
touch so the moment that that became the rule meant
that we you know, you obviously want to go and
play with So whenever he would be in school, because
it was like a desktop, we were just yeah, we
(08:06):
were just like mess around with it, and um, it
became a real passionate for me. So when I went
to college, it was a computer science truck, so a
computer science to me. So you sold NERD Force correct right,
(08:26):
And you did not go back to Macedonian retiring the beat.
I did not. I boots strapped nerd Force. In fact,
I didn't really know what it meant to raise venture
capital and investments and things like that. Did you raise
money with nord Force? I did not know. Is just
started from day one, just franchise it because people are
calling and wanted to franchise. Yeah. Yeah, we started getting
(08:47):
so many calls. Um, well, we were named one of
the most thriving companies post nine eleven at the five
year Anniversity. So in two thousand and six, five years
after nine eleven, we were on the centerfold. Back then
it was a big deal of the New York Daily News. Um,
and it was sort of this company's thriving in New
(09:08):
York Post and so that gave us a lot of
brand awareness at the local level. And so again as
a geek squads started launching on a national scale, we
just we got bombarded with calls for franchising. Yeah, how
did you figure out how to franchise? Oh my god.
I went to an attorney in State Island and I said, Hey,
(09:28):
I want to franchise my business. And I said, well,
it's gonna be two and fifty tho. I was like,
I don't I don't have two. Um. I locked myself
in my office for three days. Literally, it was like
a Friday on Monday, learned everything that there is to
know about how to franchise your business, including trademarking your
logo and brand, and I did it myself and within
(09:51):
ninety days we had our first franchise. E wow. Wow.
So the answer to everyone who's listening to this is
just be smart, be super smart, get through college in
three years and learned that. What you just said reminded
me of like, uh, Leonardo DiCaprio, catch me if you can.
Have you seen that with Tom Hanks at the end
of the movie Tom? I said, don't you know, how
(10:13):
did you? Like? What? What was it? Like? How did
how did you get into law school? Or how what
was it to become a lawyer or something. He's like, no,
I just studied and took the test and I passed.
It's like what, No, but you're a con artist. You
had a separate way to get about it. He's like, now,
I just I just studied and took the test, and
I would say that's Um, it's actually less complicated than smart.
I think it's just put an effort. I don't know
(10:34):
that I'm smarter than anyone, that we all have the
same abilities. But it really is about the input, the
effort you put in against that you know ability, and
that gives you an advantage or not. So it's really
more effort than it is smart. And do you remember
where your first franchise wash. Yeah, I was in Fort Lane,
New Jersey. Nice. And so that person then paid you
(10:56):
a fee and opened up their own nerd force. Look, yeah,
I got it where people doing these like out of
their own homes and garages type thing or opening up
retail stores. No, it was a mobile. It was like
a you know, man in a van mobile on side
tech support in home business. And you know, we grew
to about nine hundred technicians. So these franchise e s
(11:17):
started hiring their own technicians and we went from about
thirty technicians to nine hundred. And you were getting a
small percentage of all other sales. We were getting four
hundred and fifty dollars a month as a flat feed royalty.
There was a marketing fee and that was it. And
were you taking a percentage? So the royalty fee was
on top of that right. So then you sold the
(11:38):
franchise and the rights to nerd Force right correct to
a public company called Nexus Management out of the United Kingdom,
public company where they just knock on your door. Yeah. Well,
they provided enterprise level support to larger companies, and they
wanted to get into the SMB space too, small business space,
and they viewed nerd Force as their wedge into a
small business and then they were going to provide their
(12:01):
enterprise level products to small businesses. Did you have to
stay on board once you sold? I did. I had
to stay on board for a couple of years. Um,
I got really lucky. So I sold in June of
two November of two thousand eight. The world changed economically
and access to capital just completely went away. And the
franchise system is highly dependent on small business loans, which
(12:25):
became impossible. And so I would say the next year
year and a half became pretty challenging. Um, and eventually
I ended up leaving got it to do what you're
doing now, or something totally different, to do what I'm
doing now? So where is that mindset switch for you?
You're sitting there, you just sold a company to a
(12:47):
public company. You're in the middle of a recession, things
are really really tough, and you're like, you know what pizza? Yeah, yeah,
so your family has been in pizza for a long time,
so I get correct, correct. So I've got a lot
of family members that own pizzerias, being albeying this is
what albeings do. That or construction, which is what my
twin brother does. Um. Yeah. And I started getting a
(13:11):
lot of family members asking me for help to build
in websites because we were because of the Nerd Force
experience and just my background and the consistency with which
these asks came across was kind of jarring. And you know,
I knew everything about the franchise model. So I'm looking
at Dominoes and I'm watching commercials and they're like order online.
(13:32):
Every commercial they stopped advertising phone numbers. Everything was e commerce.
So I wanted to learn more about what was going
on there, and I also wanted to learn more about
the pizza industry more holistically. Um, but I didn't really
I'll be honest, I don't really think about challenges Like
I didn't really think, well, it's a recession, like maybe
I shouldn't start a business. I don't my brain isn't
(13:53):
wired that way. My brain is more just like what
is what is the opportunity and what's the current sort
of data set? And so um. Anyway, learned a couple
of things. One, you may be surprised, but the pizza
industry in the US is forty seven billion dollars. That
is revenue that passes through seventies seven thousand locations in
(14:15):
the US. That's a massive, massive industry, forty seven billion. Two,
only twenty of all locations are the big chains combined Domino's,
Papa John's, Little Caesars, Pizza Hut. Everyone else is independent
for the most part. And three, Domino's locations were starting
(14:36):
to really outperform independence because of the e commerce play exactly.
And so I UM, I was like, wait, going back
to my experience with nerd Force, these independent operators, these
mom and pop locations have the same problem that the
independents who were competing with us did as well. But
(14:57):
let me go and talk to them. Let me see
why did why did my uncle not open up a
Papa John's, Why did he open up John Anthony's Pizza.
So what you learn is that most small business owners
are really passionate about a craft, and so they go
into the business because of that, and they inherit all
these business problems, but they are not really business people.
(15:18):
They don't know marketing, they don't know technology, they don't
know you know, finances and all those things. They just
kind of have to figure that stuff out. So the
artists first. Yeah, and so I realized that there's an
opportunity to create a new model called a reverse franchise,
where instead of doing sort of recreating the franchise, I
wanted to unite all the independence and in essence create
(15:41):
the world's largest pizza chain, but this time instead of
all of them being the same brand, for them to
be independent brands but have the same benefits. So that
was the moment I realized that those three things and
and sort of that lesson for why independence go into
business or mom and pop sort of owners go into business. Um,
(16:01):
I went and bought a domain name called my pizza
dot com, which was the brand of my company for
the first five years. Did you to buy it for
somebody else? I did. It was for sale for one
and fifty thousand dollars. Yeah, my pizza dot com. Yeah
it was. It was. I mean, this is two thousand
nine billion names were pretty popular. Pizza dot Com, which
I tried to buy, was on sale for four million dollars.
(16:25):
So it's like, I'll take the mine, and uh, but
I negotiated that down to you are a good salesman.
I mean that you can't see the storyteller, you not
get down. Yeah, and so UM got that on board
and we started, um yeah, we started scaling quickly, bootstrapped again,
no investments, but it started as my Pizza. Yeah. And
(16:48):
then obviously, so this is two ten, so creating an
app wasn't even an idea yet. No, it was still
super early. I mean, in hindsight, I probably should have
invested there early enough, but I did not. Instead, we
for the most part built websites for the pizzeria powered
by my Pizza, and then we have the platform and
and so you would just cold call independent pizzerias and say, hey,
(17:11):
we're gonna help you sell more pizza online. Yeah. Well,
well we tried doing that and they were like, what
are you talking about? Who needs to sell pizza online?
It's again, it's two thousand nine. No one really wants technology.
And so UM I went and got three cars, these
like little Nissan cubes. They look like pizza boxes. UM
(17:32):
branded them with my Pizza and I would park them
in front of pizzeria's literally just moving around with my
twin brother and we would leave him around town and
it would give us credibility because we were a brand
new like who knew my Pizza dot Com and UM.
And then after leaving them, you know, in front of
a pizzeria for a day or two, I would go
inside the pizza and say, hey, I'm with my Pizza
(17:52):
dot Com. If you guys want to want to work
with us, here's what we do. And that's how we
got probably the first locations. But you build them all
their own individual websites, correct, because that's what your friends
and family were having you do, because that's what you
asked somebody who starts a company called nerd force, did
you exactly? But what we did was and the unlock
here is that all these PiZZ threas are almost identical.
(18:15):
They just don't know it. They all operate the same way.
And so what we did was we built a system
where as long as I can enter a PiZZ reas,
information on the back end, on the front end of
website would be created automatically. But it was just like
a cookie cutter website, same one, just different photos and
different stuff. What how do you make money? So we
(18:36):
basically charged two dollars per order. For every order we
generated online, we will charge two dollars and can building
the website. You're knowing what orders you're coming through. So
we built a website, We had my pizza dot com.
We created some advertising channels, the marketing channels online through Google,
and so for every order that would pass through, the
(18:56):
restaurant would pay us two dollars. It would cost us
on so literally like it was like create something for
for a dollar, sell it for two, and do that
as many times as possible. Got it good? Think people
buy a lot of pizza though, And you started just
east coast to start, Yeah, just mostly in New York.
And I'll tell you a story. By the way, my
mom was like, what is this new thing you're doing.
Why don't you go get a job, And and I
(19:19):
was like, okay, I'll explain to you what we do.
We we partner with pizzerias, We build this website, we
enter all their menu items, we go and advertise, and
then somebody orders. And then when somebody orders, we make money,
and she's like, okay, not bad. So the orders like
thirty dollars, so you make thirty dollars. I was like, no, no, no,
we make two and in fact it costs us one.
So we make a dollar. And she's like, all that
(19:39):
work for a dollar a lot of exactly you read
scale of lots of dollars. So then where do you
go from there? Like you just okay, now you're just
gonna tackle all the independent PiZZ to reas in the
(20:00):
United States. Yeah. So then you know, once we started
UM sort of creating some critical mass on the on
the restaurant side, words started to spread. UM. Really the
unlock for us was when we figured out how to
turn online orders into faxes to the pizzrea automatically. So
there's technology that converts um something in in you know,
(20:23):
something digital to a facts within like thirty seconds, so
that they could get like the paper order and they
would print it out and deliver it. Yeah, because a
lot of pizzrea's were like, hey, I don't want all
this technology, you know, they're sort of there's a lot
of anxiety around that, but they all have a fax
number on their menu. And so we started asking, Hey,
how many times this is fax machine print in order
(20:43):
for you? And they would say once every two weeks,
and so we were like, what if that printed out
like thirty times a day. They were like, you know,
it's great, and it it meant that they didn't have
to change their workflow. And so we started selling my
Pizza as a facts ordering service to the restaurant, but
an online ordering product to the consumer. Crazy and the
(21:06):
moment that happened, it just kind of took off. And
pizzeria is just kind of because they all talk to
each other, right, they all talk to you, and they're
all very connected. If if you own a pizza shop,
so does your brother in law and maybe your sister,
and so there's this sort of community effect and then
they just all want to be a part of the
same system because you're also you're making ordering easier, but
we're also making them more money where they sell more pizza, No, definitely.
(21:27):
So the big unlock here is that online volume, e
commerce volume is more valuable than offline volume. So if
you compare to Pizza Rea's, one of them is on
phone based where you're calling in the orders. The other
one is e commerce. The difference is going to be
three x yeah. One because the phone channel is the
(21:50):
same person who's making the pizza has to answer the phone.
It's busy, it's all these things, taking down the credit
card numbers, all that stuff too. Once you call a pizzree,
they never call you back. There's no CRM, there's no
like retention marketing. They don't remind you to reorder, they
don't upsell you. There's none of that. And then um three,
(22:10):
it costs a lot more to serve that customer because
you need people to answer the phone and so, and
you make a lot of mistakes and all that good stuff.
So really the primise here is that if we can
flip all of these independent pizzreas, these family owned businesses,
to e commerce businesses, they'll make a lot more money
and they'll save a lot a lot of money. Nice
(22:31):
and so then take me up to switched. So a
couple of things happened between then and one is first,
did you raise any money? We didn't raise money, just
operating purely off cash flow, purely off like yeah cash
flow bootstrapped started to build out a team in Macedonia,
so you're profitable. Yeah, we were hiring some family members
(22:54):
in Macedonia to do some of the menu work that
we spoke about. Because you wanted to do this for
p thres No, it's all us. But I wanted them
to help me do the work, and so I went,
yeah off shore. I went to visit family in Macedonia
and they were asking me about this new company. And
(23:15):
one of my relatives said, hey, why don't you give
us that work and we can do it for five dollars.
It was costing us a hundred here and so. And
by the way, five dollars over there five dollars per
hour is maybe five times the national average. So you
get this amazing job in an office, you get paid
really well. Um. And so we started hiring people there,
(23:39):
and by we had a team there of about twenty
or thirty people doing a lot of the admin work, yeah,
the back office operations. And then I picked my head
up February. I'm in Starbucks in stud Island and I'm
looking at these um at my books, at my financial books.
And in January of twenty fifteen, we had profited two
(24:02):
and fifty thou dollars just for the month, straight to
the bottom line. UM. I started doing some silly things
so I went to Manhattan Motor Cars in Bora Bentley
just cash, and I was like, I'll make it up
next month. So so some silly things like that, where
where's that Bentley? Now I sold it in three years later.
(24:24):
But you know things you do that you're like, you
know what am I going to do with this money? Um?
Then I realized, wait, I'm being kind of silly. I
need to reinvest this thing, and could you to reinvest
in the company. Six months later, I got an offer
to sell the company for eighteen million dollars and it
would have been you know, life changing. Yeah, and I
(24:45):
almost did it. Who makes it kind of over private
equity fund interest. Couple of brothers had sold their own
tech company and they were starting to create a portfolio
of companies and they saw what you guys were doing
and just came to you. Yeah, yeah, came to us,
and UM got really close. They took me out to
dinner and the whole thing got really close to selling.
And my twin brother was like, well, what are you
(25:06):
gonna do next? That I was thirty five, and and
you know I thought to myself, I was like, you
know what, I'll probably do the same thing again. The
third time around, and for me, it was like, you
know what, Um, this is still the beginning are We
were growing so fast that I kind of asked myself, Hey,
(25:28):
what if I treated this company as the new thing
and I don't sell, But what if I really come
in with that level of energy of like launching something
brand new? What would happen? And so I turned down
the deal and I reached out to one of the
founders of Seamless who had sold the company on Twitter
and um they responded and they're like, yeah, let's jump
(25:51):
on a call. Get on a call. He's like, hey, like,
what is this business? My pizza dot com? I've never
heard of it. I don't even know what this is.
But hey, when you have like five restaurants on your platform,
just call me back and we'll we'll work together. I
was like, well, I've got three thousand. I had three
thousand restaurants by then, and he's like, come to my
(26:12):
office tomorrow. UM. I go to the I go to
the office. Um. They got really excited and invested a
million dollars. For me, it was access to their network
to help the scale the business, and that was kind
of the beginning of the second phase of the company,
but it was still my Pizza. It was still my Pizza.
This was late October November. So when did you make
(26:36):
the switch from all the different websites into the one
app platform. Yeah, so that must have been a huge
that's a huge planned shift. Yeah, well everything changed. Yeah,
and we we still actually power all the websites. So
we we decided to go from just being websites only
to being omni channel. So one is we made a
(26:58):
deal with Google, so we are a direct partner of Google,
where if you are a pizza shop and your partner
with Slice, the consumer can order through Google, Google Assistant,
Google Food, Ordering, your name it all these channels freely
without you having to do anything extra. And then we
started to invest in a director consumer app um and
we launched that in October of and that was that
(27:21):
coincided in parallel with us going from the My Pizza
brand to the Slice brand, and it was kind of
crazy business business inside. I wrote this article that said,
this one man company is so profitable that they've hired
one hundred people in like ninety days and now it's
called Slice kind of things. I think it's still still
(27:42):
out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is still out there.
It's such a cool, such a crazy cool story. Um,
why did you do all this? Like? What's your mission?
Is it to takedown dominoes? Is it to empower? I listen?
You know, I could have nine hours of question for you. Um,
but your story is just so unique and inspiring to
(28:03):
a lot of people are listening, Like I have a
lot of ideas right now, um, and so I know
a lot of other people are probably thinking, you know,
for themselves too. But like you, you now are at
a point where is the goal just to completely shift
the way people order food? Is it to change the paradigm?
Is it just to build something as big as possibly
(28:23):
can be? Because have you had other offers come to
you to try to buy you out? Left? And we have? Um,
we we did. We had another offer in twenty nineteen.
Haven't made this public, but I'll share it here. I
won't say who, but we didn't have an off trailer
and the trailer I haven't that's great, But we did
have an offer to sell for fifty million dollars in
(28:44):
nineteen that I turned down. You turned it down? Did
you tell your mom? I did? Okay? So to make
sure because maybe she'll listen to this. We are and
at the time I own more than fifty percent of
the company still, so it would have been that would
have been life changing as well. But uh, in hindsight,
it was absolutely the right idea and it was the
right decision um because again we're incredibly early in this
(29:09):
digital transformation e commerce transformation phase. And to your question,
like what what motivates me, it's you know, money is
a is a lagging indicator of wealth that you can
create for the world, and I don't. Wealth isn't defined
as money. Wealth is making people, making things people want,
(29:31):
and so that's one too. I also don't like, I
don't operate with the mindset of in order for me
to win, I gotta make sure somebody else loses, because
that assumes that wealth is a finite pie. That's not
true either. Wealth in fact, is an infinite um game.
If you create wealth, it's incremental to everything that already
(29:52):
exists um. And so I admire dominoes, I admire some
of these chains. I think they're doing incredibly well, and
I take some inspiration from what they're doing. But I
want to make that accessible and democratize that. As much
as I don't like that word UM to everybody else.
So for me, what I'm really passionate about is how
do we keep the debate of what is your favorite pizza? Going?
(30:16):
Because that debate will be gone if local family owned
businesses go out of business, of course, and the only
way for these family owned businesses to have a shot
is for there to be an operating system, ultimately a
platform that will allow them to focus on what they
do really well but solve all the other problems. So
(30:39):
having said all of that, the way I think about
the opportunity looking forward is instead of somebody going and
wanting to open up a franchise, I want someone to
open up their own local brand, their own authentic brand,
with their own recipe, their own story, their own history,
UM and focus on what they do best. But everything
else is sort of saw for by slice, which is
(31:02):
the real estate side we should talk after um. The
financial side, so access to capital, the entire technology platform, brand,
creative marketing, all those things. Do you give small business loans? Now, company, Yeah,
we're we're actually launching two locations this month with great
operators who have had one location for a long time,
(31:24):
have always had a dream to open up their second location,
but they don't have access to capital or had a
lot of anxiety about where and how to do it.
One of them will be in Greenwich, Connecticut, and another
one is in a small town in Massachusetts. And are
you taking ownership stakes? And those we are not now
they're just exclusive customers to Slice. Interesting. So what's your
(31:45):
what's your daylight now? I mean, are you hiring and
managing this entire time? Is that like your Monday through Friday? Yeah?
You know, for a while it became really reactive, and
I'm not really it's not really a great feeling to
to react to things at this scale. So I've actually
put some structure to my week, and so I've created
(32:08):
themes for every day. Um, and so you know, Mondays
are my days with my direct management team, so with
our chief business officer, chief technology officer, you know, and
so on and so forth. And and also we have
our exact team meeting. So I know what Monday is about. Um,
Tuesday's sort of a focus on products. Wednesday we've got
(32:28):
no meeting days like we don't we just don't meet.
It's it's a data to do. Get it done. Can
I say that? I don't know if I can um,
and then you know, so every day has the theme.
But um, you know what's been pretty awesome is meeting
a lot of different people and learning about different stories
being here today and you know, learning hopefully learn more
(32:49):
about you know, your journey as well. But um, and
I think that's most of most of how I spend
my time. And then on the weekends, I literally live
inside pizzerias. I just go drive around and I'll sit
at a pizzreia. They don't really know who I am,
but I'll order a pie. And when you order a
pie from a from an owner and you tell them
it's good, they start they start talking, so you can
(33:11):
ask him questions. They're like, well, what are your baby challenges? Yeah,
and so I try to stay really close to the
customer because the last thing I would want to do
is loose touch with what exactly is happening in the market.
Big Money Energy is hosted by me Ryan Sirhant. It's
produced by Mike Coscarelli and Joe Loresca, an executive produced
(33:34):
by Lindsay Hoffman. Find more podcasts like Big Money Energy
on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get
your podcasts.
What's up, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Big
Money Energy Podcast, Season two with I Heart Radio, the
greatest podcast ever. Obviously, today we have a really really,
really cool entrepreneur, Elier Sela. And now you might be
saying what I don't know? That is I don't but
you know what you do have you know what you
do know? You know you have tasted pizza. Elier Sela
(00:21):
is the new pizza king because he founded a company
called Slice, which has completely changed the way people order
pizza all over the world. He's created it not too
long ago and he's now built it to one thousand,
seventy five employees and they're going to do a billion
dollars in pizza sales this year. The story is totally incredible.
(00:45):
He's a first generation immigrant from Macedonia, grew up in
Staten Island, went to local college and just figured out
what his passion was and so many other things. Also,
he turned down an offer to sell the company once
for eighteen million dollars or he said no. That was
a really really tough decision for him, and then again
for three hundred and fifty million dollars he said no.
(01:06):
We go through the whole thing. I'll be like it
typically there's so much information that I'm like trying to
pare it down. I'm like, all right, how do I
be as efficient with questions as possible? Right with you? Like,
(01:30):
I know just enough, but you're also kind of like
the secret Ninja entrepreneur, Like there's not a lot out there,
and so, um, I kind of want to like dig
into it. People know your background and they're listening to this,
so they've obviously read the caption and the description of
what the podcast episode is. But your first generation, Yeah,
I moved here when I was ten years old. Came
(01:52):
here from Europe. Um. I remember literally vividly remember flying
into JFK. I come from a town in Europe, in
southeastern Europe that has zero traffic lights. I mean there's
no there's barely ading lights. And coming into New York
City from from JFK. You look around, you look out
the window, you're ten years old. I mean it looks
(02:14):
like magic, It looks like anything, anything could be possible,
which is kind of the it's stuck with me from
from that moment forward. And what brought your family to
the US into New York. Yeah, My my family actually
has been um, going back and forth. My um, my grandfather,
my parents lived in the city in the seventies and
(02:34):
they owned a pizza shop called Charlie's Pizza on sevent
and the Wild Story. As a real estate U person,
you'll appreciate this. Yeah, they earned a lot with their
pizza shop. It was seven operation, saved a lot of
cash there at least ran up and the building owner
offered them to buy the building for dollars h five
(03:00):
man and they turned it down so they could all
move back home. Got it to take the money exactly.
But yeah, they moved back, moved back home, and then
um decided to come back again. And I think part
of it has to do have to do with the
fact that my brothers and I we were, you know,
getting older in a in a sort of sense, and
(03:21):
they wanted to provide opportunity for us, specifically on the
education front, so better schools, better opportunities, and they made
a lot of sacrifices to come back. I'm sure. And
you spoke English at the time, No, not really barely. Yeah,
it's like just so classic, right, like your parents put
you on an airplane and take you to the US
and don't really know English, and they're like, go figure
(03:42):
it out, go to school, go on and be somebody.
But fortunately I have a twin brother and identical identical
and are you the twin are you really? You never know?
We are in a lot of places. I am in
a lot of places at the same time. Let me
put it that way. I'm kidding, but we um it was.
(04:03):
It made things a lot easier. Obviously, I have a
twin brother, You're kind of going through this journey together.
You don't feel so alone, and you don't have to
sort of have this pressure of making friends. So it
kind of softened the experience a little bit. What did
you want to be when you were a little kid.
I'm trying to imagine you is like nine years old
in Macedonia and then eleven in New York. Yeah, I
(04:23):
I'll be at my My dad really instilled this sort
of entrepreneurial passion from from the early days. My dad
worked incredibly hard. He was, you know, part of the
family's pizzeria business when he was younger, and then he
became a master tailor and opened up a shop in
Manhattan when we moved back, um and really made a
(04:44):
name for himself because the suits he made were just
are are incredible? I Mean, we've got to we've got
to talk after this. But he's retired now and world
words sort of spread out, and um, you know, John F.
Kennedy Jr. Was getting married and needed a suit for
his wedding and my dad handmade his suit for his wedding. Um,
(05:06):
and that was sort of his own small business, right,
he was just a master tailor. What he sort of
taught us was kind of going back to the same
point I made earlier, which is, when you come to
to America, every opportunity is available to you. Literally everything,
it all is um up to you. It's all up
to you if you want to, um really take advantage
(05:26):
and seize the moment and sees the opportunities. And basically
what he said, what are was that the rules of
this country favor entrepreneurs. Um. Nothing wrong with having a
job and working for others, of course, but but that
is what the system is designed to do, is is
nurture and enable entrepreneurs to launch businesses. And so yeah,
(05:49):
from right out of school, I mean, my my first
job was a my own business where we built websites
in the early two thousands. Um, is that nerd Force
nerd Force A great. I got great, simple to name. Yeah,
I got really lucky. UM Geek Squad launched with Best
Buy nationally and um it was not a franchise, but
(06:13):
people wanted to get into that business. So we started
painting calls NonStop for people who wanted a franchise. I
had no idea what that meant, but if they wanted one,
I needed to sell them that. So I franchised the
model and we launched the hundred and twenty four locations.
That's insane. How old were you? I was twenty well
when I launched those twenty one, so twenty one to
(06:35):
twenty seven you we Did you go to college? Did
you get out of college? I went to CUNEI. I
went to the College of Staten Island. So I always
did really well in school, but albeying culture is one
that we're at the time. It was like you have
to be home, you can't really go away to school,
and so I went to the College of Staten Island. Yeah,
I graduated in three years. I had a bunch of
(06:57):
college credits from high school. I don't know why, I
think just I've got this way of memorizing things. I
guess um, But yeah, I finished school pretty quickly and
then launched the tech support company, got it. And did
you always love technology? Yeah? I think I can when
you're a little kid, even in Macedonia or is this
like no, definitely not in Macedonia. Now there is. But
(07:22):
I think what really led me to embrace and kind
of have passion for technology is sometime maybe I was
thirteen or fourteen years old and my older brother got
a computer. My older brother who's five years older, he
was just starting three of you, three boys, three of us. Yeah.
So my older brother, um started school, he's an architect, um,
(07:45):
and his freshman year of college, he got a computer
and we were not allowed to touch it, my brother
and I. And so the moment you're told you can't
touch so the moment that that became the rule meant
that we you know, you obviously want to go and
play with So whenever he would be in school, because
it was like a desktop, we were just yeah, we
(08:06):
were just like mess around with it, and um, it
became a real passionate for me. So when I went
to college, it was a computer science truck, so a
computer science to me. So you sold NERD Force correct right,
(08:26):
And you did not go back to Macedonian retiring the beat.
I did not. I boots strapped nerd Force. In fact,
I didn't really know what it meant to raise venture
capital and investments and things like that. Did you raise
money with nord Force? I did not know. Is just
started from day one, just franchise it because people are
calling and wanted to franchise. Yeah. Yeah, we started getting
(08:47):
so many calls. Um, well, we were named one of
the most thriving companies post nine eleven at the five
year Anniversity. So in two thousand and six, five years
after nine eleven, we were on the centerfold. Back then
it was a big deal of the New York Daily News. Um,
and it was sort of this company's thriving in New
(09:08):
York Post and so that gave us a lot of
brand awareness at the local level. And so again as
a geek squads started launching on a national scale, we
just we got bombarded with calls for franchising. Yeah, how
did you figure out how to franchise? Oh my god.
I went to an attorney in State Island and I said, Hey,
(09:28):
I want to franchise my business. And I said, well,
it's gonna be two and fifty tho. I was like,
I don't I don't have two. Um. I locked myself
in my office for three days. Literally, it was like
a Friday on Monday, learned everything that there is to
know about how to franchise your business, including trademarking your
logo and brand, and I did it myself and within
(09:51):
ninety days we had our first franchise. E wow. Wow.
So the answer to everyone who's listening to this is
just be smart, be super smart, get through college in
three years and learned that. What you just said reminded
me of like, uh, Leonardo DiCaprio, catch me if you can.
Have you seen that with Tom Hanks at the end
of the movie Tom? I said, don't you know, how
(10:13):
did you? Like? What? What was it? Like? How did
how did you get into law school? Or how what
was it to become a lawyer or something. He's like, no,
I just studied and took the test and I passed.
It's like what, No, but you're a con artist. You
had a separate way to get about it. He's like, now,
I just I just studied and took the test, and
I would say that's Um, it's actually less complicated than smart.
I think it's just put an effort. I don't know
(10:34):
that I'm smarter than anyone, that we all have the
same abilities. But it really is about the input, the
effort you put in against that you know ability, and
that gives you an advantage or not. So it's really
more effort than it is smart. And do you remember
where your first franchise wash. Yeah, I was in Fort Lane,
New Jersey. Nice. And so that person then paid you
(10:56):
a fee and opened up their own nerd force. Look, yeah,
I got it where people doing these like out of
their own homes and garages type thing or opening up
retail stores. No, it was a mobile. It was like
a you know, man in a van mobile on side
tech support in home business. And you know, we grew
to about nine hundred technicians. So these franchise e s
(11:17):
started hiring their own technicians and we went from about
thirty technicians to nine hundred. And you were getting a
small percentage of all other sales. We were getting four
hundred and fifty dollars a month as a flat feed royalty.
There was a marketing fee and that was it. And
were you taking a percentage? So the royalty fee was
on top of that right. So then you sold the
(11:38):
franchise and the rights to nerd Force right correct to
a public company called Nexus Management out of the United Kingdom,
public company where they just knock on your door. Yeah. Well,
they provided enterprise level support to larger companies, and they
wanted to get into the SMB space too, small business space,
and they viewed nerd Force as their wedge into a
small business and then they were going to provide their
(12:01):
enterprise level products to small businesses. Did you have to
stay on board once you sold? I did. I had
to stay on board for a couple of years. Um,
I got really lucky. So I sold in June of
two November of two thousand eight. The world changed economically
and access to capital just completely went away. And the
franchise system is highly dependent on small business loans, which
(12:25):
became impossible. And so I would say the next year
year and a half became pretty challenging. Um, and eventually
I ended up leaving got it to do what you're
doing now, or something totally different, to do what I'm
doing now? So where is that mindset switch for you?
You're sitting there, you just sold a company to a
(12:47):
public company. You're in the middle of a recession, things
are really really tough, and you're like, you know what pizza? Yeah, yeah,
so your family has been in pizza for a long time,
so I get correct, correct. So I've got a lot
of family members that own pizzerias, being albeying this is
what albeings do. That or construction, which is what my
twin brother does. Um. Yeah. And I started getting a
(13:11):
lot of family members asking me for help to build
in websites because we were because of the Nerd Force
experience and just my background and the consistency with which
these asks came across was kind of jarring. And you know,
I knew everything about the franchise model. So I'm looking
at Dominoes and I'm watching commercials and they're like order online.
(13:32):
Every commercial they stopped advertising phone numbers. Everything was e commerce.
So I wanted to learn more about what was going
on there, and I also wanted to learn more about
the pizza industry more holistically. Um, but I didn't really
I'll be honest, I don't really think about challenges Like
I didn't really think, well, it's a recession, like maybe
I shouldn't start a business. I don't my brain isn't
(13:53):
wired that way. My brain is more just like what
is what is the opportunity and what's the current sort
of data set? And so um. Anyway, learned a couple
of things. One, you may be surprised, but the pizza
industry in the US is forty seven billion dollars. That
is revenue that passes through seventies seven thousand locations in
(14:15):
the US. That's a massive, massive industry, forty seven billion. Two,
only twenty of all locations are the big chains combined Domino's,
Papa John's, Little Caesars, Pizza Hut. Everyone else is independent
for the most part. And three, Domino's locations were starting
(14:36):
to really outperform independence because of the e commerce play exactly.
And so I UM, I was like, wait, going back
to my experience with nerd Force, these independent operators, these
mom and pop locations have the same problem that the
independents who were competing with us did as well. But
(14:57):
let me go and talk to them. Let me see
why did why did my uncle not open up a
Papa John's, Why did he open up John Anthony's Pizza.
So what you learn is that most small business owners
are really passionate about a craft, and so they go
into the business because of that, and they inherit all
these business problems, but they are not really business people.
(15:18):
They don't know marketing, they don't know technology, they don't
know you know, finances and all those things. They just
kind of have to figure that stuff out. So the
artists first. Yeah, and so I realized that there's an
opportunity to create a new model called a reverse franchise,
where instead of doing sort of recreating the franchise, I
wanted to unite all the independence and in essence create
(15:41):
the world's largest pizza chain, but this time instead of
all of them being the same brand, for them to
be independent brands but have the same benefits. So that
was the moment I realized that those three things and
and sort of that lesson for why independence go into
business or mom and pop sort of owners go into business. Um,
(16:01):
I went and bought a domain name called my pizza
dot com, which was the brand of my company for
the first five years. Did you to buy it for
somebody else? I did. It was for sale for one
and fifty thousand dollars. Yeah, my pizza dot com. Yeah
it was. It was. I mean, this is two thousand
nine billion names were pretty popular. Pizza dot Com, which
I tried to buy, was on sale for four million dollars.
(16:25):
So it's like, I'll take the mine, and uh, but
I negotiated that down to you are a good salesman.
I mean that you can't see the storyteller, you not
get down. Yeah, and so UM got that on board
and we started, um yeah, we started scaling quickly, bootstrapped again,
no investments, but it started as my Pizza. Yeah. And
(16:48):
then obviously, so this is two ten, so creating an
app wasn't even an idea yet. No, it was still
super early. I mean, in hindsight, I probably should have
invested there early enough, but I did not. Instead, we
for the most part built websites for the pizzeria powered
by my Pizza, and then we have the platform and
and so you would just cold call independent pizzerias and say, hey,
(17:11):
we're gonna help you sell more pizza online. Yeah. Well,
well we tried doing that and they were like, what
are you talking about? Who needs to sell pizza online?
It's again, it's two thousand nine. No one really wants technology.
And so UM I went and got three cars, these
like little Nissan cubes. They look like pizza boxes. UM
(17:32):
branded them with my Pizza and I would park them
in front of pizzeria's literally just moving around with my
twin brother and we would leave him around town and
it would give us credibility because we were a brand
new like who knew my Pizza dot Com and UM.
And then after leaving them, you know, in front of
a pizzeria for a day or two, I would go
inside the pizza and say, hey, I'm with my Pizza
(17:52):
dot Com. If you guys want to want to work
with us, here's what we do. And that's how we
got probably the first locations. But you build them all
their own individual websites, correct, because that's what your friends
and family were having you do, because that's what you
asked somebody who starts a company called nerd force, did
you exactly? But what we did was and the unlock
here is that all these PiZZ threas are almost identical.
(18:15):
They just don't know it. They all operate the same way.
And so what we did was we built a system
where as long as I can enter a PiZZ reas,
information on the back end, on the front end of
website would be created automatically. But it was just like
a cookie cutter website, same one, just different photos and
different stuff. What how do you make money? So we
(18:36):
basically charged two dollars per order. For every order we
generated online, we will charge two dollars and can building
the website. You're knowing what orders you're coming through. So
we built a website, We had my pizza dot com.
We created some advertising channels, the marketing channels online through Google,
and so for every order that would pass through, the
(18:56):
restaurant would pay us two dollars. It would cost us
on so literally like it was like create something for
for a dollar, sell it for two, and do that
as many times as possible. Got it good? Think people
buy a lot of pizza though, And you started just
east coast to start, Yeah, just mostly in New York.
And I'll tell you a story. By the way, my
mom was like, what is this new thing you're doing.
Why don't you go get a job, And and I
(19:19):
was like, okay, I'll explain to you what we do.
We we partner with pizzerias, We build this website, we
enter all their menu items, we go and advertise, and
then somebody orders. And then when somebody orders, we make money,
and she's like, okay, not bad. So the orders like
thirty dollars, so you make thirty dollars. I was like, no, no, no,
we make two and in fact it costs us one.
So we make a dollar. And she's like, all that
(19:39):
work for a dollar a lot of exactly you read
scale of lots of dollars. So then where do you
go from there? Like you just okay, now you're just
gonna tackle all the independent PiZZ to reas in the
(20:00):
United States. Yeah. So then you know, once we started
UM sort of creating some critical mass on the on
the restaurant side, words started to spread. UM. Really the
unlock for us was when we figured out how to
turn online orders into faxes to the pizzrea automatically. So
there's technology that converts um something in in you know,
(20:23):
something digital to a facts within like thirty seconds, so
that they could get like the paper order and they
would print it out and deliver it. Yeah, because a
lot of pizzrea's were like, hey, I don't want all
this technology, you know, they're sort of there's a lot
of anxiety around that, but they all have a fax
number on their menu. And so we started asking, Hey,
how many times this is fax machine print in order
(20:43):
for you? And they would say once every two weeks,
and so we were like, what if that printed out
like thirty times a day. They were like, you know,
it's great, and it it meant that they didn't have
to change their workflow. And so we started selling my
Pizza as a facts ordering service to the restaurant, but
an online ordering product to the consumer. Crazy and the
(21:06):
moment that happened, it just kind of took off. And
pizzeria is just kind of because they all talk to
each other, right, they all talk to you, and they're
all very connected. If if you own a pizza shop,
so does your brother in law and maybe your sister,
and so there's this sort of community effect and then
they just all want to be a part of the
same system because you're also you're making ordering easier, but
we're also making them more money where they sell more pizza, No, definitely.
(21:27):
So the big unlock here is that online volume, e
commerce volume is more valuable than offline volume. So if
you compare to Pizza Rea's, one of them is on
phone based where you're calling in the orders. The other
one is e commerce. The difference is going to be
three x yeah. One because the phone channel is the
(21:50):
same person who's making the pizza has to answer the phone.
It's busy, it's all these things, taking down the credit
card numbers, all that stuff too. Once you call a pizzree,
they never call you back. There's no CRM, there's no
like retention marketing. They don't remind you to reorder, they
don't upsell you. There's none of that. And then um three,
(22:10):
it costs a lot more to serve that customer because
you need people to answer the phone and so, and
you make a lot of mistakes and all that good stuff.
So really the primise here is that if we can
flip all of these independent pizzreas, these family owned businesses,
to e commerce businesses, they'll make a lot more money
and they'll save a lot a lot of money. Nice
(22:31):
and so then take me up to switched. So a
couple of things happened between then and one is first,
did you raise any money? We didn't raise money, just
operating purely off cash flow, purely off like yeah cash
flow bootstrapped started to build out a team in Macedonia,
so you're profitable. Yeah, we were hiring some family members
(22:54):
in Macedonia to do some of the menu work that
we spoke about. Because you wanted to do this for
p thres No, it's all us. But I wanted them
to help me do the work, and so I went,
yeah off shore. I went to visit family in Macedonia
and they were asking me about this new company. And
(23:15):
one of my relatives said, hey, why don't you give
us that work and we can do it for five dollars.
It was costing us a hundred here and so. And
by the way, five dollars over there five dollars per
hour is maybe five times the national average. So you
get this amazing job in an office, you get paid
really well. Um. And so we started hiring people there,
(23:39):
and by we had a team there of about twenty
or thirty people doing a lot of the admin work, yeah,
the back office operations. And then I picked my head
up February. I'm in Starbucks in stud Island and I'm
looking at these um at my books, at my financial books.
And in January of twenty fifteen, we had profited two
(24:02):
and fifty thou dollars just for the month, straight to
the bottom line. UM. I started doing some silly things
so I went to Manhattan Motor Cars in Bora Bentley
just cash, and I was like, I'll make it up
next month. So so some silly things like that, where
where's that Bentley? Now I sold it in three years later.
(24:24):
But you know things you do that you're like, you
know what am I going to do with this money? Um?
Then I realized, wait, I'm being kind of silly. I
need to reinvest this thing, and could you to reinvest
in the company. Six months later, I got an offer
to sell the company for eighteen million dollars and it
would have been you know, life changing. Yeah, and I
(24:45):
almost did it. Who makes it kind of over private
equity fund interest. Couple of brothers had sold their own
tech company and they were starting to create a portfolio
of companies and they saw what you guys were doing
and just came to you. Yeah, yeah, came to us,
and UM got really close. They took me out to
dinner and the whole thing got really close to selling.
And my twin brother was like, well, what are you
(25:06):
gonna do next? That I was thirty five, and and
you know I thought to myself, I was like, you
know what, I'll probably do the same thing again. The
third time around, and for me, it was like, you
know what, Um, this is still the beginning are We
were growing so fast that I kind of asked myself, Hey,
(25:28):
what if I treated this company as the new thing
and I don't sell, But what if I really come
in with that level of energy of like launching something
brand new? What would happen? And so I turned down
the deal and I reached out to one of the
founders of Seamless who had sold the company on Twitter
and um they responded and they're like, yeah, let's jump
(25:51):
on a call. Get on a call. He's like, hey, like,
what is this business? My pizza dot com? I've never
heard of it. I don't even know what this is.
But hey, when you have like five restaurants on your platform,
just call me back and we'll we'll work together. I
was like, well, I've got three thousand. I had three
thousand restaurants by then, and he's like, come to my
(26:12):
office tomorrow. UM. I go to the I go to
the office. Um. They got really excited and invested a
million dollars. For me, it was access to their network
to help the scale the business, and that was kind
of the beginning of the second phase of the company,
but it was still my Pizza. It was still my Pizza.
This was late October November. So when did you make
(26:36):
the switch from all the different websites into the one
app platform. Yeah, so that must have been a huge
that's a huge planned shift. Yeah, well everything changed. Yeah,
and we we still actually power all the websites. So
we we decided to go from just being websites only
to being omni channel. So one is we made a
(26:58):
deal with Google, so we are a direct partner of Google,
where if you are a pizza shop and your partner
with Slice, the consumer can order through Google, Google Assistant,
Google Food, Ordering, your name it all these channels freely
without you having to do anything extra. And then we
started to invest in a director consumer app um and
we launched that in October of and that was that
(27:21):
coincided in parallel with us going from the My Pizza
brand to the Slice brand, and it was kind of
crazy business business inside. I wrote this article that said,
this one man company is so profitable that they've hired
one hundred people in like ninety days and now it's
called Slice kind of things. I think it's still still
(27:42):
out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is still out there.
It's such a cool, such a crazy cool story. Um,
why did you do all this? Like? What's your mission?
Is it to takedown dominoes? Is it to empower? I listen?
You know, I could have nine hours of question for you. Um,
but your story is just so unique and inspiring to
(28:03):
a lot of people are listening, Like I have a
lot of ideas right now, um, and so I know
a lot of other people are probably thinking, you know,
for themselves too. But like you, you now are at
a point where is the goal just to completely shift
the way people order food? Is it to change the paradigm?
Is it just to build something as big as possibly
(28:23):
can be? Because have you had other offers come to
you to try to buy you out? Left? And we have? Um,
we we did. We had another offer in twenty nineteen.
Haven't made this public, but I'll share it here. I
won't say who, but we didn't have an off trailer
and the trailer I haven't that's great, But we did
have an offer to sell for fifty million dollars in
(28:44):
nineteen that I turned down. You turned it down? Did
you tell your mom? I did? Okay? So to make
sure because maybe she'll listen to this. We are and
at the time I own more than fifty percent of
the company still, so it would have been that would
have been life changing as well. But uh, in hindsight,
it was absolutely the right idea and it was the
right decision um because again we're incredibly early in this
(29:09):
digital transformation e commerce transformation phase. And to your question,
like what what motivates me, it's you know, money is
a is a lagging indicator of wealth that you can
create for the world, and I don't. Wealth isn't defined
as money. Wealth is making people, making things people want,
(29:31):
and so that's one too. I also don't like, I
don't operate with the mindset of in order for me
to win, I gotta make sure somebody else loses, because
that assumes that wealth is a finite pie. That's not
true either. Wealth in fact, is an infinite um game.
If you create wealth, it's incremental to everything that already
(29:52):
exists um. And so I admire dominoes, I admire some
of these chains. I think they're doing incredibly well, and
I take some inspiration from what they're doing. But I
want to make that accessible and democratize that. As much
as I don't like that word UM to everybody else.
So for me, what I'm really passionate about is how
do we keep the debate of what is your favorite pizza? Going?
(30:16):
Because that debate will be gone if local family owned
businesses go out of business, of course, and the only
way for these family owned businesses to have a shot
is for there to be an operating system, ultimately a
platform that will allow them to focus on what they
do really well but solve all the other problems. So
(30:39):
having said all of that, the way I think about
the opportunity looking forward is instead of somebody going and
wanting to open up a franchise, I want someone to
open up their own local brand, their own authentic brand,
with their own recipe, their own story, their own history,
UM and focus on what they do best. But everything
else is sort of saw for by slice, which is
(31:02):
the real estate side we should talk after um. The
financial side, so access to capital, the entire technology platform, brand,
creative marketing, all those things. Do you give small business loans? Now, company, Yeah,
we're we're actually launching two locations this month with great
operators who have had one location for a long time,
(31:24):
have always had a dream to open up their second location,
but they don't have access to capital or had a
lot of anxiety about where and how to do it.
One of them will be in Greenwich, Connecticut, and another
one is in a small town in Massachusetts. And are
you taking ownership stakes? And those we are not now
they're just exclusive customers to Slice. Interesting. So what's your
(31:45):
what's your daylight now? I mean, are you hiring and
managing this entire time? Is that like your Monday through Friday? Yeah?
You know, for a while it became really reactive, and
I'm not really it's not really a great feeling to
to react to things at this scale. So I've actually
put some structure to my week, and so I've created
(32:08):
themes for every day. Um, and so you know, Mondays
are my days with my direct management team, so with
our chief business officer, chief technology officer, you know, and
so on and so forth. And and also we have
our exact team meeting. So I know what Monday is about. Um,
Tuesday's sort of a focus on products. Wednesday we've got
(32:28):
no meeting days like we don't we just don't meet.
It's it's a data to do. Get it done. Can
I say that? I don't know if I can um,
and then you know, so every day has the theme.
But um, you know what's been pretty awesome is meeting
a lot of different people and learning about different stories
being here today and you know, learning hopefully learn more
(32:49):
about you know, your journey as well. But um, and
I think that's most of most of how I spend
my time. And then on the weekends, I literally live
inside pizzerias. I just go drive around and I'll sit
at a pizzreia. They don't really know who I am,
but I'll order a pie. And when you order a
pie from a from an owner and you tell them
it's good, they start they start talking, so you can
(33:11):
ask him questions. They're like, well, what are your baby challenges? Yeah,
and so I try to stay really close to the
customer because the last thing I would want to do
is loose touch with what exactly is happening in the market.
Big Money Energy is hosted by me Ryan Sirhant. It's
produced by Mike Coscarelli and Joe Loresca, an executive produced
(33:34):
by Lindsay Hoffman. Find more podcasts like Big Money Energy
on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.