January 2, 2021 • 34 mins
FTP Host David Grasso talks to Brad Kent, the co-founder of Blaze Pizza. He describes his path from chef to food scientist to entrepreneur with a focus on the pizza industry. Follow The Profit also looks at the legacy of one internet billionaire who changed the way of e-commerce.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Follow the Profit is a production of Gang Ridge, three
sixty and I Heart Radio. So you know the phrase
nine to five, Well, for decades that has been, unfortunately
the metric of working full time, you know, just a
simple eight hour day. Well, one study that we looked
at showed that half of those under thirty five that
(00:20):
have a full time job get this, also have a
side gig. And I think naturally that's because people are
aware of the ever changing economic landscape and they want
to plan for contingencies, and of course they need the
extra money. We hear it, Follow the Profit will spotlight
the passing of a very influential Internet billionaire and all
(00:41):
the events that surrounded his passing. And we'll also talk
to the co founder of a popular food chain. It's
gonna give us the realities of opening and managing a
successful restaurant. On that note, I'm David Grasso, and this
is of course Follow the Profit. So if you're expecting
(01:05):
a motivational, get rich quick show, then go find another podcast.
There's plenty of those. We hear of Follow the Profit
always deconstruct what's going on in the economy, politics, and
finance in a way that you can understand. So that
you can use your money to help you yourself follow
the profit. There are a number of things that bring
(01:25):
a smile to people's faces, puppies, winning lottery, tickets, and naturally, pizza.
More than eighty percent of people eat pizza at least
once a month, and I imagine that's global because pizzas everywhere,
but here in the United States. The pizza industry makes
forty billion dollars annually. So how do you stand out
(01:47):
in a sea of pizza makers? Well, Blaze Pizza made
its name by creating artisanal personal pizzas with domemade in
house and talked with all natural ingredients and it's all
done fat and fresh. And one of the people who
developed that method is Brad Kent. He's the co founder
of Blaze Pizza and not only easy a chef that
(02:08):
runs his own restaurant, he's also a food scientist. So
we have here Brad today. How are you doing, Brad?
I'm doing as well as I can these days. So
let's rewind back in time, Brad Pizza, are you a cook?
Your food scientists? Evidently, like, where on Earth did you
have the moment where you said, I want to get
(02:29):
into the most what I consider the most challenging industry
out there, the most challenging industry being the pizza industry
or the restaurant industry. I mean, I think you picked
the hardest of the hardest, So the restaurant industry is terrible.
And then pizza on top of that, Oh my god. Well,
I think there was such a wide open gap in
the pizza industry, and the pizza industry had already proven
(02:51):
itself to be a very lucrative piece of the pie,
so to speak, that it made a ton of sense
to do something like Blaze, which was this assembly line,
very fresh, high quality ingredients at that affordable price point.
There wasn't anything in that space about ten years ago.
But why did you start cooking? Like what is the
original like push into like develop a career in this space. Well,
(03:16):
I went to college to study business, and I had
no idea that you could do a career in food.
That wasn't even an option. I was supposed to be
what my parents called a professional, so that was either
a business person, a lawyer, or a doctor. Those are
my three choices. And a business person I really didn't
know what that meant. So I studied business and I
was supposed to start a business out of college, and
(03:38):
I started it while in college. I started a catering
business just because I had such a great passion for food.
In fact, in my dorm, where we weren't allowed to
have any sort of cooking devices, I snuck a toaster
oven into my room, kept it under the bed, and
I would bake things in there and mix them and
clean the dishes in the in the shared restroom. I've
been cooking a long time. It is a true passion
(03:59):
of mine, and I'm just fortunate that I get to
do what I love on a daily basis. Yeah, Brad,
that's really funny. I've always joked that my parents, you know,
being from an immigrant family, always handed me a form
when I was a kid, what would you like to
be doctor, lawyer or entrepreneur? So I guess you chose
the latter. But first you got a bachelor's in food signs.
What's food science? Yeah, so I didn't know there was
(04:23):
such a thing as a food scientist. When I got
into food, I just knew that that I really wanted
to have a retail line of products on the shelves
at the grocery store. And I didn't know how to
go about that. I thought, if I started a catering
business in Los Angeles, which is where I was, I
would meet some movie stars cater for them, they would
give me money and and I would use their leverage
(04:44):
with the notoriety to develop my own brand. That happened,
but my own brand was a catering business in Los Angeles,
not a retail line of foods. So the secuitous route
that I took. I ended up going to culinary school
out of business school stead Culinary Arts, and actually ironically
got recruited a CIA for my culinary degree, working as
(05:07):
a food scientist for a company that made products for
the sports nutrition industry. From there, the owner of that
company found this interesting product, which was a performance bar
that was developed by the Department of Defense called the
Hua Bar that was proven to improve performance on humans,
and that was something we weren't able to test on
(05:28):
humans because we weren't the military. And he said, you
should go get a job there, and so I went
to try to get a job there, and I said,
you can't get a job here without a degree in
food science. So I went back to school, got my
de grand food science, and I created a position for
myself at Department Defense as a food scientist, and they
created a position for me, and that's how I got
into that field. And a food scientist with the Department
(05:51):
of Defense works on developing products that meet all of
the stringent demands of the military, which will be shelf life, safety,
and frisian over the life of that product, and it
also has to taste good and that was something that
was new to the food science industry. In the time
that I started in this industry, which was early two thousand,
(06:11):
processed foods didn't taste very good and that was because
food scientists are like lawyers, I guess, and then that
they put a lot of stuff in there just to
make sure that they're protected and it doesn't always taste good,
so they put preservatives in there. They would process foods
heavily so you lose color and texture and flavor. And
the niche I created and where I worked specifically on
(06:32):
in the military was creating foods that had better taste,
better texture, and that full shelf life to create a
safe product that hopefully soldiers would would find delicious to
three years after it was manufactured. So, Brad, but you
said you went to c I a which I imagine
is Culinary Institute of America for our listeners, right, because
I'm hearing c I A and then Department of Defense.
(06:52):
I don't want to muddy the waters here. So that
was that was a culinary school, correct? Yeah? That Yeah,
I went to the Culinary Institute of America and New York,
not not the other CIA. And and yes, even though
I did have secret clearance when I worked for the
d O D, I never worked for the CIA. Okay, great,
because we don't want to kick off this podcast by
saying the founder of Blaze Pizza was in the CIA.
(07:15):
So what you got this degree and you got this
experience with the Department of Defense. I mean, that's a
very unusual career path, and you kind of reverse engineered it.
You understood that you needed a degree in food science,
and then you went back to the Department of Defense.
What did you learn during your time there that helped
you be a more effective businessman later? That is actually
why I'm in pizza is from working at d O
(07:36):
D I. I learned that I was working with the
brightest of the bright that were food scientists, and their
specializations were so focused that I learned there that I
could never be a master of food. I could only
master one thing, and really I wanted to be a
food scientist to understand all foods, and I decided to
(07:58):
just focus on one thing from learning from these scientists,
So my focus became pizza, and that's where I began
developing the business plans for what turned out to be Blaze.
Actually was when I'm working at d D. So before
we get into the entrepreneurship part of this, like what
is it the actual science of your pizza? And I
hear that you are the pizza whisperer, So what sort
(08:19):
of strategic decisions did you make from a scientific standpoint
that sets your pizza apart? After working for the Department Defense,
I got a job as a food scientist and in
marketing for a food manufacturer that made natural products that
went into Trader Joe's and a number of chain restaurants.
And one of those chain restaurants was California Pizza Kitchen.
(08:40):
And the way that they worked was I thought backward,
the chef would give the recipe to us, we would
have to make it manufacturable, and that wasn't always easy
to get the exact same results of a product. So
what I thought would be a unique approach to pizza
would be to develop a product that could scale and
(09:01):
be manufacturable from the onset. That is what made Blaze
able to grow so fast is that from day one
we had a scalable product, which is not how people
start the restaurant world, especially when they are expanding into
a global brand. You tried first frozen pizza, right, and
that didn't exactly pan out because frozen pizza, I guess,
(09:22):
funny enough, isn't very profitable, is it? Bred Um? No.
And one of the products that I worked on when
I was working at as a food scientist for the
natural foods manufacturer was was products that were ended up
into frozen foods. And the cost needs to be so
low on products that the quality can't be high enough
to meet at least the demands I had for what
(09:43):
I wanted to represent who I am. And you'd have
to sell a pizza for probably twenty dollars at retail,
which people just aren't willing to spend to have something
of superior high qualities. Then Blaze Pizza is born. So
what is the creation myth of Blaze Pizza? Where was
the first one? How did you turn it into a
national chain and why is your pizza good? So I've
(10:05):
got like the two distinct backwards. One is in food science,
one is in culinary arts. When I started that those
two didn't converge. Really, it was either food science or
culinary arts. And when I developed recipes now, and when
I developed recipes, I didn't even early on in my
career as a food scientist. I was a chef first,
so I had to make them taste good in order
to pass the muster. I created products for Blaze that
(10:28):
tasted good, we're scalable, and also I used the business
degree to make sure that they were affordable from day
one as well. So that combination is how you win
in the restaurant world. It has to be delicious, affordable, repeatable,
and scalable. We're gonna take a quick break here, be
(10:51):
right back. What have you learned and what have been
the significant challenges of being an entrepreneur in pizza or
an entrepreneur in general, however you'd like to take it, Brad.
When I was in high school, I was fifteen years old.
My dad said, okay, you're fifteen. Now, you're gonna be
driving soon. You need to get a job, and I said,
(11:13):
but I don't want to get a job. This is
much more fun not working and just sponging off of you.
And so he said, no, you have to have a job,
and you have to have one by the end of
this week. And so I said, well, I'm just going
to start a business then, and he said, what what
are you gonna do. You don't have any skills. And
I said, but I love cars. I'm gonna start a
car cleaning business. And he's like, okay, well you have
until the end of the week. If you don't have
(11:33):
a job by Saturday Monday, we're going to go get
a job. Together. So I created flyers. This was in
the eighties. I photo copied them. I drew a picture
of a car on it, and I created a price.
I said, thirty five dollars I will detail your cars.
Was back in the eighties. And I handed them out
to all my neighbors and I had business that weekend.
And from there I did a good job and they
referred me to people, and by the time I graduated
(11:53):
high school, I had over three customers and very regular business,
and I was able to do whatever I wanted in
high school. Brad, do you feel like it was your
parents that instilled that entrepreneurial spirit in you, No, it's not.
It was me. I think my parents have the entrepreneurial spirit,
but they were afraid because they grew up from Jewish
(12:14):
immigrant parents. And I believe that what was instilled in
them was be a professional, just like they told me,
go get your degree in college, go do your thing
and be a doctor or a lawyer or a business person.
And we don't know what business person means, but never
was it create your own business. In fact, when I
started my catering business in college, my grandma, who was
my dad's mother, said to me, are you sure you
(12:36):
want to do catering? There's so many people in food
out there. Why don't you choose something else? Like, Grandma, like,
I love this? What do you want me to do
something I don't love? So one of the things I
follow the profit that we love to talk about is
coming out of the closet to your parents. And I'm
not talking about sexuality here. I'm talking about that you
want to do something that you know is kind of
(12:58):
against the ethos of your family, right, like being a
chef is very blue collar and telling your immigrant family
that how did you do it were They just shocked. Yeah,
so to my grandma lived in l A. I lived
in l A. She must have called my dad and
then my dad called me, which in my lifetime, I
think he's called me maybe twenty times. You know, we're
very close, but he's not the type to to call
(13:20):
or visit. And he said, I hear you're starting a
catering business, and I said yeah. And he's like, is
this a vocation or an advocation? And I said, well,
it's both. He's like, he gave me another time period.
He's like, you need to be successful at this by
such and such, or I'm cutting you off because they
prolped me pay my mortgage. And I had a job
(13:41):
just catering odd jobs and that was covering my bills.
And he said, well, if you don't have a job
by this period time, or if the business isn't successful
by then you need to go work for somebody else.
So I said fine, So I became a consultant. I
consulted to restaurants, which is crazy because I never had
a culinary degree, I had no training. I've never worked
in a restaurant. But that I was catering parties for
(14:01):
the Who's Who in Los Angeles at the time, which
was really odd. I did like Creative Artist Agency was
one of my first clients, and I did their Christmas
party out of my condo. You know, it's like crazy stuff.
So how does it feel now that you walk around
like I'm in places as dissimilar as Pasadena, California and Orlando, Florida,
and you see your brand everywhere? What does that immigrant
(14:23):
family think now? So Blaze has we have three about
three locations were in uh six countries, you know, including
a lot in the Middle East. And my dad finally
again he reached out to me another one of those
calls last year. This is after we like had all
this success and he said, I think you're gonna be okay.
(14:43):
So I finally got his approval. But personally, I don't
feel successful in the food space yet. There's like this
number I wanna We've been hering at three locations. That's
always been my threshold to break. Once we break three
fifty restaurants, then I will be happy. So um, I
always set goals and I look at the finish line
instead of the path there. As you can tell, like educationally,
(15:07):
it's never been a direct path and the same thing
in business. I look at the goal only Brad here
making me feel like a slacker. I think I'm not
doing enough. Now, what countries are you in abroad? So yeah,
you a e Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Bahrain.
So you pick something that your family was against, you,
(15:27):
pick something that all the odds were against you. You
picked pizza. Pizza is really hard. So how did you
sustain yourself in times when you almost failed? Was there
a moment that you really thought I'm not going to
make it? No, it's again, it's that looking at the
goal lines. The goal line is like, this has to
work because I don't have a backup plan. I learned
that high quality ingredients and good technique will always create
(15:51):
good food. If you can do that affordably and you
give them good service, people will come and they will
come back. You don't have to mark it necessarily to them.
They will find you. So, speaking of those goals, I'd
like to know more. How many locations would you like
to see? Would you like to see this as a
franchiseable model, Like, what are your expansion plans for well
Blaze is franchise that's how we grew so fast. That's
(16:13):
a beautiful model because imagine how much money it would
take to build three fifty locations, you know, at a
roughly seven hundred thousand, six hundred thousand apiece, you need
millions of tall it's just to build restaurants. But when
you have that franchise model, you can leverage on the
infrastructures of these individual businesses that already have business. You know,
(16:34):
some of our franchisees have two hundred locations of other
businesses that they operate themselves. So that was the model.
A lot of modern food outlets, though I have moved
away from the franchise e model as we see you know, Starbucks,
you can't franchise it, Chick fil A sort of, it's
kind of a hybrid model. What made you harken back
(16:55):
to the roots of the franchiseable model. There's a couple
of challenges with with franchise zing, and and that is
that with the franchise fees and with the cost of
doing business, can the franchise e make money? And so
the beautiful thing about pizza agains we're selling you know,
the main ingredient is flour and water and air, and
then you top it with expensive things like cheese and
meat toppings, and but meat toppings on a pizza, there's
(17:18):
not a lot. If you actually to weigh the pizza
toppings themselves, you're not You're only going to get a
few ounces. And that's how you can afford to do pizza. Yeah,
it's really interesting that you've brought back that model. I've
actually written about this phenomenon where there's fewer and fewer
companies that are franchising, So hats off to you for
bringing back that very important way for entrepreneurs to have
(17:39):
a highway for entrepreneurship. And those entrepreneurs can be the
people that work in the restaurant. Too. Many people that
are franchisees started by working from franchise systems themselves and
earned enough money to buy a location, and then that
became two or four, and then they have dozens, and
they become multi multimillionaires, some without high school even our
(18:00):
college education. As you know, McDonald's has created more black
and brown millionaires in any other company in this country,
and my aunt is actually one of them. So I
understand the importance of franchises in America. And I've been
concerned that we've been moving away from that. You seem
to have this like relentless drive, right, So can we
get into you know, Brad's brain for a second and
(18:22):
understand why you're never discouraged. I think birth order has
something to do with it. I'm the youngest, and I
got my way a lot, and I think that getting
my way is just that's in me. So if I
don't get it, I will continue to kick and scream.
And you know that doesn't work in business, but you
know it's clawing and working extra hours. So I will
continue to push hard until I get, you know, where
(18:44):
I want to go. That's all that there is too
and it's just hard work, work ethic. Let's talk about
uber eats and grubhub and all that. How have views
as an entrepreneur working with those platforms, but we all
read the articles that businesses are kind of getting squeezed
by those plats forms. I ordered food last night for
my family and on one of the platforms from a restaurant.
(19:05):
On the platform, it increased my check by sixty dollars
because of service fees, delivery fees, and markup because the
restaurants just trying to sell the product for roughly the
same profit margin as if they were to sell it
from the restaurant. But I decided away from that, save
sixty dollars in order directly from restaurant, picked it at myself.
We haven't seen the last of the controversy around those
(19:27):
platforms because if you actually dig into the fees of
how much it costs to get that food to your house,
it's a financial weapon of mass destruction. And not only that,
it's terrible for restaurants, right, and are they making money
at those third parties? I don't understand how that works.
How do you have a multibillion dollar company with no profit?
So a lot of people have their dream of owning
their own restaurant? Right, what works? What doesn't work? Can
(19:51):
you do it on a small budget? Like? Is this
the right time? Yeah? Oh, it's definitely the right time
right now. I think you're going to be able to
negotiate some very good leases and especially get some long
term leases. You'll you'll benefit. There's so many restaurants that
have failed recently that you could get in to a
turnkey operation where you're not even going to spend any
money on build out. So this would be the time
to get into the restaurant business. Okay, well I want
(20:12):
to end in a cheesy way, no pun intended here.
What is your favorite pizza that you offer and why
should we eat it? My favorite pizza that is offered anywhere,
including Blaze is we call it the Red Vine. But
it's basically a Margarite of pizza. And I was just
talking to someone about Margharite of pizza. Marguarite of pizza
(20:34):
represents all the seasons. If you think about what the
key ingredients are on there. There's wheat in many most
cases it'll be winter wheat. You have tomatoes, those are
harvested in summer. You have extra virgin olive oil, which
is harvested in the fall. So you are tasting the
entire year in one bite. And now we go to
(20:54):
the what you're tasting. You've got complete sensory melt down,
as it's called in the in the in the send
three science industry, where you've got crunchy from the crust,
You've got chewy, you've got hot, you've got tepid cold, chewy, stringy,
and then you've got savory, you mommy, acidic, sweet, every
taste you can imagine, including like just the browning on
(21:16):
on the crust, so you've got everything and and it's healthy.
Margaret A pizza is healthy, Are Margaret a pizza? Are
Red vine Pizza at Blaze is about six d collies
for the entire pizza, So it's not a fattening food
as pizza has been kind of deemed, and it is not.
Pizza is as healthy as you wanted to be, and
(21:37):
it's as fresh as you wanted to be, and it's
as seasonal as you wanted to be. It's it's the
perfect food. Well that note, Brad, thank you so much
for taking the time to talk to us. I'm now
inspired to go back to Blaze Pizza right down the
road here in Orlando, Florida at Disney Springs. If you
haven't been there, it is a massive, massive place. So
congrats on all your success Bred. Thank you, David. It's
(21:58):
been so much fun talking to you. We're gonna take
a quick break here, be right back. If you consider
that there are over seven and a half billion people
on the planet, I can probably tell you with a
lot of certainty that the majority of them want to
be wealthy, like billionaire level wealthy. Well, among those seven
(22:22):
and a half billion people populating the Earth. There are
about only two thousand billionaires on the planet, so they're
actually a pretty rare breed. And one of these billionaires
who unfortunately passed was named Tony Shay and his life
was one just defined by extraordinary achievement and his death
(22:43):
was very puzzling to a lot of his friends, families, fans,
and business contexts. And here and follow the profit, we
want to take a harder look at what made Tony
rise to this extraordinary level of success and as well
as really taking a fair look at what demons he
had to battle with all along the way. So Tony
(23:04):
was born over in Marin County. That's where the Golden
Gate bridges right across the Bay from San Francisco in California.
He was born into Taiwanese parents in nine and at
a very young age he demonstrated that he had an
entrepreneurial talent. In college, he had the idea to buy
whole pizzas and sell slices to his dorm roommates and
(23:26):
of course he made a profit. He started following the
profits super early and later he created his first company
called link Exchange, which that focused on Internet advertising and
he had a big pay day when he sold that
to Microsoft for a whopping two hundred and sixty five
million dollars. And get this, Tony was only twenty five
(23:47):
years old and a year later he was one of
those entrepreneurs that never really stopped. Tony took all that
money that he made from that last exit when he
sold to Microsoft, and he took two hundred and sixty
five million dollars and broke all the rules by selling
shoes online. Shoes. You know, you think you want to touch,
feel and try on shoes in person. Well, e commerce
(24:11):
was exploding at the time, and Tony created the online
shoe store Zappos, which Zappos comes from the word sappato
in Spanish, which of course means shoe. And he did
this all at the age of six. God, I wasn't
doing much at twenty six. And in two thousand nine,
Tony had another big pay day when he sold Zappos
(24:32):
to Amazon for more than a billion dollars and he
remained the CEO of Zappos. He made a billion dollars
at the age of thirty six. I'm thirty six right now,
so I guess I could be a billionaire. But I'm not.
At this one point, you would think that Tony would
be like, Okay, I've made it. I've made enough money.
(24:52):
He can never spend all this money in his lifetime,
even if he tried. Tony didn't do that. Zappos had
a headquarters in the Las Vegas and he invested in
revitalizing the old downtown and creating a sort of artistic
and technological hub. And if you've ever been to downtown
Vegas ten years ago versus now, you would really see
(25:12):
the difference. And Tony lived in a little airstream and
had a pet Lama that was loose. I mean, he
was an eccentric guy, but he really cared about the
local community and really spent the last decade of his
life really investing in Las Vegas and its people. But
at the same time he started to engage in some
(25:33):
peculiar activities. One he became more distant from his friends
and family in San Francisco in Vegas and began hanging
around a new group in Park City, Utah. If you
don't know about Park City, it's not that far from
Salt Lake City and it's actually a ski town. And
he started buying up property there had like a little
posse following him around and was showering everyone with money.
(25:56):
He also started engaging in some risky behavior. He became
obsessed with how much his body could do without things
such as food, urinating an oxygen, and at the same
time he became fascinated with fire. In fact, he bought
a mansion in Park City, Utah, and when a real
estate agent paid a visit, he discovered that Tony had
(26:17):
placed more than a thousand candles throughout the house. And
despite all these oddities, the pat lama the candles that
starving himself, Tony still had some really good values. He
wanted to make his friends lives better, and he was
a painful introvert, but he's still got a lot of
satisfaction from making other people happy. In August, Tony stepped
(26:41):
down as the CEO of Zappos, which is quite a
chakra at the time. I remember reading the article and
he had a party to celebrate his leaving the company
at his mansion, the one with the candles in Park City, Utah,
and he invited the singer Jewel who I love, and
Jewels showed up. She performed for a small crowd and
the next day she left suddenly. Now Jewel had to
(27:03):
communicate a message, and funny enough, Tony was going through
a digital cleanse, which that means, you know, he didn't
have a smartphone in his hand and he really wasn't
checking his email. So Jewel FedEx the letter to Tony,
and according to Forbes, had said, and I quote, I'm
going to be blunt. I need to tell you that
I don't think you are well and in your right mind.
(27:24):
I think you're taking way too many drugs that cause
you to disassociate. The people you are surrounding yourself with
are either ignorant or willing to be complicit in killing yourself. Woof,
And Jewel you called it because just a few months later,
in November, in the middle of the Knife, firefighters responded
(27:45):
to a house fire at a three story beach front
home in New London, Connecticut. He was at his girlfriend's house,
and the radio traffic among the responders was someone stuck inside,
and later the talk was there's someone trapped inside, and
after that it was just i've do as someone was
barricaded inside. So we really didn't know what happened that night,
(28:06):
but Tony died and he was only forty six years old.
Tony left a mess because Tony didn't even have a will.
And that's really something that's important, especially when you're talking
to your parents or anyone in your life. You've got
a plan for the worst. I know it's maccab and
we don't want to talk about it, but sometimes people
die and you need to leave a plan. And that's
(28:27):
why a state planning is really really important. Tony's death
was not only a shock, but he had no will
or a state plan. And you know, this is surprisingly common.
In fact, one study we looked at showed that for
people making more than seventy five thou dollars, only fifty
five of them have a will. So Tony, who was
(28:50):
worth a billion dollars, didn't have one. Neither did the
singer A Prince and a Wretha Franklin had three handwritten wills,
and of course that problems with the estate. So how
do you start making an estate plan? Many people don't
because they don't want to face the inevitable. Yeah, it's
really sad to think about your own demise, right, but
financial planners all agree you have to create a proper will.
(29:13):
It's not for you, it's to make sure you don't
leave a mess when it comes to distributing your assets
to your loved ones, and not having one creates chaos
and breaks up families. You know you don't want to
fracture your whole family because you died. They're already dealing
with your loss. So make sure you have a plan.
What does a plan look like? Well, number one, you
(29:35):
have to have a will, and in that will, it
needs to be detailed. You need to be specific as
to who gets what, and that minimizes stress and the
eventual fights that will break out. Two, you need to
think about your health care. At some point. Unfortunately, and
we all don't want to think about this, you may
be in a position at some point where you won't
(29:56):
be able to make decisions about your own medical care.
So be sure that the people who are helping you,
your loved ones, your partners, etcetera. Have this specific details
as well as the power of attorney to go ahead
and make those medical decisions for you. The next one
is really important. Use a password manager and give someone
(30:17):
you trust access to that password manager because you're gonna
need someone that gets into all of your accounts. Imagine
how many accounts you have just for your bank, your car,
your insurance, etcetera. In that same vein think about papers.
We've live in a digital economy, right, but we still
have deeds, life insurance docs, specific funeral arrangements. You need
(30:39):
both passwords and papers, and those need to be ready
in case you unfortunately die. So not something we want
to think about, but really really really important. So looking
back at Tony SHA's life, really one aspect of his
life caught my attention. He founded the lune shoe company Zappos,
(31:01):
which he sold to Amazon for more than a billion dollars.
But something we could learn from. Tony came up with
a very interesting philosophy when it came to running his business.
He really wanted to value experiences over having things, and
he really practiced what he preached if you look at
his life and where he lived. Here's how. Whenever a
(31:22):
new employee started at Zappos, about a week after they started,
Tony would take him aside and he would make them
an offer. He called it the offer. He would tell
the employee that if they liked working at Zappos, they
could of course stay, but if they didn't like it,
they could leave, and Tony would give them a thousand
dollars to do. So Tony's rationale was simple. If the
(31:44):
employee quit and took the thousand bucks, they clearly did
not have the same passion and vision then those who
chose to stay. But why on earth would Tony want
people to work there who didn't want to in the
first place. Actually, you know what, the offer makes a
lot of sense. Training employees is enormously expensive. In fact,
(32:06):
some of the businesses that suffer the most are the
ones that have the highest turnover. We have a saying
that would as cheap is ultimately expensive. We have to
really think about how much it costs to hire and
fire people. And Tony saw pass all the bs and said,
you know what, if I don't have the right person,
they're gonna take this quick thousand dollars. And really it
(32:29):
was a great way to weed out people. We want
people who share our vision, who are passionate about what
they're doing. If they don't share that sentiment, then they
need to go because it's in a complete waste of
time for the company as well as the employee. So
I think Tony's philosophy was rock solid, and in fact,
I don't even know how you do that through human
(32:50):
resources perspective or what a business manager would think about it.
But Tony was pretty unconventional and he could really see
that employee's pension, employee satisfaction, and more importantly, employee productivity
depended on having skin in the game and being committed
to the vision of the founder. So thanks to all
(33:18):
of you for joining me as we Follow the Profit,
and a big thanks to Brad Kent, the co founder
of Blaze Pizza, for his insights on restaurants and the
food industry. And a shout out to our team of
producers Emiliano Lemon over in sunny Los Angeles and Scott
Handler over in cloudy New York, and of course especially
to our executive producers new King Rich and Debbie Myers.
(33:40):
I'm your host, David Grasso. If you're enjoying the show,
please rate us five stars and give us a review
so that others can learn what the show is all about.
Follow the Profit is a production of ging Rich three
sixty and I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you get your podcast
Follow the Profit is a production of Gang Ridge, three
sixty and I Heart Radio. So you know the phrase
nine to five, Well, for decades that has been, unfortunately
the metric of working full time, you know, just a
simple eight hour day. Well, one study that we looked
at showed that half of those under thirty five that
(00:20):
have a full time job get this, also have a
side gig. And I think naturally that's because people are
aware of the ever changing economic landscape and they want
to plan for contingencies, and of course they need the
extra money. We hear it, Follow the Profit will spotlight
the passing of a very influential Internet billionaire and all
(00:41):
the events that surrounded his passing. And we'll also talk
to the co founder of a popular food chain. It's
gonna give us the realities of opening and managing a
successful restaurant. On that note, I'm David Grasso, and this
is of course Follow the Profit. So if you're expecting
(01:05):
a motivational, get rich quick show, then go find another podcast.
There's plenty of those. We hear of Follow the Profit
always deconstruct what's going on in the economy, politics, and
finance in a way that you can understand. So that
you can use your money to help you yourself follow
the profit. There are a number of things that bring
(01:25):
a smile to people's faces, puppies, winning lottery, tickets, and naturally, pizza.
More than eighty percent of people eat pizza at least
once a month, and I imagine that's global because pizzas everywhere,
but here in the United States. The pizza industry makes
forty billion dollars annually. So how do you stand out
(01:47):
in a sea of pizza makers? Well, Blaze Pizza made
its name by creating artisanal personal pizzas with domemade in
house and talked with all natural ingredients and it's all
done fat and fresh. And one of the people who
developed that method is Brad Kent. He's the co founder
of Blaze Pizza and not only easy a chef that
(02:08):
runs his own restaurant, he's also a food scientist. So
we have here Brad today. How are you doing, Brad?
I'm doing as well as I can these days. So
let's rewind back in time, Brad Pizza, are you a cook?
Your food scientists? Evidently, like, where on Earth did you
have the moment where you said, I want to get
(02:29):
into the most what I consider the most challenging industry
out there, the most challenging industry being the pizza industry
or the restaurant industry. I mean, I think you picked
the hardest of the hardest, So the restaurant industry is terrible.
And then pizza on top of that, Oh my god. Well,
I think there was such a wide open gap in
the pizza industry, and the pizza industry had already proven
(02:51):
itself to be a very lucrative piece of the pie,
so to speak, that it made a ton of sense
to do something like Blaze, which was this assembly line,
very fresh, high quality ingredients at that affordable price point.
There wasn't anything in that space about ten years ago.
But why did you start cooking? Like what is the
original like push into like develop a career in this space. Well,
(03:16):
I went to college to study business, and I had
no idea that you could do a career in food.
That wasn't even an option. I was supposed to be
what my parents called a professional, so that was either
a business person, a lawyer, or a doctor. Those are
my three choices. And a business person I really didn't
know what that meant. So I studied business and I
was supposed to start a business out of college, and
(03:38):
I started it while in college. I started a catering
business just because I had such a great passion for food.
In fact, in my dorm, where we weren't allowed to
have any sort of cooking devices, I snuck a toaster
oven into my room, kept it under the bed, and
I would bake things in there and mix them and
clean the dishes in the in the shared restroom. I've
been cooking a long time. It is a true passion
(03:59):
of mine, and I'm just fortunate that I get to
do what I love on a daily basis. Yeah, Brad,
that's really funny. I've always joked that my parents, you know,
being from an immigrant family, always handed me a form
when I was a kid, what would you like to
be doctor, lawyer or entrepreneur? So I guess you chose
the latter. But first you got a bachelor's in food signs.
What's food science? Yeah, so I didn't know there was
(04:23):
such a thing as a food scientist. When I got
into food, I just knew that that I really wanted
to have a retail line of products on the shelves
at the grocery store. And I didn't know how to
go about that. I thought, if I started a catering
business in Los Angeles, which is where I was, I
would meet some movie stars cater for them, they would
give me money and and I would use their leverage
(04:44):
with the notoriety to develop my own brand. That happened,
but my own brand was a catering business in Los Angeles,
not a retail line of foods. So the secuitous route
that I took. I ended up going to culinary school
out of business school stead Culinary Arts, and actually ironically
got recruited a CIA for my culinary degree, working as
(05:07):
a food scientist for a company that made products for
the sports nutrition industry. From there, the owner of that
company found this interesting product, which was a performance bar
that was developed by the Department of Defense called the
Hua Bar that was proven to improve performance on humans,
and that was something we weren't able to test on
(05:28):
humans because we weren't the military. And he said, you
should go get a job there, and so I went
to try to get a job there, and I said,
you can't get a job here without a degree in
food science. So I went back to school, got my
de grand food science, and I created a position for
myself at Department Defense as a food scientist, and they
created a position for me, and that's how I got
into that field. And a food scientist with the Department
(05:51):
of Defense works on developing products that meet all of
the stringent demands of the military, which will be shelf life, safety,
and frisian over the life of that product, and it
also has to taste good and that was something that
was new to the food science industry. In the time
that I started in this industry, which was early two thousand,
(06:11):
processed foods didn't taste very good and that was because
food scientists are like lawyers, I guess, and then that
they put a lot of stuff in there just to
make sure that they're protected and it doesn't always taste good,
so they put preservatives in there. They would process foods
heavily so you lose color and texture and flavor. And
the niche I created and where I worked specifically on
(06:32):
in the military was creating foods that had better taste,
better texture, and that full shelf life to create a
safe product that hopefully soldiers would would find delicious to
three years after it was manufactured. So, Brad, but you
said you went to c I a which I imagine
is Culinary Institute of America for our listeners, right, because
I'm hearing c I A and then Department of Defense.
(06:52):
I don't want to muddy the waters here. So that
was that was a culinary school, correct? Yeah? That Yeah,
I went to the Culinary Institute of America and New York,
not not the other CIA. And and yes, even though
I did have secret clearance when I worked for the
d O D, I never worked for the CIA. Okay, great,
because we don't want to kick off this podcast by
saying the founder of Blaze Pizza was in the CIA.
(07:15):
So what you got this degree and you got this
experience with the Department of Defense. I mean, that's a
very unusual career path, and you kind of reverse engineered it.
You understood that you needed a degree in food science,
and then you went back to the Department of Defense.
What did you learn during your time there that helped
you be a more effective businessman later? That is actually
why I'm in pizza is from working at d O
(07:36):
D I. I learned that I was working with the
brightest of the bright that were food scientists, and their
specializations were so focused that I learned there that I
could never be a master of food. I could only
master one thing, and really I wanted to be a
food scientist to understand all foods, and I decided to
(07:58):
just focus on one thing from learning from these scientists,
So my focus became pizza, and that's where I began
developing the business plans for what turned out to be Blaze.
Actually was when I'm working at d D. So before
we get into the entrepreneurship part of this, like what
is it the actual science of your pizza? And I
hear that you are the pizza whisperer, So what sort
(08:19):
of strategic decisions did you make from a scientific standpoint
that sets your pizza apart? After working for the Department Defense,
I got a job as a food scientist and in
marketing for a food manufacturer that made natural products that
went into Trader Joe's and a number of chain restaurants.
And one of those chain restaurants was California Pizza Kitchen.
(08:40):
And the way that they worked was I thought backward,
the chef would give the recipe to us, we would
have to make it manufacturable, and that wasn't always easy
to get the exact same results of a product. So
what I thought would be a unique approach to pizza
would be to develop a product that could scale and
(09:01):
be manufacturable from the onset. That is what made Blaze
able to grow so fast is that from day one
we had a scalable product, which is not how people
start the restaurant world, especially when they are expanding into
a global brand. You tried first frozen pizza, right, and
that didn't exactly pan out because frozen pizza, I guess,
(09:22):
funny enough, isn't very profitable, is it? Bred Um? No.
And one of the products that I worked on when
I was working at as a food scientist for the
natural foods manufacturer was was products that were ended up
into frozen foods. And the cost needs to be so
low on products that the quality can't be high enough
to meet at least the demands I had for what
(09:43):
I wanted to represent who I am. And you'd have
to sell a pizza for probably twenty dollars at retail,
which people just aren't willing to spend to have something
of superior high qualities. Then Blaze Pizza is born. So
what is the creation myth of Blaze Pizza? Where was
the first one? How did you turn it into a
national chain and why is your pizza good? So I've
(10:05):
got like the two distinct backwards. One is in food science,
one is in culinary arts. When I started that those
two didn't converge. Really, it was either food science or
culinary arts. And when I developed recipes now, and when
I developed recipes, I didn't even early on in my
career as a food scientist. I was a chef first,
so I had to make them taste good in order
to pass the muster. I created products for Blaze that
(10:28):
tasted good, we're scalable, and also I used the business
degree to make sure that they were affordable from day
one as well. So that combination is how you win
in the restaurant world. It has to be delicious, affordable, repeatable,
and scalable. We're gonna take a quick break here, be
(10:51):
right back. What have you learned and what have been
the significant challenges of being an entrepreneur in pizza or
an entrepreneur in general, however you'd like to take it, Brad.
When I was in high school, I was fifteen years old.
My dad said, okay, you're fifteen. Now, you're gonna be
driving soon. You need to get a job, and I said,
(11:13):
but I don't want to get a job. This is
much more fun not working and just sponging off of you.
And so he said, no, you have to have a job,
and you have to have one by the end of
this week. And so I said, well, I'm just going
to start a business then, and he said, what what
are you gonna do. You don't have any skills. And
I said, but I love cars. I'm gonna start a
car cleaning business. And he's like, okay, well you have
until the end of the week. If you don't have
(11:33):
a job by Saturday Monday, we're going to go get
a job. Together. So I created flyers. This was in
the eighties. I photo copied them. I drew a picture
of a car on it, and I created a price.
I said, thirty five dollars I will detail your cars.
Was back in the eighties. And I handed them out
to all my neighbors and I had business that weekend.
And from there I did a good job and they
referred me to people, and by the time I graduated
(11:53):
high school, I had over three customers and very regular business,
and I was able to do whatever I wanted in
high school. Brad, do you feel like it was your
parents that instilled that entrepreneurial spirit in you, No, it's not.
It was me. I think my parents have the entrepreneurial spirit,
but they were afraid because they grew up from Jewish
(12:14):
immigrant parents. And I believe that what was instilled in
them was be a professional, just like they told me,
go get your degree in college, go do your thing
and be a doctor or a lawyer or a business person.
And we don't know what business person means, but never
was it create your own business. In fact, when I
started my catering business in college, my grandma, who was
my dad's mother, said to me, are you sure you
(12:36):
want to do catering? There's so many people in food
out there. Why don't you choose something else? Like, Grandma, like,
I love this? What do you want me to do
something I don't love? So one of the things I
follow the profit that we love to talk about is
coming out of the closet to your parents. And I'm
not talking about sexuality here. I'm talking about that you
want to do something that you know is kind of
(12:58):
against the ethos of your family, right, like being a
chef is very blue collar and telling your immigrant family
that how did you do it were They just shocked. Yeah,
so to my grandma lived in l A. I lived
in l A. She must have called my dad and
then my dad called me, which in my lifetime, I
think he's called me maybe twenty times. You know, we're
very close, but he's not the type to to call
(13:20):
or visit. And he said, I hear you're starting a
catering business, and I said yeah. And he's like, is
this a vocation or an advocation? And I said, well,
it's both. He's like, he gave me another time period.
He's like, you need to be successful at this by
such and such, or I'm cutting you off because they
prolped me pay my mortgage. And I had a job
(13:41):
just catering odd jobs and that was covering my bills.
And he said, well, if you don't have a job
by this period time, or if the business isn't successful
by then you need to go work for somebody else.
So I said fine, So I became a consultant. I
consulted to restaurants, which is crazy because I never had
a culinary degree, I had no training. I've never worked
in a restaurant. But that I was catering parties for
(14:01):
the Who's Who in Los Angeles at the time, which
was really odd. I did like Creative Artist Agency was
one of my first clients, and I did their Christmas
party out of my condo. You know, it's like crazy stuff.
So how does it feel now that you walk around
like I'm in places as dissimilar as Pasadena, California and Orlando, Florida,
and you see your brand everywhere? What does that immigrant
(14:23):
family think now? So Blaze has we have three about
three locations were in uh six countries, you know, including
a lot in the Middle East. And my dad finally
again he reached out to me another one of those
calls last year. This is after we like had all
this success and he said, I think you're gonna be okay.
(14:43):
So I finally got his approval. But personally, I don't
feel successful in the food space yet. There's like this
number I wanna We've been hering at three locations. That's
always been my threshold to break. Once we break three
fifty restaurants, then I will be happy. So um, I
always set goals and I look at the finish line
instead of the path there. As you can tell, like educationally,
(15:07):
it's never been a direct path and the same thing
in business. I look at the goal only Brad here
making me feel like a slacker. I think I'm not
doing enough. Now, what countries are you in abroad? So yeah,
you a e Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Bahrain.
So you pick something that your family was against, you,
(15:27):
pick something that all the odds were against you. You
picked pizza. Pizza is really hard. So how did you
sustain yourself in times when you almost failed? Was there
a moment that you really thought I'm not going to
make it? No, it's again, it's that looking at the
goal lines. The goal line is like, this has to
work because I don't have a backup plan. I learned
that high quality ingredients and good technique will always create
(15:51):
good food. If you can do that affordably and you
give them good service, people will come and they will
come back. You don't have to mark it necessarily to them.
They will find you. So, speaking of those goals, I'd
like to know more. How many locations would you like
to see? Would you like to see this as a
franchiseable model, Like, what are your expansion plans for well
Blaze is franchise that's how we grew so fast. That's
(16:13):
a beautiful model because imagine how much money it would
take to build three fifty locations, you know, at a
roughly seven hundred thousand, six hundred thousand apiece, you need
millions of tall it's just to build restaurants. But when
you have that franchise model, you can leverage on the
infrastructures of these individual businesses that already have business. You know,
(16:34):
some of our franchisees have two hundred locations of other
businesses that they operate themselves. So that was the model.
A lot of modern food outlets, though I have moved
away from the franchise e model as we see you know, Starbucks,
you can't franchise it, Chick fil A sort of, it's
kind of a hybrid model. What made you harken back
(16:55):
to the roots of the franchiseable model. There's a couple
of challenges with with franchise zing, and and that is
that with the franchise fees and with the cost of
doing business, can the franchise e make money? And so
the beautiful thing about pizza agains we're selling you know,
the main ingredient is flour and water and air, and
then you top it with expensive things like cheese and
meat toppings, and but meat toppings on a pizza, there's
(17:18):
not a lot. If you actually to weigh the pizza
toppings themselves, you're not You're only going to get a
few ounces. And that's how you can afford to do pizza. Yeah,
it's really interesting that you've brought back that model. I've
actually written about this phenomenon where there's fewer and fewer
companies that are franchising, So hats off to you for
bringing back that very important way for entrepreneurs to have
(17:39):
a highway for entrepreneurship. And those entrepreneurs can be the
people that work in the restaurant. Too. Many people that
are franchisees started by working from franchise systems themselves and
earned enough money to buy a location, and then that
became two or four, and then they have dozens, and
they become multi multimillionaires, some without high school even our
(18:00):
college education. As you know, McDonald's has created more black
and brown millionaires in any other company in this country,
and my aunt is actually one of them. So I
understand the importance of franchises in America. And I've been
concerned that we've been moving away from that. You seem
to have this like relentless drive, right, So can we
get into you know, Brad's brain for a second and
(18:22):
understand why you're never discouraged. I think birth order has
something to do with it. I'm the youngest, and I
got my way a lot, and I think that getting
my way is just that's in me. So if I
don't get it, I will continue to kick and scream.
And you know that doesn't work in business, but you
know it's clawing and working extra hours. So I will
continue to push hard until I get, you know, where
(18:44):
I want to go. That's all that there is too
and it's just hard work, work ethic. Let's talk about
uber eats and grubhub and all that. How have views
as an entrepreneur working with those platforms, but we all
read the articles that businesses are kind of getting squeezed
by those plats forms. I ordered food last night for
my family and on one of the platforms from a restaurant.
(19:05):
On the platform, it increased my check by sixty dollars
because of service fees, delivery fees, and markup because the
restaurants just trying to sell the product for roughly the
same profit margin as if they were to sell it
from the restaurant. But I decided away from that, save
sixty dollars in order directly from restaurant, picked it at myself.
We haven't seen the last of the controversy around those
(19:27):
platforms because if you actually dig into the fees of
how much it costs to get that food to your house,
it's a financial weapon of mass destruction. And not only that,
it's terrible for restaurants, right, and are they making money
at those third parties? I don't understand how that works.
How do you have a multibillion dollar company with no profit?
So a lot of people have their dream of owning
their own restaurant? Right, what works? What doesn't work? Can
(19:51):
you do it on a small budget? Like? Is this
the right time? Yeah? Oh, it's definitely the right time
right now. I think you're going to be able to
negotiate some very good leases and especially get some long
term leases. You'll you'll benefit. There's so many restaurants that
have failed recently that you could get in to a
turnkey operation where you're not even going to spend any
money on build out. So this would be the time
to get into the restaurant business. Okay, well I want
(20:12):
to end in a cheesy way, no pun intended here.
What is your favorite pizza that you offer and why
should we eat it? My favorite pizza that is offered anywhere,
including Blaze is we call it the Red Vine. But
it's basically a Margarite of pizza. And I was just
talking to someone about Margharite of pizza. Marguarite of pizza
(20:34):
represents all the seasons. If you think about what the
key ingredients are on there. There's wheat in many most
cases it'll be winter wheat. You have tomatoes, those are
harvested in summer. You have extra virgin olive oil, which
is harvested in the fall. So you are tasting the
entire year in one bite. And now we go to
(20:54):
the what you're tasting. You've got complete sensory melt down,
as it's called in the in the in the send
three science industry, where you've got crunchy from the crust,
You've got chewy, you've got hot, you've got tepid cold, chewy, stringy,
and then you've got savory, you mommy, acidic, sweet, every
taste you can imagine, including like just the browning on
(21:16):
on the crust, so you've got everything and and it's healthy.
Margaret A pizza is healthy, Are Margaret a pizza? Are
Red vine Pizza at Blaze is about six d collies
for the entire pizza, So it's not a fattening food
as pizza has been kind of deemed, and it is not.
Pizza is as healthy as you wanted to be, and
(21:37):
it's as fresh as you wanted to be, and it's
as seasonal as you wanted to be. It's it's the
perfect food. Well that note, Brad, thank you so much
for taking the time to talk to us. I'm now
inspired to go back to Blaze Pizza right down the
road here in Orlando, Florida at Disney Springs. If you
haven't been there, it is a massive, massive place. So
congrats on all your success Bred. Thank you, David. It's
(21:58):
been so much fun talking to you. We're gonna take
a quick break here, be right back. If you consider
that there are over seven and a half billion people
on the planet, I can probably tell you with a
lot of certainty that the majority of them want to
be wealthy, like billionaire level wealthy. Well, among those seven
(22:22):
and a half billion people populating the Earth. There are
about only two thousand billionaires on the planet, so they're
actually a pretty rare breed. And one of these billionaires
who unfortunately passed was named Tony Shay and his life
was one just defined by extraordinary achievement and his death
(22:43):
was very puzzling to a lot of his friends, families, fans,
and business contexts. And here and follow the profit, we
want to take a harder look at what made Tony
rise to this extraordinary level of success and as well
as really taking a fair look at what demons he
had to battle with all along the way. So Tony
(23:04):
was born over in Marin County. That's where the Golden
Gate bridges right across the Bay from San Francisco in California.
He was born into Taiwanese parents in nine and at
a very young age he demonstrated that he had an
entrepreneurial talent. In college, he had the idea to buy
whole pizzas and sell slices to his dorm roommates and
(23:26):
of course he made a profit. He started following the
profits super early and later he created his first company
called link Exchange, which that focused on Internet advertising and
he had a big pay day when he sold that
to Microsoft for a whopping two hundred and sixty five
million dollars. And get this, Tony was only twenty five
(23:47):
years old and a year later he was one of
those entrepreneurs that never really stopped. Tony took all that
money that he made from that last exit when he
sold to Microsoft, and he took two hundred and sixty
five million dollars and broke all the rules by selling
shoes online. Shoes. You know, you think you want to touch,
feel and try on shoes in person. Well, e commerce
(24:11):
was exploding at the time, and Tony created the online
shoe store Zappos, which Zappos comes from the word sappato
in Spanish, which of course means shoe. And he did
this all at the age of six. God, I wasn't
doing much at twenty six. And in two thousand nine,
Tony had another big pay day when he sold Zappos
(24:32):
to Amazon for more than a billion dollars and he
remained the CEO of Zappos. He made a billion dollars
at the age of thirty six. I'm thirty six right now,
so I guess I could be a billionaire. But I'm not.
At this one point, you would think that Tony would
be like, Okay, I've made it. I've made enough money.
(24:52):
He can never spend all this money in his lifetime,
even if he tried. Tony didn't do that. Zappos had
a headquarters in the Las Vegas and he invested in
revitalizing the old downtown and creating a sort of artistic
and technological hub. And if you've ever been to downtown
Vegas ten years ago versus now, you would really see
(25:12):
the difference. And Tony lived in a little airstream and
had a pet Lama that was loose. I mean, he
was an eccentric guy, but he really cared about the
local community and really spent the last decade of his
life really investing in Las Vegas and its people. But
at the same time he started to engage in some
(25:33):
peculiar activities. One he became more distant from his friends
and family in San Francisco in Vegas and began hanging
around a new group in Park City, Utah. If you
don't know about Park City, it's not that far from
Salt Lake City and it's actually a ski town. And
he started buying up property there had like a little
posse following him around and was showering everyone with money.
(25:56):
He also started engaging in some risky behavior. He became
obsessed with how much his body could do without things
such as food, urinating an oxygen, and at the same
time he became fascinated with fire. In fact, he bought
a mansion in Park City, Utah, and when a real
estate agent paid a visit, he discovered that Tony had
(26:17):
placed more than a thousand candles throughout the house. And
despite all these oddities, the pat lama the candles that
starving himself, Tony still had some really good values. He
wanted to make his friends lives better, and he was
a painful introvert, but he's still got a lot of
satisfaction from making other people happy. In August, Tony stepped
(26:41):
down as the CEO of Zappos, which is quite a
chakra at the time. I remember reading the article and
he had a party to celebrate his leaving the company
at his mansion, the one with the candles in Park City, Utah,
and he invited the singer Jewel who I love, and
Jewels showed up. She performed for a small crowd and
the next day she left suddenly. Now Jewel had to
(27:03):
communicate a message, and funny enough, Tony was going through
a digital cleanse, which that means, you know, he didn't
have a smartphone in his hand and he really wasn't
checking his email. So Jewel FedEx the letter to Tony,
and according to Forbes, had said, and I quote, I'm
going to be blunt. I need to tell you that
I don't think you are well and in your right mind.
(27:24):
I think you're taking way too many drugs that cause
you to disassociate. The people you are surrounding yourself with
are either ignorant or willing to be complicit in killing yourself. Woof,
And Jewel you called it because just a few months later,
in November, in the middle of the Knife, firefighters responded
(27:45):
to a house fire at a three story beach front
home in New London, Connecticut. He was at his girlfriend's house,
and the radio traffic among the responders was someone stuck inside,
and later the talk was there's someone trapped inside, and
after that it was just i've do as someone was
barricaded inside. So we really didn't know what happened that night,
(28:06):
but Tony died and he was only forty six years old.
Tony left a mess because Tony didn't even have a will.
And that's really something that's important, especially when you're talking
to your parents or anyone in your life. You've got
a plan for the worst. I know it's maccab and
we don't want to talk about it, but sometimes people
die and you need to leave a plan. And that's
(28:27):
why a state planning is really really important. Tony's death
was not only a shock, but he had no will
or a state plan. And you know, this is surprisingly common.
In fact, one study we looked at showed that for
people making more than seventy five thou dollars, only fifty
five of them have a will. So Tony, who was
(28:50):
worth a billion dollars, didn't have one. Neither did the
singer A Prince and a Wretha Franklin had three handwritten wills,
and of course that problems with the estate. So how
do you start making an estate plan? Many people don't
because they don't want to face the inevitable. Yeah, it's
really sad to think about your own demise, right, but
financial planners all agree you have to create a proper will.
(29:13):
It's not for you, it's to make sure you don't
leave a mess when it comes to distributing your assets
to your loved ones, and not having one creates chaos
and breaks up families. You know you don't want to
fracture your whole family because you died. They're already dealing
with your loss. So make sure you have a plan.
What does a plan look like? Well, number one, you
(29:35):
have to have a will, and in that will, it
needs to be detailed. You need to be specific as
to who gets what, and that minimizes stress and the
eventual fights that will break out. Two, you need to
think about your health care. At some point. Unfortunately, and
we all don't want to think about this, you may
be in a position at some point where you won't
(29:56):
be able to make decisions about your own medical care.
So be sure that the people who are helping you,
your loved ones, your partners, etcetera. Have this specific details
as well as the power of attorney to go ahead
and make those medical decisions for you. The next one
is really important. Use a password manager and give someone
(30:17):
you trust access to that password manager because you're gonna
need someone that gets into all of your accounts. Imagine
how many accounts you have just for your bank, your car,
your insurance, etcetera. In that same vein think about papers.
We've live in a digital economy, right, but we still
have deeds, life insurance docs, specific funeral arrangements. You need
(30:39):
both passwords and papers, and those need to be ready
in case you unfortunately die. So not something we want
to think about, but really really really important. So looking
back at Tony SHA's life, really one aspect of his
life caught my attention. He founded the lune shoe company Zappos,
(31:01):
which he sold to Amazon for more than a billion dollars.
But something we could learn from. Tony came up with
a very interesting philosophy when it came to running his business.
He really wanted to value experiences over having things, and
he really practiced what he preached if you look at
his life and where he lived. Here's how. Whenever a
(31:22):
new employee started at Zappos, about a week after they started,
Tony would take him aside and he would make them
an offer. He called it the offer. He would tell
the employee that if they liked working at Zappos, they
could of course stay, but if they didn't like it,
they could leave, and Tony would give them a thousand
dollars to do. So Tony's rationale was simple. If the
(31:44):
employee quit and took the thousand bucks, they clearly did
not have the same passion and vision then those who
chose to stay. But why on earth would Tony want
people to work there who didn't want to in the
first place. Actually, you know what, the offer makes a
lot of sense. Training employees is enormously expensive. In fact,
(32:06):
some of the businesses that suffer the most are the
ones that have the highest turnover. We have a saying
that would as cheap is ultimately expensive. We have to
really think about how much it costs to hire and
fire people. And Tony saw pass all the bs and said,
you know what, if I don't have the right person,
they're gonna take this quick thousand dollars. And really it
(32:29):
was a great way to weed out people. We want
people who share our vision, who are passionate about what
they're doing. If they don't share that sentiment, then they
need to go because it's in a complete waste of
time for the company as well as the employee. So
I think Tony's philosophy was rock solid, and in fact,
I don't even know how you do that through human
(32:50):
resources perspective or what a business manager would think about it.
But Tony was pretty unconventional and he could really see
that employee's pension, employee satisfaction, and more importantly, employee productivity
depended on having skin in the game and being committed
to the vision of the founder. So thanks to all
(33:18):
of you for joining me as we Follow the Profit,
and a big thanks to Brad Kent, the co founder
of Blaze Pizza, for his insights on restaurants and the
food industry. And a shout out to our team of
producers Emiliano Lemon over in sunny Los Angeles and Scott
Handler over in cloudy New York, and of course especially
to our executive producers new King Rich and Debbie Myers.
(33:40):
I'm your host, David Grasso. If you're enjoying the show,
please rate us five stars and give us a review
so that others can learn what the show is all about.
Follow the Profit is a production of ging Rich three
sixty and I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you get your podcast
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