“I Quit My Job And Built A $10M Pizza Business” - Thom Elliot Founder of Pizza Pilgrims
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By the way, in case you haven't heard, my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity, is now out. It is available everywhere books are sold. And it's actually hit the New York Times and also the Sunday Times bestseller list. So thank you to everyone who's already got a copy of the book. If you've read the book already, I would love a review on Amazon. And if you haven't yet checked it out, you may like to check it out. It's available in physical format and also ebook and also audiobook everywhere books are sold. Put 50 up for sale on that Wednesday, having promoted it, I think, on the Monday. And we sold the first 50 in like under a minute. And we were like, oh.

Okay.

This is a thing. Everyone from like the Spice Girls to Stormzy to all these people made these kits. It was huge on Instagram and it saved the company. This is an interview between me and Tom Elliott, who is the co-founder of the really successful pizza chain, Pizza Pilgrims. It's incredibly exciting because Pizza Pilgrims has been around now for 10 years. And it actually started on a bit of a whim when Tom and his brother decided that they were going to quit their corporate jobs that they didn't enjoy. And they were going to do a little pilgrimage to Italy to learn about how pizzas are being made.

and then while in italy they bought a pizza van they drove it all the way back to the uk and they started their first store in 2012. we were like obsessed with pizza that's that's the thing that's what we're going to do to break into this world then obviously after we'd come down off that initial high it was like oh we know nothing about pizza at all we have

no skills, no understanding. We need to figure it out. So that's when we realized that we needed to go to Italy to understand what it's all about. And so in this very wide ranging conversation, we talk about how they took that plunge initially to quit their boring corporate jobs and do this rogue thing like starting a pizza business. We talk about some of the challenges of entrepreneurship as it relates to having a food business and all of the various different issues and challenges associated with that.

And Tom shares a bunch of really, really helpful advice that's useful for me and that's useful for any entrepreneur at whatever stage of the journey you're at. If you have that thing in you, whatever that is, to want to start a business, I just think you've got to go for it early. Like if you're going to do it, do it as early as you possibly can. It annoys me that we don't encourage people straight after their A-levels, definitely straight after university, to go and have a crack at something.

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This season is once again being sponsored very kindly by Trading212. Now, people ask me all the time for investment advice because they see that I've made money and I've made videos talking about where I'm investing that money. The thing that Warren Buffett and basically everyone who's sensible in the space recommends, which is to invest in broad stock market investments.

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So you quit your job and started a pizza company, which has now just celebrated its 10-year anniversary. So that's all really rogue. What was the origin story? How did you get started? I love how success in restaurants these days is just survival. It's literally like high five everyone, 10 years. But no, it's been a mad journey. I worked in advertising. I started the company with my brother.

have to admit it was his idea I was very much the sort of enabler of his idea but um yeah so I was working in advertising my brother was working in tv production we had grown up literally above a pub our parents had run a pub we had lived above it and sort of had that sort of hospitality thing in our veins and yeah we had both been in London for sort of

five seven years doing jobs that we really didn't enjoy didn't get a kick out of it all had tried a couple of times to like maybe start a pub of our own but we had no capital we had no kind of experience or no one would have backed us um and so we're sort of a bit sort of stuck i guess and then just out of nowhere like a sort of an amazing revelation this this food truck

street food revolution happened in London. And suddenly it was possible to, you know, create a credible quality led brand

but have no capital and start in the back of a food truck. What do you mean you can start a food business without capital? So like, honestly, I genuinely believe, and this is like me kind of getting carried away with myself, but I think in the sort of world of food, which does like to kind of like self reflect quite a lot in 50 years time, we'll look back on like 2010 to 2012, very much how we look back on like 1961 to 1963 in music terms, just like a sort of an explosion of like creativity and,

all the right things in all the right places. Twitter just landing, street food trucks becoming a thing. Obviously just off the back of a big recession. So lots of people having lost their jobs, looking to kind of start afresh.

And I still think in London particularly, like so many of the great brands that went on to become something bigger all started in that time. Like your Dishooms, your Flatirons, your Patty and Buns, your Honest Burgers, you know, Caravan. I mean, you could go on forever. There are so many fantastic brands that like started in that moment. But our particular way in was street food and it was –

like I said, we were looking around for a way to get in. I mean, restaurants famously, they require a capital. They require you to put quite a lot on the line because you've got to build the bloody thing before you even open it. And suddenly there was an opportunity to, you know, we were going, we were like traveling across London, having seen on Twitter that there was, you know, this meat wagon in, um,

in a car park in New Cross or Peckham or whatever and you'd go and there'd be potentially hundreds of people waiting to try a burger excited about the product like a product led business

All driven by Twitter and like this sort of like, you know, it's going to be gone tomorrow. So we've got to go now type feeling. And, you know, it was, it was a genuine thing. And yeah, that was another one. Meat, meat wagon became a meat easy, became meat liquor. And that was, you know, one of the hottest restaurant openings of 2013 probably. So we're in 2013, you and your brother working the corporate jobs in, in, in,

in your corporate jobs which you're not particularly enjoying yeah how do you get from there to let's start a food truck like that still feels a bit and there was a huge amount of like I mean everyone a lot of eye rolls I raised a lot of like okay here's another person who's lost their mind um

But I mean, the short version is that we really wanted to do it. We were trying to find a way into the food business. My brother went and did for his 21st birthday, which had been a few years earlier. He'd gone and done like a sort of cookery class in Italy, which he'd been paid for by his grandmother. And he'd seen basically that everyone had pizza ovens in their gardens.

And instead of a barbecue, people had a pizza oven. So then we had an idea. We'd start a pizza oven company and put pizza ovens in people's gardens. Then Jamie Oliver did that. So we were like, OK, I feel like he's got this one. But the idea of pizza remained.

then we had this kind of street food element so you know going down to meat wagon going to king's cross and seeing the guys on each street and like you know chatting to all those guys about you know some of them were doing paella some of them were doing hot dogs and you know understanding that life and just again seeing that like you know they were building real brands that had real twitter following and had real people that came back every week to try it um

And we looked at that scene and we were like, no one's doing pizza. That seems insane. It's like one of the world's great, if not the world's great food stuff. Why is no one doing pizza? Turns out the reason you're doing pizza is because you have to buy a massive great oven, which costs you thousands of pounds and you've got to carry the bloody thing around. So, uh, so that was the reason why. But yeah, we were like obsessed with pizza. That's, that's the thing. That's the thing that's going to, that's, that's what we're going to do to break into this world. Uh,

uh then obviously after we'd come down off that initial high it was like oh we know nothing about pizza at all we have no no skills no understanding we need to figure it out so that's when we realized that we needed to go to italy to understand you know birthplace of pizza yeah to understand what it's all about so okay question would love to dive into the pizza stuff but i'm still intrigued like you're like i don't enjoy my job yeah

a lot of like you could start a software business you could start a youtube channel you could start a what any anything other than a food business like what was it about the food business that made you think that's the thing we want to do i think it is just that like genuinely it's just that little

human interaction thing of like giving someone a little bit of joy yeah and we still try and do that like street food is the most perfect distillation of that there's no business in the world really where someone comes up to you kind of like you know fisher price fisher price business someone comes up to you and goes can i have that thing yeah that you sell here's a crisp five pound note you go away you make it for them to order you then give it to them and then you watch you watch them eat it yeah and it's like this glorious feedback loop of like

You can actually ask them what they thought. You can learn from it. You kind of get this, you know, it's got this real kind of immediacy energy that you just cannot get from anything digital or, you know, it's just, it's just real. There's just no, I mean, that sounds so incredibly cringeworthy when I say it. No, not at all. It's quite inspiring, really. Like, it's so true because like there's no other business where you literally make the thing and just give it to them. Yeah. Except maybe like build a bear or something. Yeah.

yeah yeah who doesn't wish they started that yeah i've got good margins yeah yeah um so was it the pub background that helped with this or i think that's it i think it's a little bit of you know we were in the pub all the time i worked behind the bar when i got old enough all that kind of stuff so that kind of constant human interaction i guess you kind of crave and it does provide that um i think there is just that that feeling that you know

I don't know. You feel like, I guess you'll feel like you're sort of giving something back in some weird way, which you're totally not really, but you are, you know, you're, you're meeting an absolutely fundamental human need, which is to eat and hopefully meeting in an elevated way. So it's like you're doing something exciting. I honestly don't think,

I could start a sushi business because I just... I think cold food doesn't have that same emotional driver that hot food has. That's true, yeah. Like, you know, I just don't think, you know, it's always a choice that you're doing because you're trying to make a compromise, you're trying to be healthy, you're trying to be fast. Whereas I think like a hot cooked meal, it's never going to go away. Whenever, you know, even if we end up in Ready Player One, you're still going to want to take that headset off and have a hot meal for sure. And so...

Yeah. I just, I think, you know, at a very deep level, we certainly didn't think about it this way at the time, but a deep level, that was a thing we wanted. Yeah. We wanted to be part of that. I think it's always, you know, with the street food things particularly, it's nice to be part of a movement. And like we were there, not certainly not the earliest, but like very much early in that world. And still like, you know, we know all those guys really well. Some of them have gone on to like do restaurants. Some of them are still doing the street food thing. You know,

I think we're both secretly quite jealous of those guys still doing the kind of street food festivals life because it is just, it's hard work, really hard work. But it's also like once it's stopped, it's stopped. You're not sitting there going like, oh God, got to do this or that or the other. You do your festival and then you have a week off and it's like nice. To what extent would you recommend the food business if someone's listening to this and let's say they're working a corporate job and they're like, you know what? I want to start a business.

I actually know a lot of people who are like, oh, I'd love to start a burger van or something like that. Yeah. Would you, to what extent would you recommend it?

I would recommend it so wholeheartedly. Really? If, if it's for the love. Because it is, there is no doubt. If you're like, I just want to make loads of money fast, food is the worst possible way to do that. It's incredibly, incredibly hard to like, you know, get yourself going. It's hard work. It's hugely rewarding, but not necessarily financially. But, you know, if you, if you want like a lifestyle business or something that's going to like just put you into interesting situations with interesting people or like throw crazy opportunities, you know,

you know, that you never thought would come your way and you're willing to work hard and like put the, put the time and energy in. I mean, we, you know, we, we've just loved every minute of, of, of doing a food business and yeah, you know, I really can't say any, any clearer than that. Nice. Okay. So you decide that you're going to start the food business and you're like, cool, we have to go to Italy. Yeah. What happens next?

What happens next? So we go to Italy. I weirdly email my boss in the advertising agency being like, I've heard on the grapevine, we've not met, but you're starting a bakery in Cambridge, apparently. You're leaving to start a bakery in Cambridge. I'm leaving to start a pizza company. We should go and have a beer. Oh, which bakery was this? It's called...

It's called, really famous for Chelsea Buns, called... Cinnabon? No, no, no, no, no. Fitzbillies? Fitzbillies. Your boss started Fitzbillies? So Fitzbillies is like an age-old business. Okay, I was going to say, it's very old, isn't it? Hundreds of years ago, certainly tens and tens of years ago. It had fallen into disrepair, disrepute. Someone had given up on it, whatever. It was like...

It was available to be sold. So in 2011, she had just bought it with her husband and was like, I'm going to transform this business. Mate, I've been to Fitzbilly so many times, 2012 through 2018. There you go. When I go back to Cambridge, I still have to go to Fitzbilly, take my mum there, the cinnamon rolls with the tea. We went recently because we very recently opened a pizza program in Cambridge. And we always go on a little, because basically I emailed her, not knowing her, but saying like, you're obviously off to start this bakery. Yeah.

uh she was like yeah absolutely we should totally come for a beer when you come to my house she lives in camden let's go go for a beer in camden went to me here what i didn't know was her husband uh is was the food critic for the financial times oh this guy called tim hayward and he's just he was the first person basically who like listened to our story our idea the fact that we were going to italy and was like

hell yes this is a great idea i'm super psyched about this he was like the first human being that was like supportive of the plan so why was he supportive of it i think he's just he's he's got sort of this incredible like puppy like enthusiasm about just everything to do with like food and lifestyle and yeah cool stuff sorry that wasn't us don't worry uh and uh yeah you know he's he obviously he's a food critic he's engaged with exciting food things we were like

obviously excited to go and learn about pizza and all that stuff and he was just like this is an awesome idea you need to make more of this pilgrimage this should be a thing that you like really like lean on and like get the most out of we mostly on if we're honestly truthful the reason we were doing the pilgrimage was because it was cheaper to buy the van that we wanted in italy because it was made in italy oh then it was you can drive it across so we're like we'll go we'll pick it up we'll drive it back we'll save a

But he was like, you're missing the point. This is like, this is the best possible starting place for your business. Okay, why?

Because he was like, pizza is the most saturated market in the world. You've got to find a reason why you're different. And at the very least, this is a fantastic story to start off with. Like we went to Italy to learn. And honestly, the whole thing was so unplanned. There was no strategy. It wasn't like, oh, we'll do this in order to do this, in order to open a pizzeria. I literally was like, I hate my job. My brothers had this idea.

I'm going to go and help him. So at the very least I've got out of advertising and I've done something like vaguely productive. Yeah. And then probably in a year's time I'll

I'll go and like disappear into the shadows. He can go and do that and I'll go and find something else to do. Were you in a TV show at one point? So, so Tim being super enthusiastic about the pizza was like, you know, this thing you need to make the most of. My brother worked in TV. So we then basically went away. We wrote a pitch, literally two sides of a four. We sent it to four production companies. We sent it like Optiman who are big, big food production company, fresh one, which Jamie Oliver's production company, uh,

another and we sent to a fourth much smaller one which is a friend a friend of a friend of james's from tv called rampage they just started out anyway we went we sent off this pitch to all these shows they all came back being like we love this idea we went and had meetings with all of them but basically the bigger guys you know um we sat with pat llewellyn who was the she's the voice on the very original jamie oliver shows she's like she discovered jamie oliver

And she was like, I love this idea, really want to do it. But you know, it's July now, you know, we're going to have to go away, fully plan it out. Then we have to go and pitch it to stations, like best case scenario, we're starting filming this in 18 months. And I was like, well, we're leaving in two months. So we're either doing it now or we're not doing it. This is not about the TV. This is very much about the business. So anyway,

didn't do it those guys rampage like look we'll take a punt we'll do it without a tv show a tv channel let's just freaking go for it and so we kind of set off and made this slightly random tv show where we we took we elongated the pilgrimage they kind of brought in some researchers we ended up doing a lot more stops uh and we made we made a tv show which quite honestly was not a tv show that we were excited by when it when it started to happen it was very clear that like

their creative vision and our creative vision were very different. They were paying for it. So we didn't really, and we were like right at the beginning of everything. We had no position to tell them what to do. And, and,

There was a TV show made and, you know, the plus side was it gave us access that we couldn't have possibly imagined if we just rocked up on our own. So, like, you know, we went to Damocale, you know, the world famous pizzeria in Naples and they let us, like, see the dough room and, like, get into the kitchen and, like, get around it. Whereas, you know, if we turned up just two Muppets that had been, like, joined the queue and absolutely not. Did you ever do a thing with, like, Nigella Lawson? No.

Mary Berry? Mary Berry, maybe. We did Mary Berry. We made pizza with Mary Berry. Was that in her garden or something? In her garden. Oh, because when you said that story of like driving to Italy to get the van, I was like, I was watching a cooking show with my mum like two months ago and I remember that story. So that was you guys. It's literally insane how many people watch the Mary Berry show. The amount of people who watch that show is insane. I was randomly watching it with my mum and it was like...

you guys that was us in the garden yeah yeah telling the story and making the pizza exactly making a pizza telling the story mary berry is like exactly how you'd want her to be yeah there was like a moment where the whole like shooting stopped stops happening and she um well she baked everyone cakes obviously for like the breaks and there's the shooting stopped and we're like went off to have a cigarette or whatever and she like completely unironically went into her garden and like just

a bunch of wildflowers and just like came back and was like, here you go guys, here's some flowers. It was just like, very, very, you're like everything I'd hoped you would be and more. Sorry, I derailed with that excitement of like, wait a minute, I think I've seen this on TV. So you... Completely separate. We made this TV show. It did end up featuring on the Food Network. I reckon about 27 or 28 people watched it in total, including my family. We were never very proud of it. I haven't actually watched the whole thing in total myself. But

It did two things that was amazing for us. It opened some doors in Italy and allowed us to get into places that we couldn't otherwise have done. And I think it kind of gave the business like a sort of momentum, a sort of fake momentum that meant that like people were kind of like, oh, this is coming up.

this must be something as opposed to like does that make sense yeah so i guess like if we think of you know within within the stories i like to think of sort of takeaway lessons from people it's like your brother taking advantage of the industry he was already in to be like hang on let's let's have a punt and see what we can do here yeah which is just you know someone's if someone didn't have access to that industry or didn't know that that was it was a possibility it

Their brain wouldn't even have thought that it's an option to... Like, I have no idea what these companies are that you just mentioned. Yeah, production companies. But again, I think for me, the lesson there is send the email to the person with the spurious connection. That's the thing for me that we've always done. And certainly in the early days, we did it relentlessly of just like, if there's any reason...

to like reach out to people just do it because people always want to help yeah they always want to tell their story they always want to like meet like-minded people who do similar stuff so like me emailing that boss person who did not know me i did not know her and just saying hey you're off to start a bakery

I'm starting another bread product based business. We should definitely go for a coffee. That, that's, that's the energy. It's kind of like a sort of create your own luck vibe, I guess. And it's just, you know, if you shoot enough things, you know, throw enough shit at the wall, something will stick. Right. Yeah. And so have you, have you had any other examples in your life or the business's life where like a cold email has been like,

whoa we didn't expect that to so so many of those i'm not going to be able to think of any i will do eventually but like so many examples as well where like we'd go and do an event and you'd get there and my brother would look at me like what the hell are we doing here it's raining on a tuesday and we're making pizza in a car parking space in hammersmith or something this is depressing and you do it and you'd be like yeah this is depressing whatever you do it and then you know you'd be chatting to people there someone would give you a card and then a year later

You know, you've even got that person back being like, great to meet you, like come and have a pizza sometime. And then a year later, it's like, oh, I'm actually like, you know, so-and-so's best mate. And I'm, you know, or I know, you know, a landlord who's got a site and he thinks you'd be great. Or just these weird connections that just come from like building those actual connections, chatting to people and then following up basically. And it's happened to us over and over again. And I think that's the other thing I never understand about sort of business as you see it on the telly.

It's just this whole like sort of aggressive, you know, I'll step on your throat to get the next level. Yeah. It's like, but that person whose throat you stepped on is like an opportunity that you've squashed that will never ever come back to be an opportunity. And I think we have genuinely, I know it sounds like a cliche, but we've genuinely tried to like never be those guys. And like, you know, it's amazing to me how many times people that you,

never thought you'd see again or would never have any relevance to your business or your personal life or whatever just reappear in your life yeah i had one i mean it's not hugely business relevant but like um the manager of swingers where we swingers you know the crazy golf club yeah we we were in their first ever pop-up doing pizza and the manager of the place the guy who you know we we kind of got on pretty well with and it was all a bit chaotic and but you know we we kind of worked with him and it was mad and

Two days ago, like he turned up on my front step in where I live down in Brighton because he was seeing if anyone needs a gardener. It's like he's there, just like randomly there. Nice. And you're like, oh, amazing. This is so good. What a great connection. And I just, I love those. I'd hate to think that he turns up and you open the door and he's like, oh, it's you. That horrible, horrible person that did that horrible, horrible thing to me. Yeah. Yeah. I think this, I often think about this, this idea of serendipity and a lot of

Like if I think of all of the different, if I think of all of the different sort of step changes we've seen in our business, basically all of them have been a result of a single, a single conversation with like a random person that like,

If I hadn't just sent them a DM on Twitter that day or if they didn't happen to have already known, like, you know, there was a case where I took these two guys' online course on like writing and like note-taking and stuff. And they happened to have seen my YouTube channel. And so I was engaging in the Zoom chat during lockdown and they were like, oh, Ali Abdaal, I recognize that name. And then I DMed them on Zoom there to be like, hey, let's hop on a call afterwards. Hopped on a call afterwards. And that one call changed our first product from being like a, I don't know,

I don't know, $100,000 product to like a $3 million product just instantly in like 10 minutes on a Zoom call. And my mind was just blown. It's like, what the hell? It's like a random thing of like this leads to this, leads to this, leads to this. Mental. And particularly in restaurants where like, you know, so many people coming through and like just making sure you're like taking the time to like just grab people and chat to them, whether that's, you know, a team member or a customer or whatever. It's just like always exciting stuff comes through it, always. Yeah. The other thing that I find surprising is that

Within business, the world seems very small. Yeah. Like everyone's kind of knows, like knows everyone else in a weird way. And you would think that there's all these businesses out there, but actually it's like, it's a fairly small network. It totally is. And I think, um, I tell you that that's one absolutely amazing thing about hospitality as an industry. Like,

and I don't have a huge number of other industries to, other than advertising where I worked, but like everyone in hospitality wants to help everyone else. Like I can call up so many people now and be like, Hey, your restaurant here, how does it do? Or, you know, you've worked with this landlord, what do you think? Or, and we just chat about everything. That's like sort of like, you know, mother's meeting type thing. It's great. And like,

I don't think other industries do that. I think if you work in retail, you don't, you know, I don't think Curry's are speaking to M&S to find out what's going on and whether this site's working for them. And it's just not happening. Whereas 100% happens in hospitality. So don't them like, isn't there a sense of like competition, like footfall competition and stuff like that?

Not really, because I think the general consensus is the more restaurants there are in a place, the more footfall there'll be. I think it's a kind of, of the chicken and egg, like the restaurants are first and then the people come. So, you know, I've never or very, very rarely encountered, I can't think of anyone off my head, someone who's like cagey on this stuff. Like everyone...

On new sites, new locations, when a new, you know, a new exciting thing happens, like Batsy Power Station or whatever, like, we all chat about, like, you know, is it working for you? What's your deal? That's what happens. And I love that. It's like, and I think it's basically built from, like, you know, back to your earlier question, like, hospitality is the perfect industry if you love people. If, like, you get your, if you recharge by, like, chatting to new people and, like, being in busy situations and just, like, constantly being, like,

surrounded by people to chat to hospitality is that and so everyone who starts a successful hospitality business is built that way and therefore they all want to chat to their their direct competitors and get a point of view from them and yeah nice okay so you're in italy you're going to buy a van in italy how did you how did you get the money for the van

Barclay card. Oh, really? We put the whole thing on a Barclay card. How much was it? It was just over 10K. Okay. You can buy a pizza van for 10K. Well, at the time, the van itself, I think, was 6,900 euros. Okay. I mean, the van is... So the big discovery when we landed in Italy. So we bought the van in Reggio di Calabria, which is like the tip of the toe, just opposite the water on Sicily. And we picked it up, turned the ignition, pulled out the...

pulled out the sort of showroom and realized that this thing had a top speed of like 20 miles an hour like and we genuinely didn't know that until we pulled out it was like this is the most ridiculous vehicle we have footage of us being overtaken up a hill by a jogger that is how slow the vehicle is uh and so yeah that kind of very quickly reframed the trip because it was like okay so that thing that drive that we thought we could do in an hour and a half not gonna happen uh

The way to work out the speed of an Ape is to take the average on Google of the car time and the walk time. Nice. And then that's the speed of the... The midpoint is the speed of your actual vehicle. Okay. So you pay 10K, you get this van, you trundle it up back to the UK? Trundle it up back to the UK via loads of pizza stops. We went and made mozzarella. We learned about tomatoes. But I mean, the big moment is when we went to Naples. So again, we didn't really know that Neapolitan pizza was kind of the big one and that's where it all started. Yeah.

But we went to Naples, we had a pizza in Damocle and we were just like, how have I lived for 27, 28 years and not had this before? And it didn't really exist in London at that time. There was Franco Manca just starting out and it was just phenomenal. And it had one in Brixton and one in Chiswick, I think at that time. And there was another pizzeria called Lansca Pizzeria and there was one in Clapham called Donna Margherita. And that was kind of it for Neapolitan pizza at that time.

So we just hadn't tried it and we just fell in love with it and we were like, this is what we want to recreate. What's special about Neapolitan people? So it has this kind of like, I guess it's particularly in the UK, this sort of famous people's

Pizza words are like thin and crispy. That's what people want. But Neapolitan is very much like it's kind of doughy and bready and like floppy. Oh, and is that like the style of your pizza? Yeah. Like you almost want to fold it. You fold it and it's got no like structure. It's not like Pizza Hut type pizza, which is like very... Yeah, you could pick up a triangle and it would be... Yes, it would stay as a triangle. This is like... Yeah, that sort of thing. So it's kind of... It's a very different thing, you know, and everyone always...

jokes about people who eat pizza with a knife and fork in the uk but actually go to naples loads of people eat pizza with a knife and fork because it's the way to do it so um yeah we discovered neapolitan pizza that style and it is a very specific style uh happens to be the like birthplace of pizza as well and yeah and we should never look back really okay so you come back to the uk yeah and then you've got one van

One van, yeah. So how does the business plan start? So the business plan was we would plan, quote unquote, was we would do events. So we'd go and do like weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, whatever event you've got, we'll sign up and make pizza for a degree price. We quickly realized that A, it's really hard to build a name for yourself that way because-

You kind of need a place that people can go and try it. If you're going to get people excited about a product, they've got to be able to go and try it off their own steam. So that was a no-no. And second, it's just so incredibly stressful being responsible for the most important day in your life.

If you're going to cater someone's wedding, the stress factor of getting that wrong or whatever is just too high to deal with. So we very quickly moved away from that and we're like, no, we want a market stall. We want a place where you can come and actually buy it. So we started emailing all the councils to say, do you have a pitch? There were probably about seven or eight really great food markets in London. Emailed all of them, constantly just heard about saying, no, we have no space. There's a waiting list as long as your arm.

Most of them were like, just don't even bother joining the list because it's going to be decades. Oh, wow. So then we were like, well, this just can't be right because we're going to these markets and they're not full. So we basically started going down to the markets, taking pictures of standing in empty spaces and emailing the council and being like, we stood in this space from 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. for five days in a row.

no one came. Yeah. How can you possibly tell me your market's full? And I think we basically just like hammered them so much until they just eventually were like, it would be easier to just give them the pitch than it would to. So yeah, eventually the first council to give up was Westminster. They gave us a pitch on Berwick Street Market and we paid 10 pounds a day for a house. Is that a,

Yeah, it was amazing. Oh, that's reasonable. Little parking spot on the market. And we could trade there from 11 till... Well, we could trade there from 9. Obviously, no one wants a pizza at 9 until... I think you could trade till 5. So we basically went and did lunch service every day. That's only £10 a day. £10 a day. Is that normal? Or is that surprisingly cheap? It's still the same. And it's kind of like that classic, like, you know, it's kind of...

It was agreed decades and decades ago, and they can't change it. And there are people there who trade there every day, whose grandparents traded there at the same rate. I mean, to be clear, the £10 a day gives you a lovely pitch, but like zero infrastructure. So when we were there, you had no electricity, nowhere to store anything. So you had to literally drive a van into Soho, unload, set up the van, and then drive it away again.

Find someone to park that van, come back, set up the stall. So it was not rosy. We basically set about the first month. It was like, how do we make this easier? Because driving a van in every day, especially to Soho, is just a living nightmare. So we made friends with the landlord of the pub, which is called The Endurance on Berwick Street.

convinced him to let us rent his basement, 50 pound a week, which we did. So we made the dough, started making the dough in that basement. Then we started to slowly but surely convince the guys, the fruit and veg guys, which is at the time, the market was mostly fruit and veg guys. Yeah.

We convinced them that we were like not bad people. I think they were just very suspicious of us turning up trying to, I mean, they called us the apprentice for a long time because we were like running around like headless chickens trying to like do anything. We convinced them that we were like a force for good. They then rented us their fridge space in the lockup that they had there. Then I convinced my old advertising agency to let us park the van underneath their agency in a car parking space, which is now the Soho Hotel. And

And slowly over the first six months, we built this like infrastructure around the business. There's a lot of convincing. A lot of convincing. It's unusual because I'm so used to online businesses and stuff where you literally don't have to speak to anyone. Yeah. This is very like, you're out there chatting to the pub guy, chatting to the fruit and veg people. It's constant. And I think, you know, again, love it. That's absolutely me and my brother's thing. But it is also, it comes with, you know, all of the kind of human, you know,

and just sort of, what's the word, you know, inaccuracies, I guess, of like, you know, suddenly the pub landlord on one day is like, actually, I've changed my mind. You're out. You've got to be out by 4 p.m. I've loaded all your stuff onto the street and you've got to go and like reconvince him that it's actually okay. And so, you know, there's that stuff. There's, you know, just that it's never fixed. It's never like, and I think that's the one thing about hospitality, but particularly street food,

The number one asset you can have is resilience. Yeah. Just like those little things that change at the last minute, just being able to deal with it. If we take a day, a random day in those first six months. Yeah. Compare it to a day in your life as like working in corporate. What's the contrast? Well, the main contrast for me are just two. One is...

You have no real context of the kind of financial, particularly in advertising because it's all – and I was junior anyway. But you have no feeling that you're really earning a wage. You're just kind of doing something. And at the end, you get this pay packet that just sort of lands. On the last Friday of the month, a pay packet arrives. But you don't really link the two, I found. It's just like you're doing loads of stuff and it's all happening and then pay packet arrives. But then the next day, you're just doing the stuff again. Whereas when you're running your own thing –

You're really kind of like constantly doing the sums of your head of like, well, if we did that and that's a day in the month, is that going to, you know, deliver enough to get us to that next line, that next finish line? So that constant like weighing up of like what you're putting your time into and your energy into. Yeah. And is it going to pay? Which you just don't, I think, do in a corporate life. I mean, I didn't anyway. But the second one and probably the bigger one is just that, you know, if you work in a big corporate office,

there's someone's call to fix anything that's not your exact responsibility. So it's like this thing is broken, that thing's gone wrong, I need a point of view on that.

you know send the email out and you wait for that response to come back and then you kind of funnel it into the next part of the thing you're kind of you've constantly got the support network around you start your own business you have no support network whatsoever everything is you if something's broken you've got to fix it with a spanner it's you if uh you know you've lost you know you put your cash down someone's robbed it that's your problem if you've made the dough incorrectly that's your problem the van's broken down it's your problem it rains it's your problem everything's your problem which

I don't know. I guess some people get a kick out of that because they're like, cool, well, I'm ready to solve those problems, bring it on. And I feel like I'm a capable person and that's exciting. And I guess, you know, that kind of like changes as good as a rest type feeling of like never a dull day because you just don't know what's going to happen. Whereas other people obviously are like, no, this is my skill set. Why in God's name would I try and...

fix a van or make dough if my skill set is only in selling or mending computers or the law um and i think you know that undoubtedly that makes sense right logically if you're really good at the law your time is not well spent fixing vans and making dough you're never going to be financially your best possible bet is to apply yourself to the law and make that work for you

I guess no one logically starts a business. I don't know. Maybe they do. I think they probably, that's probably a bit too much of a sweeping statement. No one logically starts a restaurant business. That's for sure. Um, what would you say to people who might be thinking, you know what? I want to quit my job to start a business because I want more free time. Yeah.

I mean, there is no such thing as free time. Everything is a blur. Like calendars, you know, there's little blocks you get in calendars, like, you know, like 10 to 11, this will happen. It's just nonsense. It's all just gray. Everything's the same. But I guess, you know, another way to look at it is like, that's all, it's whether you see that as all free time or all work. That's the fundamental dichotomy there of like,

If you see having no 10 to 11 a.m. meetings and no places you have to be at certain times as freeing, then start your own business and you'll absolutely love it because it's just constantly like that. Whereas if you see that as like, I cannot, you know, I need to know when I'm doing X and when I'm doing Y, then you're never going to, you know, it doesn't work like that. It's just constantly changing. Yeah. And to what extent can you clock off at like 5 p.m., 6 p.m. kind of thing when you have a business? Do you know what? Increasingly,

I can now, I could clock off and I could go, you know what, I'm not going to do that. And I'm trying to be better at it. But unfortunately, I think it's just, it always is there. You know, you'll be sitting there clocked off watching something on telly and somebody comes like, oh, that's, that's cool. I wonder if we could try that in the pizzeria or like, oh, you see an advert for something. You're like, oh, it's interesting that they've said it, you know, said it that way. I wonder how that affects us or whatever.

you know you you do just never ever ever switch off especially when you've got a phone next to you and you can immediately google it and then you're off then you're off then you're off down the rabbit hole again yeah and my wife rightly is just livid about that she's like you can't do it like you've got to stop like if you don't stop um and i find if i lie you know if i lie in bed at night and i'm not listening to a podcast or something my brain just racing and like oh what about if we did that and you know and i think

it's a blessing and a curse. It's nice to have a sort of thing that drives you forward in many ways and like gives you, gives you ways to like approach stuff. And it's nice to have a point of view on things that, you know, how could I make that work for me? But yeah, it's also, it must also be lovely. And I definitely do dream about this to be like, I tell you what I most dream about it is exactly about now when you clock out of the office and

Friday, bang, holiday. And you walk out at four because it's Friday and everyone's like, whatever, just go home. You go home, you're like, I literally have nothing to worry about now until Tuesday. That never happens. That never, ever, ever happens to me. Because restaurants, particularly, again, they never stop. I go to bed at 10 o'clock at night

The guys and girls are still out there doing incredible things with Pizza Pilgrims. Sunday afternoon watching the football, yeah, Pizza Pilgrims is still open. And so it is a weird feeling of it. And the worst thing you can do to a restaurant, quite generally, is stop. The momentum, we closed basically twice a year for a full team party and we closed all the restaurants.

I guarantee the next day is when you have the most mechanical issues, the most delivery problems. Because if the flywheel stops, it really takes a lot to get it going again. And I guess if you plot my particular curve involved in that, at the beginning it was just us and we were very much hands-on with every single thing. So you never had these rug pull moments because you were just there. I mean, they happened, but they kind of happened live and you were just dealing with it.

Then you had the bit where, you know, we weren't necessarily in the restaurants at nine o'clock at night, but you'd be there trying to switch off and you'd get the call being like, this is blown up or that thing's gone wrong or someone's just come in and tried to mug us or... And that was my worst time because then I would just be like, right, you know, you're trying to, you know, calm and suddenly you've got to like drop everything and rush off and fix some like much bigger problem. And I guess, you know, we're lucky now in that like...

We have grown, we have got like, you know, really amazing teams and we've got a fantastic managing director and he's got ops director below him and then, you know, head of operations, ops managers, each store has a manager and assistant manager. Like it has to be pretty nuclear for it to get to me now. But that said, I always want to know, I always read the reports, you know, if something does go wrong, it's like, how can we be better next time? How can we stop it happening? Yeah.

That middle bit where you don't have the management, but you do have the kind of freedom. I actually found the worst. Yeah. The feeling of like having, having your own business. So like my, my girlfriend has recently quit her day job full time in her business. And she was like,

you know, it gets to 11 PM and it's just like, Oh, but I've just had a moment of inspiration where I feel so excited about this thing. And like back in the day when she had the day job, she was always being like, Hey, Ali, why are you working at 11 PM? Come on. Like, you know, like work-life balance and all this kind of stuff. And now she gets it. And I'm like, Oh yeah. And back in the day we used to be like, you know, when we're on holiday, like, you know, why are you working all the time? And now she's like, man, I don't have time to work during, during normal times. They're like, Oh, we can do so much work on holiday. And I'm like, yes. Yeah.

There you go. You see the whole like psychology changes, I guess when it's your thing, a hundred percent. There's like, there's like a really powerful reason to work on it. Massively. And I, you know, I think the obvious, again, very obvious cliche, but the obvious connection there is, is kids. You see people with kids and you're like, Oh, I would never do it that way. Or like, you know, I can handle that, whatever. And then when you have kids of your own, you're like, Oh,

oh right okay this is this is it this is what it's all about and it does just never stop we have a question here from asma from our telegram community would you recommend working full-time or part-time as you start your business so that you have a stable income already or would you recommend that one invests all of their time into their startup i personally found it

beneficial to test it more and not throw everything out and go like, I'm out, done. So we did quit. We did go and do this trip. We did build the business. But in the very, very early days, it was like, look, this is crazy. We're not going to be able to both do this. So I came back. I quit my job in advertising Adidas and got a job advertising Stannis stairlift's.

uh and started doing that like in parallel and i guess we we when we started out did a lot of testing of like right here's you know we want to start a pizza business

let's get 50 mates around for dinner party and do pizza and see how that goes. And if that's good and we enjoy it and we kind of, then you can kind of go, right, what's the next thing? The next thing in our case was let's go to my old advertising agency and park up outside and do pizza for lunch for them and see how they get on. And then the next thing is like, let's go and do a one night event and like, you know, pay a hundred quid. And I think that is the way to do it. Obviously it depends on what your business is, but like,

you've got you've got to my mind like doing some basic basic testing even if it's like i'm going to take a week holiday and go and just do this for a week yeah it's a great way to do it you don't need to throw the baby out of the bath water yeah that's very much my view of it as well i think there are some businesses where you don't have that option but like of course you know i i think actually having a job and doing doing the thing doing the business on the side forces you to prioritize yeah because i found that's

two years into two years after i was i did the doctor stuff and suddenly i had spare time my output reduced in terms of number of videos we were making because i spent all spending all my time doing the bullshit that i just didn't have time to do back in the day and i was like well i can now reply to all these emails and like hop on the calls with all these people who want to hop on calls in the end and it's like before i know it my entire calendar is booked up with like unproductive discovered calendly and i'm like oh my god i can just give a link out it's like bloody hell i'm on zoom calls all day oh shit like

And it took about a year to realize that, oh, back when I was doing this as a side hustle, I intuitively prioritized the most important things and ignored everything else. Now I need to actively prioritize the most important things and ignore everything else, which requires figuring out what's the goal, what are the metrics that matter, what is the needle moving stuff, what's the 80-20, and desperately trying to ignore all the other opportunities that are coming my way. Yeah.

I think that, I mean, that's exactly, you know, the classic thing of like, you know, he wants something done, ask someone busy type thing. And I think, I think that's exactly right. I think we had a, that sort of similar inflection point of like, because we started out with like no plan and no, you know, we just knew we needed, we had this thing and we needed to like get it out there and grow it. So we started out just doing everything. It was like, yes to everything, which is why we ended up in car parking spaces and Hammersmith and all that kind of stuff.

But, but it always, it always led to something. And it was like the right thing to do. I believe just throw yourself into everything. And like, but you're right. Very quickly, that becomes overwhelming. Very quickly, you are doing stuff. It's like, you know what, we could have been better off doing this or that or the other. And I think once you kind of someone talks about this analogy of like, you're pushing a ball up a hill.

And then you go over the... You go onto the downhill bit once you've kind of got to a certain level. And then your job is to direct the ball rather than push the ball. Ooh, yeah, that's nice. And I think that was an inflection point that I think we kind of wrestled with a bit. Because I was still very much like, no, we're still going up the hill. And I think my brother was like, we're over the hill. We need to stop saying yes to this stuff at the edge and just focus on the pizzeria or making the product better or whatever it is. And so...

Yeah, I think we still, though, we still always get our heads turned by like shiny new stuff. It's always like, oh, but that would be cool. Wouldn't it be cool to do, you know, go and do Glastonbury? And I think the business now looks at us like, why would we do Glastonbury? We know we're not going to make any money. It's going to be super stressful. We haven't got, you know, we have to drag people out of the pizzeria. So we call loads of stress for people who aren't even at Glastonbury because they're all their teammates are in a field with you.

And no one, you're not going to get any publicity about it really. I just, I don't get it. And we're just like, oh, but you know, it's cool to do. Yeah. And like, I think, you know, and I kind of like that because I think, you know, another, I think mine and my brother's role, we now, we know we've always been founders. We've never been CEOs or whatever, but like,

I think our role kind of is to like throw in that stuff that's like the grown-ups all go like that makes no literally no sense why would we do that um and you know 90% of the time they're right and we don't do it but actually sometimes I'm like no no we really do actually think this will move the dial forward and like we will so quite recently we've just done our 10th birthday and we were like we need to go and like revisit you know re-establish the pilgrimage thing it's such a big part of our brand and we need to like reinvigorate our menu we've got to be staying ahead of everyone else

And we basically came up with this idea of we had another ridiculous vehicle to do it in. So we got a Vespa and,

And we worked with this amazing company to build a sidecar that turned into a pizzeria, like a transformer. And so we have the world's first Vespa pizzeria. And then we drove that to Naples and we drove it around Naples for 10 days, making 10 films about new menu items. And like, we had this incredible full circle moment where we'd first ever tasted pizza in Damocali, super revered temper of pizza in Naples. They allowed us to come into Damocali and do a pop-up.

in their restaurant, take it over for a whole night, put pizza pools out the door. And it was like, that's 10 years of us, like knowing those guys and working with the Naples community and like building relationships. And it's amazing. It's an amazing thing to have done. But like, I guess when we first proposed this idea, everyone was like, this is, this is nonsense. Like we definitely shouldn't do this. And actually it's been a, it's been a great way to reestablish a business. The amount of, the amount of sort of coverage we've got from it has been great.

Nice. Okay, so you're in this market for the £10 a day. You've got the pizza. Yeah. What's like the daily profit and loss of the business when you're a pizza food van in a market? So we sold pizza for £5. Yeah.

So £5 a pizza. It was quite a bit smaller probably than the ones we make now. But yeah, £5 for a margarita. And a great day would be £500. Didn't take cards. Okay. So didn't take cards. So £500 in cash. So 100 pizzas. 100 pizzas. That would be a good day. I think our record day ever was like 120 pizzas. Okay. On that market stall. Yeah. Then you'd go and do something like...

british summertime yeah and you could you could happily do 800 pizzas in a day ah and suddenly and you're probably charging a little bit more because it's a festival so that's when you're starting to make like real money yeah but you know again like it's such a weird thing we're like

No cards. So you're literally at the end of the day, you're there with a box of cash. Why didn't you take cards? Because it was 2012. There was no way to take cards on a market. I guess Stripe POS wasn't a thing. Didn't exist. iZettle and all that. Just like iZettle. Just about coming around then. But no, it didn't exist in 2012. Yeah. It did not exist. In 2014, I started using that for some stuff.

Yeah. But like, yeah, 2012 was like old school. It's proper old school. So like, you get like a world pay enterprise account or some shit like that to accept cards. Genuinely, one of our biggest challenges every day was what, how much change we had. Really? Like, did we have enough, like literally coins? And I still, I still fucking hate change to this day. I never have cash. I never, because I just remember the trauma of dealing with cash. And then I remember in 2013, so vividly, because we'd started a business on a Barclay card, I emailed Barclay card and said, Hey,

We're opening a pizzeria next month. I fucking hate cash. Can we just make it completely cashless? Can we be the UK's first cashless restaurant? And this was in 2013 and we had a meeting in their big tall tower in, I think it was in Canary Wharf or something like that.

And they were up for it. And then we got overruled by all of our investors. They were like, this is nonsense. Yeah. Why? They were like, you can't run a restaurant and turn people away if they only have cash. And I was like, we absolutely can. And they were like, no, no, you can't. You can't do that. It's too risky. Got overruled. And I didn't win that argument. I think I basically had that argument once a year, every year for seven or eight years. And only the first time I won it was COVID. Wow. Yeah. Okay.

Okay. And it's like, it makes no, cash makes no sense. It's like, you have to ensure, you know, you have people walking out of your restaurants after, you know, a busy weekend. You get a young guy or girl walking to the bank with like thousands of pounds strapped to their back through Soho. I'm like...

It's just not safe for that person, straight off. You have to pay more for the insurance. It's slower. It's a faff. You've got to have change. It's got to be stored on site. The whole thing is just a nightmare. It's like cards are just like dreamy. So yeah, all of our pizzerias now are cashless, finally. Thank goodness. So first six months, you're in the market stall. Yeah. So that's 2013, 2015?

March 2012 was when we sold our first pizza. Nice. And then how does the business grow over the next few years? What were the big... So we started at that market stall. £500 was a good day. And we basically do the market stall for lunch at least four days, mostly. We do it at least...

Four days a week. So £500 is a good day of which how much is profit? Like, well, what are the margins on a business like that? I think like quite honestly, we were investing all of our profit in like things in like doing other stuff. So obviously you go and do a festival. They take a pitch fee. So you guys aren't making any money? No, I think we took £100 each a week.

Wow. Okay. That was, that was the money we were making. So how did you sustain yourselves during that period? Uh, I was very lucky that my wife, uh, had a job. I mean, she worked also for an advertising agency. It certainly wasn't like an amazing, you know, high salary or anything, but that was, you know, that was a huge help. She wasn't my wife at the time. She was my girlfriend. Then my fiance. So I was, yeah.

uh we were boyfriend and girlfriend i had a stable job then we got engaged and then about a week later i was like i think i'm gonna quit my job and start a stupid pizza thing how did her family feel about this uh i think they were confused yeah slash um yeah again more eyebrow raises more like you sure this is the right thing yeah um i think just on that point i'd like to make this point i feel so so strongly that it is the right thing

I think, you know, if you're if you have that thing in you, whatever that is to once start a business, the longer you wait thinking that you're getting gaining invaluable experience, the more your life is like crystallizing into a thing. And you have a mortgage and you have, you know, kids maybe. And you have all these things that actually do make the risk you're taking a bigger risk.

And I just think, you know, that this idea of like, oh, you know, you I just think you've got to go for it early. If you're going to do it, do it as early as you possibly can. That's not so you can't do it later. And obviously, if you've got a great job and you've built up a big nest egg and that's a whole different conversation. But I don't know, it annoys me that we don't encourage people straight after their A-levels, definitely straight after university to go and have a crack at something.

I know, you know, you've got to have the money, but we didn't. We put it on a credit card. Like, I think having a crack then is the best way. Because I just don't think, I think the more you kind of learn what you think is the right way to do something, the more, you know, when the road's not that and you have to deviate, you don't deviate. You just go, no, but I really believe that this is the way to do it. Yes, I know that some people then create Facebook and that's fine. I get that. But most people don't. Most people have their, you know, their set worldview set

they set out into the market the market tells them you're kind of 60% of the way there but it's actually here and there's you know the more if you've done it for 10 years and you're super set in your ways I don't think you I think you're harder to deviate yeah one of the things I think I've heard you talk about before is founders naivety yeah yeah what do you mean by that

I just think so many things that we have in our business that I love about our business still came to pass because we'd never worked in restaurants before. We'd worked behind a bar in our parents' pub, but we'd never worked in a big restaurant company. And just the way you treat the team, how you kind of –

obviously famously restaurants are, you know, hard hours, long hours. We were always like, no one works more than these hours. If you work more than your contracted hours, it's a problem, not a benefit. You know, giving, splitting tips between chefs in front of house at the time. It was like, no, no, the front of house take all the tips. Sometimes they give some to the chefs and I'm like, well, what? So I've gone in, I've had a nice pizza. I leave a tip and the chef sees none of that. It's like, yeah, that's what happens.

And I'm like, that's nonsense. So we changed that and we split it 50-50 and we still do. And little things like that. And the more you kind of have experience in industry, the more you just kind of follow the herd. And that's, to me, not the definition of starting your own thing. We had a question from Patrick from our Deep Diver Telegram community, which is, what are the key things that you wished you knew before opening a food business? I wish I knew, I guess...

quite honestly more about the financial bit. Like I knew nothing about a P and L nothing about like, I'd never even heard of a P and L had no kind of concept of like VAT or like, and I think we tried to sort of plot some stuff out, but I did it so fundamentally wrong. And the fact is that like running particularly a restaurant business, understanding the numbers helps you understand the business and actually looking at the numbers, uh,

from afar you can tell a business that's like a happy business or a sad business just by looking at like the productivity for example so that their labor percentage how much how much money they're taking as a restaurant how much they're spending on labor yeah

You can tell which ones are teams that are struggling or like not delivering at the right productivity level or maybe a new team or versus the ones that are like absolutely flying, setting their ways. And they're the ones who are happy because everyone knows what they're doing. Everyone's got their role. They've got the tools to do the job well. Everything's flying.

And you can see that. And I think, you know, we just didn't know anything about numbers at all. I'm quite a numbers guy. Like I did, you know, lots of mass A levels. I did psychology at uni, which is all statistics and stuff. And so like kind of really delved into that. But we kind of, we spent a long time like...

learning it and then and then sheltering everyone from it because we were like well no one wants to know the numbers because it's just the boring bit like the fun bit is running the restaurant having fun and like creating a party atmosphere but the managers definitely don't want to see this so we'll we'll keep that away from them let them run the party and

And actually, that's so not true. Like numbers just free everyone up to know like what success looks like. I think you often think as a founder, I guess, that like a blank sheet of paper is everyone's dream of like, why don't you just go and do it your way? And, you know, we'll absolutely be here to support you. But like, you know, just go for your life. It's your pizzeria. And actually, no.

of people don't want that. Yeah. At the very least, they want some lines on the paper and they want, you know, maybe a couple of headers of like, how do you fill this paper out? And I think we started the business thinking that everyone loved the blank bit of paper. And what you've absolutely got to do is make sure there is definitely blank space for people to fill. But, and obviously everyone's different, but,

the vast majority want some kind of framework to work in. That's so true. Like this is a big realization I've had in the last like 12 months as well, where I thought like everyone on my team wants the same autonomy that I do. And so it's like, great. What that looks like is me not giving them direction because they can obviously make it up and they prefer it. And then literally everyone on the team is like, no, like we like autonomy, but we also like having a direction and we like knowing what success looks like to you because like fundamentally, if it's not like successful, it's like,

Similarly, like in the last six months, various people in the team, we've been saying to the team that, you know, we've got someone in charge of our YouTube channel and the podcast and social media and stuff. And we're like, we're saying to them, we want you guys to be the sort of the CEOs of your own departments. And then one, like an immediate question is like, cool, what's the budget? And we're like, huh, that's a good question. Yeah. I don't know, like unlimited. Well, it's not limited because like, like, you know, if we spent 2 million on this thing, you'd probably have a problem with it. Like, yeah. Yeah.

So what's the budget? I'm like, okay, yeah, this is actually worth us sitting down and figuring it out. And now people have a budget. Now they get it. They're like, okay, I've got 100K to play with to be able to do all this stuff. Yeah. So it's so interesting because I, for years, hate budgets. And I went to my kind of business mentor person, not a mentor, but like someone who I look up to. It's John Timpson. You've heard of John Timpson? So he runs, he was, he used to run, his son now runs it. Timpson's like shoe shops.

Are you coming across a Timpson test? No, what's that? A Timpson test is like a... From the Timpson shops. Yeah. It's like 10 questions that every manager should be able to answer about their employees. I've not seen this. Oh, it's really interesting. So my CEO coach uses the Timpson test...

With like the picture of the little Timpson shoe shop thing. It's like, you know, how many kids do they have? What are the names of the kids? When's their birthday? What's their favorite? Blah, blah, blah. That is 100% a John Timpson thing. And I've not heard it. Yeah. But like he, his whole thing is, um,

He calls it upside down management. So it's like the most important person in your business is the person serving the customer. And they should have as much autonomy as they need to do that job and to be able to make the customer happy. So I think every employee in Timpsons could spend 500 pounds of company money to write a customer complaint without any kind of approval process. They have no central EPOS. So every store, the manager knows how many key fobs you need to order that week, how many they sold last week. They have a budget.

The reason I got into this is the budget thing. They have a budget in the store of like, this is your sales target for the week and everything above that, they get a third.

of oh nice so like you know this is what you got to do but if you beat it you can have a big chunk of it yeah nice um but he was so i went out to meet him weirdly my grandmother decorated a house for him once in cheshire so she's like oh yeah i've met john timpson send him email somehow he agreed to let us go up me and my brother for a day and chat to him yeah just like such an inspirational guy but um he was like i hate budgets they're nonsense you write down a number on the 1st of january

And you're telling me that like the 31st of December that you'd have been right. And that it's, I literally do a budget because I have to, because the bank make me, but I make no one stick to it. I want, I want to know,

I want to know, I want people to just sort of feel it, I guess. And like, you know, I don't want them to be like punished for a number that I wrote down on the 1st of January, but also don't want to hold anyone back because I feel like if you hit that finish line and you're done, that changes your, changes your energy a bit. Whether he's right or wrong on the whole no budget thing. But I guess in your example,

You know, people do want to know what the number is. And I would say the best, you know, the best work that we've ever done, like creatively or, you know, that's moved the business forward was always done on a shoestring rather than like with a massive pile of money behind it. Yeah.

But you wouldn't... If the budget's 100 grand and some, like, absolute game-changer of an opportunity comes along and it's 200 grand, you wouldn't want them to be like, oh, well, this isn't going to... We'll ignore that because it's never going to work. This was my resistance to budgets because I was like, guys, think more about P&L. If you know, for example, we get X amount of sponsorship dollars per YouTube video. We know that that's what we get per YouTube video and therefore almost anything to make YouTube videos better we can justify because of the absurd amount of... But then...

yeah it's like i think it's it's useful for for the team to know it's like it's 100k rather than a million for example yeah but also that that 100k is like actually fairly malleable yeah i think that's the important thing is knowing it's malleable and we've you know as we've grown we've had to put in more budgets particularly for different departments yeah and i'm always like it's it's a guide it's a guide it's not like the target it's not you know if you spend more than it's a problem if you spend less than it you're going to get a pat on the back it's just a guide but

Yeah, you want people to go like, oh, but this is outside the budget, but it'd be amazing and take that kind of attitude. So Pizza Pilgrims now has been going on for 10 years. 10 years. What are the stats of the business these days, if you don't mind sharing, like revenue margins, that sort of thing? Yeah, so we're 24 pizzerias.

um which uh yeah it's more than i could have imagined when we had our little market stall 24 pizzerias uh we employ just over 500 people 500 yeah bloody hell which is madness yeah absolute madness we had our staff party uh last week actually our summer party and yeah that's the that's when you realize it the most when you see how much does it cost to do a party for 500 people

It costs a lot of money. Do you know what? It costs less because of the industry we're in. We did it actually with our good friends at Camden Brewery. Oh, nice. And they paid for all the beer. Yeah. So that's a big chunk of it. But no, it's great. It's good to do that stuff. What's interesting... Sorry, I keep going off on weird tangents. That's good. Young people are different.

to us and i'm not saying you're also a young person i'm very much middle-aged i'm 40 now and like they don't you know where is kind of slightly going out and having a lot of drinks and that was kind of like the that was that was the definition of a good time like kind of like getting a bit mashed up that's not that's not what everyone wants right now it's like there's a whole thing around like do young people really want a party or do they would they prefer to just have a day off

And I don't know, one half of me is like quite sad. We've got to work really hard, you know, in our industry, we are about, you know, showing people a good time and going out and that kind of thing. And so I think, you know, I think people who work in that industry do want to party and they do want to kind of engage with their peers. And it's great seeing like, you know, people move around different pizzerias and like seeing those connections re-established and stuff. I love it. But I guess the point I'm trying to make is the danger is that because I love it, does that mean that they love it? And you've got to be constantly aware of like,

Is that actually the best thing, you know, with that chunk of money, whatever it is, is that the best thing you can do for your team? Or actually would they prefer to do something more wholesome or would they prefer to literally just have a day off or what is it? And so you've got to kind of constantly work on that stuff.

but yeah 500 people uh you know with the incredible to see them all in one place uh we we've just finished our year end end of um june uh turnover of 27 million net of vat and with an ebitda of about 2.4 uh so like oh okay interesting

So 27 million top, like, like revenue basically. Yeah. After you paid VAT. Yeah. And then EBITDA is like your operating profit kind of. Yeah. Operating profit. Exactly. Of 2.4 million. Yeah. That's 10, 10% ish. 10% ish. Is that normal? 10% ish is kind of,

a sort of target for restaurants but it depends what you're doing right we we always well number of things we've always reinvested all of our profit back in we've never really taken it we've never ever taken a dividend or anything like that so you know we're very much like putting it back into grow yeah and i think we've always really wanted to grow at the right rate yep the endless debate we have with our board is about the head office percentage cost so you have a so you have a pizzeria yep if you take one if you've got 24 pizzerias take one unit yes

you know a standard pizzeria might take let's say they might take 30 to 40k a week they might take as in that would be your revenue okay sure so that's what at 1.5 to 2 million yeah revenue uh and you would hope that you would convert that 20 some of us convert higher than that some convert into ebitda okay so you've got your your um 2 million at 20 would be 400 400 ebitda uh and

And then obviously that all goes into a big pot. And then you have your central overhead, which is your head office that obviously is not, none of them are revenue generating essentially. So they're people who are like supporting, making sure that those businesses work really well. So that'd be marketing or finance, HR, legal, HR, HR operations also sits in there. So our operations team would have, you know, managing partners as they're called, would have five pizzerias that they're responsible for. Okay. Their cost would sit in head office rather than in that pizzeria. Okay.

Anyway, so the big debate is what percentage of your revenue you're spending on your head office. So if it was 10%, if your revenue is 27 million, you'd be spending 2.7 million on your head office. And from my point of view, I'm like, I want to grow right. I want to grow great. I want to make sure our business would meet on the bones and we're making the right decisions. We've just applied for a B Corp. We're on our 2030 goal.

journey, net zeros journey, all that. I want to make sure that the teams are supported, that we have the right training in place, doing all that stuff. And that costs a lot of money, all of that stuff. And therefore, obviously, your EBITDA percentage is reduced. Whereas you could absolutely run that business on a much, much smaller overhead. And you can make a lot more money on an annual basis. But I would suggest that your business will be at the best maintaining

And at worst, probably degrading. And so it's how do you... We've always been like, it's a long game. We literally remember when we were carrying gas bottles above our head on the market, we'd be like, it's a long game. Everything's about like, how do we shoot forward rather than like do best now? So it's kind of like... So the point I'm making is that

obviously we're blown away by where the business has got to, but it's all about reinvesting into the future and also making sure that we're doing it the right way. And we're not like breaking people or pushing people too hard or, or,

making it not enjoyable because yeah that point it's like what's the point yeah like you know you start a business because you want you want something that's better than the corporate job yeah exactly and i just you're not having fun along the way then if you're not enjoying it like what is the actual point um and so yeah we've always tried to do that that right and we've definitely made a lot of mistakes but broadly i think you know we've we've i don't think we've kind of done wrong by anyone along the way or tried to kind of exploit anyone or

you know, do anything. You know, we've, we've, we've tried to do it what I would call the right way, whether we always have, I'll let other people decide, I guess. And so I'm curious about this, this bottom line, actually. So, so top line and bottom line numbers, um, total, what was the, what's the growth graph looked like over time? Has it been like exponential or has it been like linear or like, has it been upsie downy? Uh, well, it's got a sort of, uh, it's got sort of COVID shaped hole in it, which, um, doesn't really help, but, uh,

Do you know what? It's been very slow. And I think what, well, it's been exponential, but not, I don't know, it's not kind of curving away to infinity. It's sort of like, it's sort of exponential and then it's sort of plateaued. I don't know what you'd call that. Exponential to plateau. I don't know. So it's definitely sped up, but we've never kind of like carried on the speeding up. But I think, you know, what always surprises me about, you know, people who start a successful business

business, particularly a restaurant business where like every site is so different and so like completely unique in its location and challenges and stuff. People open one really successful site and they're like, this is going really well. We're enjoying this like really good. You know, I'm on the ground a lot, blah, blah, blah. And then their next step is like, cool, I'm going to go and do four more next year. And I'm like, what, like,

Even weirder than that are the ones where people open one and it's not going well. And they're like, my solution to that is open another one. I'm like, I do not. I literally don't understand. We were always like, get one. I guess our problem was we wanted to make it perfect. So we were like, just get this one absolutely singing. We were never ready to do the next thing. And we had to be pushed to be like, guys, you're on marginal gains now. You need to move on to the next one. So we did one in August 2013.

We didn't want to do another one at all. And we got approached with this kind of insane offer that we wanted to turn down, which had opened in Carnaby Street in Kingly Court. And we were like, just don't think of time, right time. Anyway, we basically got pushed into it. Pretty much the only time I think our investors were like, you should definitely not miss this opportunity. So we did do that. That was the second one. But we didn't do another one after that for 18 months. So you're already at, you know, almost three years to do three. And then I think it was another year to do the fourth. So like...

It took us five years to open five. Yeah. And we're now at 24. So, you know, you do the math. So, yeah, it's definitely sped up. But, you know, it takes a lot of time to figure this stuff out. And I just think, I don't know, I would never be comfortable hitting the ground running. Plus, you know, inevitably, if you want to do four in the second year, you're going to lose control of your business immediately. Because that four restaurants is not going to, it's a chunk of capital. You've got one that's working well. I guarantee you're going to be a minority shareholder by the time that's done.

And that's not a good thing. And I just don't think, you know, again, if you've started a business to actually enjoy it, what's the rush? Yeah. One thing that I, so I love the, I love the whole long-term thinking. I guess in my, in my business, one thing that I struggle with, and I'd love to get your take on this is because our business is so reliant on the YouTube channel.

And it's like, you know, we've got more than like 4.6, 7 million subscribers now with a YouTube channel and another like 300K with a podcast. And it's like, things are growing, but at the same time,

you know, subscribers, there's a lot of churn. Like the people that watched me five years ago and broadly not the same people that are watching me now. Every day new people are discovering the channel and people are stopping watching the videos because they've gotten what they needed and they've left now. Yeah. Like I don't listen to much of Gary Vee's content anymore even though I loved it back in the day when I was first getting started. Yeah. And so there's a natural churn there. And so my worry is always like,

are we now at the peak is it are we gonna you know is is this the year where we're gonna stop growing is this the year we're gonna sort of be on the decline and so thinking long term feels like oh it feels scary because like gotta make sure we're like on 60 margins every single year because if we're not then it's like yeah like all the kind of the fear associated with that yeah do you do you did you feel that at all in your business or like i think you i think you

Definitely do. I think our way of growing is so different to you in that it's like, cool, we want to grow. Let's go and open a pizzeria in Manchester or Edinburgh or Glasgow or Bristol. That's growth. And yours is obviously you have access to all those people already. So it's like a very different approach. More and better and new. And try and not like default to new because actually more and better is like...

But I guess the most important thing is to understand why people watch you, right? And then trying to do more of that. More of that and better. And more of that and better. But I'm reading, I mean, just to, you know. But yes, absolutely, you constantly feel that. I genuinely believe that pizza programs has kind of got, you know, survived because I literally feel like every single day it could fail tomorrow.

like that's my kind of general sitting anxiety level of like but if we didn't do that thing that we probably don't need to do and it's going to be a lot of effort yeah but if we don't do it

We might. It might fail tomorrow. It might be over. I'm reading at the moment Paul McCartney biography. Oh, interesting. Well, I only read rock biographies. It's like my only thing that I read. Unfortunately, I read no productivity books. Radiohead t-shirt. Yeah, there you go. You see. And so I only read rock biographies. But he went to, I'm going to forget the name of the bloody philosopher now, but he basically at the peak of Paul McCartney, at the peak of the Beatles fame, he constantly felt like,

it was going to be a flash in the pan. Beatles will be forgotten. And his one thing he'd be left with was being a songwriter. So he was constantly, the Beatles kind of progression of their like studio stuff and like the songwriting becoming more and more complex in nature and was built around him going, I'm going to have to write songs for artists that I don't necessarily chime with. So I need to constantly be like,

doing new stuff in the studio to be pushing ourselves so that when this all disappears and everyone's forgotten about the Beatles, I know loads of different genres of songwriting so I can go and have a solid career. That was his driving thought. That's cool. That's helpful in some ways. Exactly. Anxiety-inducing in others. Yeah, no, exactly. And I think it's probably not the healthy, but he went to see this really, really famous

Oh, God, it's going to annoy me. Basically, it's like the most famous philosopher of his time. Alan what? No. No. Beginner of the B. Bernard... Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell. Yes. That's exactly who it was. He's written a good essay, In Praise of Idleness.

Right. Which I often read as like a solid, which is all about, it was written like the 1920s where he's like, yeah, everyone's going to stop working because like something and people are going to realize that they can just chill. And I'm like, oh, okay. That's exactly what it was, Bertrand Russell. And so anyway, he went to see Paul McCartney was like,

I've got this thing. It's kind of, as you may have noticed, it's kind of got quite big. It's probably like 1966 or something. You know, what, what do you think I should do? He was Bertrand Russell was 90 at the time. I watched, I do about it. I'm worried about this. I'm worried about that. Like,

And basically Bertrand Russell was like, you should literally enjoy it every single day. Make the most of enjoying it because it's insanely brilliant. And like, don't think about anything else. Just enjoy it to the max. And like, that's great advice. Like, I'm not saying we're anywhere near that level, but like, I love the idea that someone literally on top of the world is going, I'm worried this is all going to go wrong. And what do I do with this? And the advice from Bertrand Russell is just have a good time.

That's so good. That is so good. What happened during the pandemic and how did you guys deal with that? It was spicy. It was super spicy. Shall I take you through it blow by blow? Yeah, I would love it. Yeah. It was pretty punchy. So we went...

So we had February half term, famously really big for us. It's kind of the first like thawing of winter. Yeah, so it's 2020. 2020, February half term, like, you know, pizza and families is big. So it's obviously always a big week for us. Had the biggest week the company had ever had in February half term. How many stores did you have at that point? It's a great question. I reckon about 17. Wow, okay. Something like that.

So yeah, February 2020. And then our RMD, who is a total legend, but is definitely on the kind of like germaphobe scale. He's like, oh, you know, this thing is getting quite big. Do you think this is going to be a thing? And I was like, this is so not going to be a thing. Every time it comes around, there's some kind of bird flu. It goes away again. It's nonsense.

obviously we then had this like weird early warning system where a lot of people who work for us are italian and we started to get calls up from italians being like my mum's told me that i can't come to work well like uh obviously we'd seen on the news it was getting big and i was like okay so this is getting closer and closer to home but we were getting like the real like on your doorstep human reaction of like i'm i'm not i'm not happy coming to work i don't know what this is i don't know hey so this was growing and growing

And obviously, you know, we were increasingly aware of it. I remember I went around on a Sunday. I went to every pizzeria and just sat and chatted to the team. I was like, how do you feel about this? You know, anyone who doesn't want to work doesn't have to work. But obviously, we're not going to be able to pay you if you choose not to work. Totally respect the decision. There'll be a job there for you if you want. But, you know, we've got to keep going. Then we had this like absolute nuclear moment where Boris came out and was like, and this is probably...

early first week of March. Yeah. He basically announced on the news that like people shouldn't go to bars, restaurants or clubs. Yeah. They shouldn't do it, but didn't close us down. Give us any kind of like, you know, support. Yeah. So suddenly our revenue, which is already, we were definitely seeing the flag. We were definitely starting to see revenue come down quite aggressively by 7th, 8th of March. Then Boris comes out and was like, don't go to these places. And it went like through the roof, like absolute collapse. Yeah.

And so we were there still open, still trading, but with no one coming. Yeah. And it was like- Like literally no one. I mean- Or like little drops of- I think our revenue probably dropped by like 60 to 70% overnight. Yeah.

So, like, I mean, we were open and trading, but we knew that every single day we were losing money. Like, you know, there's just no way that's going to work. So, you know, restaurants famously thin margins anyway. So, you know, losing 10%, 20% is enough to cause you... Anyway, so that happened. We were like, what the hell do we do now? And basically we had to make a decision and we decided...

We did two things. One, we sat down and modelled out what we called the apocalypse scenario, which showed six weeks of closure, which was like obviously nowhere near what we ended up having. And we never forget we did it. We did the spreadsheet. It was the four of us senior bods in the room, did the spreadsheet, pressed enter. And it was like, oh, actually, six weeks of closure. That's all right. We can survive this. This is pretty good. And then our FD was like, oh, forgot to link cell A to cell B.

boom like business is gone in six weeks like nothing left

So why is it? Is it because you have to pay the rent for the stores and you've got to pay the staff? So we were modeling it with everyone still being paid. This is obviously before. We didn't know anything about furlough. Oh, yeah, that hadn't come around then. So we had this week of like, right, we know that the business will implode. So what do we do now? We've got all these stores. They're losing money. That's pretty scary. How did that feel when you saw the spreadsheet? It was totally horrendous. And I genuinely, genuinely did go to the human element of like,

what are we going to do? We can't fire all these people. What are they going to do? So we based it on the decision that our plan was...

Obviously, everyone was nervous of it. And it was like, we were getting a lot of like, well, why are you opening? You shouldn't be opening. It's not safe, blah, blah, blah. We were like, no, the best thing we can do for the most people in this business is to trade our asses off as much as we can, keep the pizzerias open as much as we can, push out left, right, and center, tell the world that we're open and trading. And if you want to come and have a pizza, we're here for you. And basically give as many people as many hours to work as we can and hope that this all blows over, basically.

And we did that and we got definitely a lot of pushback. We got a lot of people telling us that we were irresponsible and blah, blah, blah. But we were like, I think this is the best thing we can do for everyone. Anyway, about a week after that, we got the sort of your pizzeria is now needs to close. Everything needs to close and it's shut by the end of today. But in that same, I think that was the day, the day they told us we had to close. And it was like, you need to by 11 o'clock at night have closed everything up and gone and you can do delivery, but nothing else.

they also announced furlough. And we were sat in this meeting, I'll never forget it, all of us on Zoom watching Rishi reading out what furlough is and there was speculation of like, is it going to be 40% of salary covered? Is it going to be 60? I think Denmark had done 60. So we were like, seems unlikely it'd be more than that.

And then came out and said, we're going to cover 80% of everyone's salary. And I literally remember like we were all just in tears. We were all quite drunk drinking. Like everyone was drinking whatever their respective drink was in their house. Watching this happen, just being like, this is unbelievable. Like all these people are going to get 80% of their salary. So the government was covering 80% of people's salaries. So we went from, I think at that point we probably had,

people. Yeah. We went to 250 people working for Pete's Pilgrims to 248 people on furlough. Wow. And there

who were getting 80% of their salary. Which means that you just pay 20% or? No, they unfortunately got 80%. They couldn't afford to pay the 20. But we took the decision at that point because we'd had so much like, I'm scared to come to work. I don't want to be. We were like, we're not going to do delivery. We're just going to shut. And we're going to, everyone's going to get 80% of their salary. They're going to be at home. Obviously, I would wish it was 100%, but it's not. We subsequently topped up quite a few people to 100%, but it's difficult in an hour's business because...

obviously we did a lot of like what normal looks like but anyway we didn't have to let anyone go which is unbelievable uh everyone you know everyone stayed in the company we closed all of our pizzerias and we just we were just like sat there you know like okay so this is weird we're going to survive which was amazing because at the point you know there was one point was like well we'll be out of business by april yeah um so we were sat there and then we started getting after about two weeks of that just going like what the fuck just happened and

we started getting calls from managers being like you know what i'm really really bored and actually you know if you're thinking of reopening a pizzeria to do delivery only

count me in type thing nice that started to happen and me and james were obviously like chomping at the bit to get a pizzeria back open because we were like jesus we had all these pizzerias you know all those pizza ovens burning and now they're all off um anyway so we decided after we had enough of those calls from enough people we were like let's open one so we reopened victoria which had been our most recent opening um we had no we were in what you call a rent-free period so when you first take on a lease

you tend to agree a period of time with the landlord where you don't pay any rent which helps to cover some of your capital expenditure i think we were in sort of a year-long rent-free period on that store so it's like we'll open there there's no kind of awkward conversations with the landlord then about what the rent is because we're not paying rent anyway so it's irrelevant so we can just open it there's no kind of politics there it's a good location and we'll do the liveroo so that was the plan uh we started gearing up for that tap and we're all very excited to have one open again and then um my brother being my brother

He just called me one day and was like, I've had this idea to send...

to basically put the ingredients for a pizza into a box and send it through the post to someone and then they could make a pizza at home while they're stuck at home. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to send you one. So you basically like put two dough balls, tomato sauce, mozzarella, parmesan, flour, oil, basil, literally into a pizza box in little plastic tubs and then wrapped it in wool. There's this proper company called Wool Cool. So you put it, I mean, it's all pretty normal now really, but like wrapped in wool with an ice pack, posted it to me.

got it the next day through the post uh opened it up it like exploded everywhere just but it was cold probe the probe the dough and it was like safe to say you know refrigeration temperature it's like this this could be a thing so we were just looking i think for something to do on instagram that was a bit more interesting than delivery yeah so like why don't we make these kits and um this is before any restaurant meal kits existed this is like

no one was doing it it was the first one i'd ever seen and when we make these kits we'll put them up for sale uh we'll make 50 we'll put them up for sale on instagram when we first on the day we open victoria we'll make them available and then we'll make them in victoria with the team that are there and we can just post them to people and you know it's just a fun thing for instagram put 50 up for sale on that wednesday having promoted it i think on the monday and we sold the first 50 in like under a minute i plan to sell them in a week and we were like

okay, this is a thing. So then we did another 50 the next day, sold them in 20 seconds. And I was starting to get my head around Shopify and I could see that like 200 people had tried to put them in the basket in the sort of 30 seconds that they were available. And I was like, this is really interesting. So on the third day, we had this like sliding doors moment of do we try and scale this sort of

Obviously there's a thing here. Do we try and slowly grow it, build our ability to make them and slowly expand? Or do we just try and sell as many as we can? So we were like, let's just put 1,100 for sale. We basically put 1,100 of these kits for sale. So you will get them at some point before the 1st of May, bearing in mind this was the 1st of April.

And we're like, I think, you know, we'll just do that, see what happens. And we sold all 1,100 kits in 40 minutes. Wow. And it was, I think, still the most profitable hour in the history of Pizza Pilgrims. And suddenly we had this thing where it was like,

holy crap, this is a thing. And we were on like Sunday brunch and we were growing this thing. We then opened another pizzeria to try and meet the demand. We kept buying like chest freezers, a bit like that. And then we'd like get all these ice packs and we'd fill them, like fill these chest freezers with ice packs and be like, cool. So what, 12 hours later you go back, you come back, they're all frozen. They weren't. So that just, everything was just chaos. Restaurants and production facilities are like as far apart from,

each other as possible. But by February 21, we were doing 10,000 units a week of this at home. That's not bad. I mean, we were turning over more than we were in the restaurants before COVID.

It was mental. Bloody hell, that's cool. So literally, like, this stupid idea just grew and grew, and it meant that we had cash flow the whole way through. Everyone from, like, the Spice Girls to Stormzy to all these people made these kits. It was huge on Instagram. We grew our Instagram following by, like, 50,000 followers.

It was mad. And it saved the company. Remember, we had cash flow the whole way through. We were able to get a whole lot of people off furlough to help us make the kits. And they obviously got that 100% payback. And yeah, and we just we kind of feathered it in with and then, you know, we were reopening pizzerias and, and we still do pizza in the post today, as it was named.

But it's obviously like so much smaller than it was. But we have about 350, 400 subscribers who get it either once a week or once a month. Oh, it's a subscription box type thing. It now is a subscription. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it was just, it was, I mean, it meant that we never ever sat still in COVID. It actually like made, you know, certainly for the parts of the world where we don't have a pizzeria,

you know people in edinburgh have now heard of us where they wouldn't have done before yeah and uh yeah it was an amazing it was an amazing solution to the problem basically love it what are your thoughts on franchises i've had such a weird u-turn on this recently i was always like the word franchise just implies like no one gives a shit sort of like just grow it for the sake of growing it like corporate nonsense

Then I watched The Founder. Have you watched The Founder? No, I haven't. What is it? It's phenomenal. A, just because I love Michael Keaton with all of my heart. But it's basically about the guy who first discovered McDonald's and San Bernardino. Two brothers running this amazing restaurant. Ray Kroc. Ray Kroc, exactly. And then he's like something about the systems. It's a classic business case study of systems. It's got such a lovely, apocryphal start, though, where basically he, Ray Kroc, was a salesman of...

milkshake mixing machines that made five at once, not one. And it was famously like, no one needs to make five at once because it's just overkill. You just make one at a time and maybe you buy two machines if you need to make two. Anyway, he got this call from this restaurant in San Bernardino being like, we need eight of these machines. He's like, no, no, you can't be right. You mean you need to make eight milkshakes? No, no, we need eight five-spindle milkshake machines. So he drove out to see them and that was McDonald's.

And he was like, this is the greatest thing ever. And starred, you know, did the franchise. And I think, you know, it's a great film. You should watch it. But I guess the point is that like where I'm at with it, it's like done right. And with the right selection process, your franchisee is going to be so much more engaged potentially than like a manager of a store. Now, you know, not at our level, but like if you're...

you know if you're going like right here you go you can take over this mcdonald's person you know here's a new mcdonald's you can come and take it over it's your business you need to pay a percentage but anything you make is yours that person is going to like absolutely gun that business and like look after the standards and be amazing what they do potentially better than a manager and i think you know obviously it's about picking the right things i'm not saying that i'd

you know i don't think that you know we work super hard with our managers and they're super engaged and well i think they are they certainly seem to be and you know done right but i could see if you're like right we're going to open 300 of these it would be easier to do with franchisees and it would be and you'd get a better outcome for everyone um but you know it's it's a difficult one because restaurant restaurant margins are tight and like if you've got to give five percent to someone

That's a big chunk of your potential upside. Where it gets smart with McDonald's is they basically became the landowner and that's where they make all their money. What's the story behind Pizza Academy? So the Pizza Academy opened in March 2020, which is an inauspicious time to open a restaurant. But the idea was that we wanted to create

I hate the idea that people think of hospitality as like not a great job or a good career and that it's easy. There are two things that drive me mad. I personally believe you should go and do your university degree, then you should go and do a year working in a restaurant and you will learn so much about people, about teamwork, about like problem solving and just general life in that year. Whatever you then go on and do, you'll be better at it. So...

That idea combined with the idea that actually to start, if your first shift in Pizza Pilgrims is in Carnaby Street on Saturday night,

it's busy and intense and not a good place to learn. So you're like, wouldn't it be great if we could have a place where it was like a central point of truth about how we do stuff. It's a pizzeria as in like there are real live humans in there who are customers, but it's kind of quieter and we can kind of teach people the way to do it in a kind of controlled environment, but there is actually a real environment. And that was the idea for the Academy. So it's a space in Camden. It's, it's split into three. There's a, there's a small restaurant on the front that's open all the time. So like on a Monday lunch, um,

probably about 20 seats in the front and that's just always open. And then we have a front of house training section in the middle with a bar and like a projector. And like, you know, we kind of do core, we do everything from like mental health awareness to how to do your stock control to, you

We do a big warm welcome there once a month where all the new joiners meet me and James and we chat about the company and stuff. And then the back, we've got a back of house recruitment. So we've got like bleacher seating. You can watch and like learn about the new menu items. And it's just a big old space where you can learn about how to make pizza. Hmm.

And every head chef and manager who starts the company now starts through there. And everyone within their first month has to go there in some capacity to like do a course or like, I think, you know, you can apply to do more. So it's interesting that people who like really want to progress themselves are

will push to be there more uh and it's been it's been a really lovely little uh lovely exercise in trying to do something i mean it it makes it breaks even as a pizzeria which was a hard sell to the board because it was like we've got to spend a whole chunk of money building a pizzeria that will make no money but it will actually help the whole company but i generally think it has helped the whole company and i think we're still learning really what it's about

But I guess my aim is that every single person in the company can learn something there, whether it's your first day and you're learning the absolute basics or meeting me or James to, you know, you're a board member and you've been in the industry for 40 years. And actually we're going to get, we had a talk of, uh,

We had Fred Sirius from First Dates come and talk to us about hospitality there. We've had, we're going to get, I'm obsessed with getting someone from an airline because I feel like dealing with customers at 30,000 feet that are there for 12 hours that have paid you a lot of money that are difficult, that is tough. And so actually what are the things that they teach you, British Airways or Virgin Airways or whatever, to deal with that? Because actually our person who's paid 10%,

10 pounds for a pizza and it's only going to be there 30 minutes is easy compared to that person nice that's cool um i read something about you guys you employ homeless people and ex convicts and stuff what's the so that's what we do so that's a big uh a big part of what the academy is about as well so we've done uh two we've worked with two charities one called the passage they're based in victoria and another called only a pavement away and it's about

uh, exactly that giving, uh, ex convicts or people who've kind of, who are homeless or have been homeless, uh, kind of a second start in life, I guess. And I just feel so fundamentally that hospitality is a great match for that because it's almost all about attitude and not about skill. Obviously it's skilled to be a pizza chef and like, you know, you learn your skills, but we can teach you the skills. It's very much about your attitude. And I think, um,

giving people a chance to kind of come and, you know, rediscover themselves surrounded by people. They're not like on their own. They're not, you know, they're, they're in a support network is a great way to do it. So we're trying to do, we're trying to do more of that as we can, as much as we can to, to bring people back up the streets into, into work. Yeah. This is one thing that I've been thinking about a lot around what's the point of growing the business? Because like once you hit a certain profit margin, it was like, yeah,

like more money in our EBITDA sort of PDF is not that personally meaningful. And so I'm trying to figure out for our business, what is the, what's the service component, like giving back and stuff. And it feels kind of cringe talking about as well, because people like virtue signaling and all that shit. But I'm curious, like, how do you, how do you think about that? I mean, I absolutely have obsessed about this and I think it's, you know,

If you really push me, I'll get on to sort of failing of capitalism type thing of like we just always want more. And if more people knew where stop was, everyone would be better off probably. But I think in a very small way, that doesn't really work for something like Even Peace Pilgrims because you're right, there's no need for the company to grow. But if it doesn't grow, the whole mindset around it changes. Now, I think the question is, can it grow now?

Does it have to grow in scale? Could it grow in like stature or responsibility like that? But if it's not growing in one of those ways, everyone's going to lose interest or certainly I will lose interest. Yeah, that's the thing. And it's not giving genuinely, and I mean this in the kind of the most obvious way, like our great people need to be growing. And if you're, you know, if you're a head chef today, what's next? And if it's not, well, we've grown. So I now need to look after...

two other head chefs and move into a higher level or do you know what we now need a head of health and safety so i'm going to go and be that or we need someone in the creative food team i'm going to go and be that if you're not growing if we'd stopped at 10 we wouldn't have the money to have a food team or a health and safety person you have a third path third party health safety team but um so yeah i think you know at a small level you've got to grow to kind of give your team opportunity yeah

But the danger is you do just end up, you know, if you're doing that the wrong way, if you're taking then debt on to grow and then you've got to service the debt and then it's sort of a, it's a vicious circle. So we've always been very, very conscious that if we're growing, we're growing because we kind of feel like we're going to, we're going to break it at the seams if we don't. Yeah. Interesting. Um, I did a good interview with Steve, Steve Bartlett yesterday and he was saying that, um, one of the main reasons for their growth, like one of the ways he thinks about it is if a team member is not challenged in their job,

they will leave within six months. 100%. And so he's constantly like keeping an eye on like making sure everyone is one foot outside of their comfort zone to make sure there's like some level of discomfort so that they then feel like they're part of something. And, you know, just in general, like the feeling of growth for people is just an addictive feeling.

And I found that with my first business, I was teaching courses, helping people get into medical school. We like grew, we grew, we grew. And then 2015, 2016, we dipped in revenue. And all of a sudden it was just like night and day difference between how I felt about it. I was just like, oh God, now either we double down on this and really make it grow. But now my heart's not in it or I really like it. And growth, weirdly,

the stuff that I was doing to grow that business, I wouldn't have said it was particularly fun. It was like a lot of admin, a lot of logistics, a lot of bloody printing booklets and making sure they arrive at the Manchester hotel room and making sure the team members who taking the train, there's no strikes to get there on time. So we can teach the kids that are there. And yeah, but it was growing and there was something so exciting about the fact that it was growing. And as soon as it stopped growing, now all of those things are just like an absolute nightmare to deal with. And I'm like, why the hell am I spending my time doing this stuff? Have you found that at all? Like growth is addictive. Yeah.

It is addictive. And I think it's, you know, it's so hard. It's so hard to start again. And I think with COVID, you really did have to start again. And I think you really were like back down again, like rebuilding and like some of the stuff you thought you'd done, you were kind of having to pretty much fundamentally rebuild. So yeah, I totally, I totally, totally get that. And I think

you know the thing i say most is i just want to be learning like everything else is irrelevant if i'm not learning something i'm going to be bored and i think that applies to you know the vast majority of people in our business now we really want to employ people who are driven by that because i think a lot of people you know i think there are two types of people who will come into you know

come into our business and be a KP, which is like, you know, washing the pots and like you're starting rung on the ladder. And one of them is like, this is the starting rung on the ladder. And I'm looking at the prep chef going, how do I be a prep chef? And then I'm looking at the junior chef being like, how do I do that? That, that is the person I think, you know, we want to have in pizza pilgrims really. But then there are plenty of people who just, you know, some, some of them work for us for many, many years. You don't want that. They want, you know, work is not what drives them. They come to work, they do their job, they go home and what drives them is family or, or,

you know, community or, you know, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. But like, so you've got to be able to do both. You've got to, you've got to accept that some people are just not built that way. They don't want that constant next thing. They just want, you know, to know what, to know what their job looks like, to get a fair pay for it, take it home and spend that how they want.

And I think it's a hard line to walk. But I mean, I always said we'd never go past 15. And here we are, 24. So, you know, either I'm a liar or I'm an idiot or I don't know. But yeah, it's just making sure that we've been lucky and that we've never got where it gets bad is when you're doing it for the wrong reasons. When you're like, oh, this one didn't work. So I'm going to do two and I'll get economies of scale and then it will work. It's like, no way. Or I've taken out a massive loan and it's not working. So I'm going to have to keep going.

to you know that's that that's the bit that if that's driving you then you should probably stop

Yeah, there was a good quote I heard at a business conference, which is that, like, if you think you're a bad parent with one kid, then for God's sake, don't have a second one thinking you're going to be a better parent. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Although there is a weird thing about like, you know, obviously not in the very early days, but like the kids will look after each other. So like, maybe the businesses are doing that. Maybe having more of them just means there's more of a network. But it's interesting for us, sorry to draw that out, but it's interesting for us.

Building that network in London is a real thing. The pizzerias can help each other out. I've run out of that. Cool. I can get that sorted for you. No problem. Then you have a new thing where we opened in Nottingham. We have one pizzeria in Nottingham and it's not near to any of our other pizzerias. They are very much more an island. That person has to be so much more on it. There's no room for, do you know what, I've run out of X because no one can save you. It's a very different mentality when you realize having one is there's nowhere to hide. Yeah.

How do you balance family life? You're married, two kids, and also founded a business in the food industry that's grown for the last 10 years. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely not easy, and I definitely don't balance it as well as I potentially could. I mean, I...

I guess my problem really is I'm kind of there a lot as in like physically at home. I try and get home and sort of, you know, certainly be home for bedtime and all that kind of stuff. And don't, you know, I don't leave the house at six. So, you know, I see the kids in the morning and the evening and I could take them to school quite a lot and that kind of thing. But am I like mentally there?

No, quite a lot of the time because my phone's going off and, you know, I've got a thing and I'm there with the kids, but I'm actually replying to an email or dealing with some kind of emergency. And I think that that's been the problem for me. And certainly what my wife would say is like, you know, well, she basically is like, if iPhones existed when we met, we wouldn't be together. Yeah.

Which, I mean, I know they did exist, but I didn't have one. And I think, yeah, you know, they are a little like, they're a little attention-sucking nightmare, aren't they? Not kids or business? Both. I was talking actually specifically about iPhones. There's no escape. Like there's no escape from it. And it's, you know, you've got to learn to turn it off. And I'm trying my best. Have there been any sort of rules or systems you've added to your life that have been helpful in maintaining this sort of harmony or balance?

I mean, I'll be honest, I've tried like almost all of those like things, you know, all those kind of productivity tools. I have never found, I've always found it a bit like doing a sort of revision timetable, which I'm just like, I feel like I'm just putting off doing the stuff rather than like actually, I'm spending all the time, you know, color coding it and making it all perfect. So actually, you know, I've,

It's interesting at the moment, I'm just at this weird transition, which I'm trying to sort of resist of like, we now have a sort of a lady who looks after the

uh management team diaries essentially and i've always done that i just don't really understand why it would help me to bring in someone to help me with this because i feel like i know exactly what's going on in my week yep i know where my priorities are and what's and i feel like i'm gonna have to like communicate all of this to someone else yeah for them to do it i don't i don't really feel like it's gonna make my life easier so i've sort of resisted that idea of the future

But yeah, I just use... I'm obsessed about my calendar. I have a family calendar and a work calendar. And they, you know, making sure that they talk to each other. Like, you know, everyone's aware of what's going on. My wife works. She works for... She also works for a restaurant business. She works for Dishoom. Oh, yeah. So she, you know, she's busy as well. So yeah. Yeah.

Sadly, no exciting kind of life hacks in there. I think staying close to it and not letting someone else manage your diary, to me, that makes no sense. Final question. It comes from Arnav from our Telegram community. What lessons have you learned from running Pizza Pilgrims that you could share with aspiring entrepreneurs? I think it's such a cliche thing, but no one knows what they're doing, especially in restaurants. So don't overthink it. Like,

If you've got an idea and you like it, think of any way you can test it that will give you a bit more insight into whether the idea is a goer, whether you actually enjoy it, whether it's something that there's a need for it without quitting your job. So you don't have to throw everything in on day one. Just start testing the fences a little bit.

But the other thing is don't go away to my mind like, you know, I could have gone, right, I want to run a pizza company. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go and work for Pizza Express for 10 years and figure out exactly how they do everything. And then I can go away. And I don't think that would have set me up anymore for success than just having a crack and doing it your way.

And I think if you are that way minded, if the white blank piece of paper is something that excites you, you'll figure it out because that's how you're built. If you're a person who likes the structure and likes to know their pay packet lands on the last Friday every month and likes to know that there is a team of people out there to help you, I think you've got to think really, really hard about whether you want to run your own business. Because I think there's definitely a danger. I love that it's celebrated more and that like, you know, entrepreneurship, which is not a word that I particularly love.

is kind of now genuinely considered something to aspire to rather than something that only crazy people do. I feel like that has changed. Entrepreneurs are now very much put up on a pedestal, whereas I think 20 years ago that was not the case. It was your Gordon Gekko's that was on a pedestal 30 years ago probably. And so I think it's good that it's on a pedestal, but I think the danger is that it's like,

it's for everyone or you know that it's like the ultimate goal and i i just i don't think it is i think it's fantastic for certain kinds of people but it is it has downsides and it's you know it's not you know we can't all be the guitarist in led zeppelin right like everyone wants to be but and it looks cool but it had i'm sure it had some massive downsides and not everyone can do it and so like i i really think you know it's a great thing to try and like you know try it in the most you know if you want to start a food business go and do it like

a weekend market for one Saturday and see if you enjoy it because you know you might hate it so yeah I think I think it's I guess my actual lesson of the deep in there was like don't overthink it don't think that everyone knows everything you don't do don't know and like give it just give it a shot like what's the worst that could happen nice it's a great place to end this Tom thank you so much

- Thanks man. - All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching.

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