By Alex Koons
Over the course of four years, I was lucky enough to interview more than 160 people in the pizza industry. Some of them were people I had watched and admired from a distance for years. I made a lot of friends, had a lot of fun and made a ton of memories.
But more than anything, I learned. As an operator, it’s not very common for other operators to let you completely into their world. Restaurants have historically been secretive places. There were always stories of guys ripping the labels off their tomato cans before taking out the trash or protecting a dough recipe that had been passed down for generations.
That mentality still exists, but the pizza industry has changed dramatically.
COVID brought a heavy injection of new players into pizza. People started making pies in backyards, apartments, breweries and pop-ups. Social media gave them an audience. Suddenly every city could become a pizza city, and the old idea that there was a “right way” to get into this business started disappearing.
I think that openness is a good thing.
I’ve been in this industry for a long time, and the longer you do anything, the easier it becomes to get hard-headed. You start believing you know the right way to make pizza, run a restaurant, manage people or build a business.
After 160-plus conversations, the biggest thing I learned is that there is no one right way to do any of it.
There is no single road to success. There isn’t a menu item that is going to catapult you into stardom. There isn’t a dough recipe, oven, location or marketing strategy that guarantees anything.
Success is built on a thousand tiny decisions.
Every operator I talked to had their own collection of those decisions—the little wins, mistakes, pivots and risks that helped them stay open, create growth and build teams. That also made me think a lot about judgment.
We make judgments about other restaurants and operators constantly, often without having the information necessary to make them. Or worse, we pick the information that supports the judgment we already wanted to make. A lot of that comes from insecurity and ego.
Having so many operators open their doors to me and share their “secrets,” struggles, pain and excitement changed the way I look at other businesses.
What we get to do is pretty special.
We get to cook for a living. We get to lead for a living. We get to create something and then watch people walk through the doors and experience it.
Being your own boss isn’t really about being a “boss.” You’re in charge of the success of your ship. There is a tremendous amount of pressure in that, and an incredible amount of care has to go into making it work.
That’s probably why I became so interested in the people who bet on themselves.
They teach themselves. They fail. They adjust. They keep going.
And it’s through those people that I grew myself.
I learned to care less about certain things and more about others. I learned to try things that made me uncomfortable. I learned that people I had admired for years were ultimately just like me. Once we were sitting across from each other with microphones between us, I realized most of them were trying to figure it out too.
That’s something social media makes very easy to forget.
Online, everyone else’s restaurant can look busier. Their food looks better. Their new location is opening while you’re dealing with a broken refrigerator. Their video gets a million views while yours gets 200. It’s incredibly easy to convince yourself that you’re behind.
Sitting across from operators for four years taught me that we’re all dealing with our own version of the same thing.
We’re figuring it out.
I highly recommend looking for the weaknesses in your business and don’t be afraid to question your own answers. That’s how you continue to grow and push yourself and the people around you.
The biggest lesson I learned from having a pizza podcast is that there is always something to learn from everyone, especially the operators you might not expect to learn from.
One of my favorite sayings is that getting to know someone is like traveling. A conversation can take you into someone else’s world.
For four years, I got to travel into more than 160 of those worlds. It’s been almost five months since I recorded my last podcast, and I didn’t expect to miss it this much. I miss the connection. I miss the opportunity to listen and laugh. I miss giving someone a platform where they could teach me—and hopefully the people listening—a thing or two.
Maybe sometime down the line I’ll have to pick the microphone back up.
Until then, I’ll keep learning from everyone around me.
Alex Koons is the owner of Hot Tongue Pizza and co-owner of Purgatory Pizza, both in Los Angeles. He also hosted the podcast, Pie 2 Pie.
