By Charlie Pogacar
Editor’s note: This article is based on an episode of The Heroes of Hospitality, an online documentary series produced by restaurant marketing consultants Matt Plapp and Kamron Karington of America’s Best Restaurants. The episode, titled “From Burnt Out to $5 Million,” kicked off season 2 of the series. Click here to watch the full episode.
Avery Ward didn’t have a lot of interest in running the family business, Little Italy Ristorante in Groveport, Ohio. His grandparents, Chuck and Janet Ward, had opened the pizzeria in 1979, and Ward had watched his dad, Nick, work the business his whole life.
Ward was busy at his dream job at Apple when fate intervened. In 2015, his father suffered a brain aneurysm. According to Ward, he was suddenly faced with few options. Selling the business was not one of them: His grandparents wouldn’t go for that. He could let the business go bankrupt or shut it down, but again, his family had other ideas.
Reluctantly, Ward took over the business. He was determined to run it differently than his father had, but six months later, he recognized he was headed down the same path.
“My dad…very much so had an old-school mentality,” Ward said. “It was: How hard you work is how much you’re worth, and you know you’re the only guy who can do everything yourself because if you’re not doing it, it’s not going to be done right. I said to myself, I don’t want to do this.”
In order to escape the cycle, Ward sought professional advice. He connected with David Scott Peters, a restaurant coach, and explained the challenges he faced. He also teamed up with Matt Plapp—PMQ columnist and CEO of America’s Best Restaurants. “I always knew I wanted more,” Ward said. “I just didn’t know how to get out of my own way.”
Peters was struck by Ward’s willingness to change—he was very coachable, in other words. “Avery is a fish to water,” Peters said. “Faster than most people, he executed everything. He never said, ‘No, something [can’t] happen.’ He was always open to change and becoming better.”
In a matter of months, Ward had successfully delegated tasks that his family members always took on themselves. He removed himself from the day-to-day grind that so many pizzeria operators fall into. This is the story of how Avery Ward took a $500,000-per-year pizzeria and turned it into a $5 million-per-year operation, as told in Heroes in Hospitality, a YouTube series produced by Plapp and Kamron Karington.
“If we show his journey,” Peters said, “we could show other operators: This is what the apex can be.”
Related: Matt Plapp: Stop Phoning In Your Promotions (and Start Owning Them)
A New Restaurant Designed With Purpose
As Ward made changes, his sales grew. So, too, did his aspirations. He became intent on designing a restaurant that would take Little Italy to the next level. The design would be purposeful: He would create a better customer experience and connection with each guest.
In “Heroes of Hospitality,” Ward demonstrates to Peters and Plapp how his restaurant design welcomes guests when they visit. “It all starts right here when you walk in the front door,” Ward said. “Being greeted the right way, with the right person, with the right smile is a huge part of the experience. We want to make sure [every guest] gets greeted quickly and gets sat right away.”
Ward trained his host and hostess to probe each guest with questions like “Have you eaten here before?” The waiting area, meanwhile, has a huge mural on the wall that tells the story of the shop’s history.
“Some of the early work we had done building that brand was telling our story,” Ward said. “When we were transitioning from the old location to the new one, [Plapp] said, you need to tell your customers about your past: Where you’ve come from and where you are today. Just really painting that picture that this is a family business.”
The mural shows the shop’s humble origins and evolution from a grocery store with a meat counter to the pizzeria it has become today. It gives guests an immediate understanding of Ward’s role in the business and how he is honoring his family running the shop.
Nearly all of the space in the new restaurant has a purpose. The hallway to its bathrooms displays large text that reads: “Tag us, get featured!” The shop’s social media handles reside below the text. Above the text are Polaroid-style photographs of customers enjoying their meals at Little Italy.
Peters marveled at how Ward capitalized on a branding opportunity in a space where guests might linger as they wait for the bathroom—or notice it as they walk out. “It communicates a message to your guests,” Peters said. “Because not only will they want to take pictures [and tag you], but they’re learning as they come in and out of the restrooms how to find you.”
Related: Matt Plapp: How to Get Customers to Join Your Pizzeria’s Loyalty Program
“That’s what it’s all about—connecting with the community in new ways I didn’t see as possible before,” Ward said.
If there was any doubt that the intentional design would drive sales, it was immediately erased on opening night in the new space. Ward had hoped to see a 30% to 40% jump in sales. Instead, sales doubled.
“We quickly realized, holy [moly]—we’ve got some hiring to do,” Ward said. “Because we couldn’t keep up with the volume on both the preparation side but also the service side.”
The Checklists
Following the advice of Peters’ coaching program, Ward implemented checklists in the original store. One of the first was a step-by-step list of how to clean the bathroom. Previously, Ward had spent 25-30 minutes training somebody on a very specific bathroom-cleaning process.
The first time he handed a new team member a tablet with the bathroom-cleaning checklist, the team member came back a few minutes later and said, “I’m done.” Ward went into the bathroom and was thrilled to find it cleaned exactly the way he wanted it to be. “I couldn’t find a single issue in that bathroom,” Ward said. For Ward, that was a light-bulb moment: These checklists really might work. He began to apply them to every role in the business. Each team member had specific duties that were suddenly clear—and the checklists helped hold them accountable to those duties.
As critical as the checklists were, they became all the more essential once Little Italy had moved into its new space.
“You embraced checklists from the very beginning,” Peters said addressing Ward in the “Heroes of Hospitality” video. “But I remember the challenge you had was that the old checklists were no good any more. But here was your brand-new facility…there was this mad dash to get it back up to standard and have everything laid out so that you could impose your will.”
Ward’s main concern was ensuring that new hires learned the same vital lessons his established team already knew. “Our core group of people that came with us were used to that culture of closed-to-open, and that mentality that everybody pulls their fair equal weight,” Ward said.
“So we talk about checklists all the time,” Peters added. “And I talk about how employees love rules but what they hate is the inconsistency in management enforcing those rules and checklists…that way everybody knows they’re being held to the same standards.”
Scale It
To cut back on food costs, a lot of pizzerias spend time counting pepperoni slices or using measuring cups for ingredients like cheese. Ward’s operation takes it a step further. A set of scales in the kitchen weighs out every single item that goes on a pizza, with digital recipe cards that identify the correct portions.
Ward told Plapp and Peters that this practice has cut his food costs by six points. “An extra two ounces of cheese adds up,” Peters said. “If you can control that portion—the over-portioning, the waste, those kinds of things—you ensure…that your guest gets the same exact dish they’ve had 500 times before. So consistency builds business.”
Ward implemented other technologies in his kitchen at the new restaurant. In the documentary, he shows Plapp and Peters his dough room, a temperature-controlled environment perfect for proofing dough. Dough balls are flattened via machinery. Pasta is machine-cut rather than hand-cranked.
“We were rolling every single piece of noodle by hand,” Ward said. “We were making up to 1,500 pounds a week of pasta by hand. And now, with this machinery and obviously the growth of the restaurant, we’re doing 3,000 and 3,500 pounds of pasta per week [by] having the right equipment and then obviously the volume of the business growing.”
This is one of the many areas where a viewer might identify a “chicken-or-the-egg” type of conundrum. Did investing in new technology help Little Italy sell more pasta? Or did Little Italy start selling more pasta, which allowed it to invest in new technology? This leads us back to the theme Plapp, Peters and Ward are driving home in the documentary: First you have to get out of your own way in order to grow the business. You can’t possibly grow it if you’re focused on the day-to-day grind.
“A lot of people are going to watch this,” Plapp said at one point. “And they’ll think, ‘I could never go from $500,000 to $5 million. But you did it in seven or eight years.”
“If I could grab every single restaurant operator and shake them,” Peters said. “[I would say]: get out of your own [freaking] way. Stop limiting your beliefs that you cannot do something, that it’s someone else’s fault. ‘It’s the government; it’s my vendors; it’s my employees; it’s my customers.’ It’s you: You are the leader of your restaurant, and if you follow what Avery’s done, he has taken ownership of any problem in his business…there’s a way to fix it, to change it, to do something different.”
Getting Personal
Plapp is especially impressed with the way Little Italy now markets itself via social media. Ward went from strictly posting announcements like menu changes, specials and upcoming events to mixing in personal stories. Little Italy’s Facebook feed now showcases team members and their stories, as well as nuggets about the pizzeria’s history.
There was a moment that changed everything in this regard. Ward posted an old black-and-white photo of a young version of himself and his dad in the restaurant. The post celebrated the restaurant’s time in its original location, noting that Little Italy would spend the week celebrating its history prior to closing up the old restaurant and moving to the new one.
“Nick [Ward] remains a guiding influence at the company, and his values passed down from his parents continue to shape everything we do,” Ward wrote about his father. “From our family recipe, scratch-made pastas, meatballs, dressings, sauces, to the way we treat our associates like family—and especially the way we always strive to give back to our community.”
The post went viral in the Groveport community, and it changed the way Ward viewed social media. “And it was the first true sign of me seeing people connect with the person, not the company, because it was my story to tell,” Ward said of the moment.
“[Some operators] think the customers just wanna come eat pizza with you, but there’s a deeper connection when you’ve got a restaurant like Little Italy that started [with] the grandmother making food on the side at a grocery store—that’s something people need to know about,” Plapp added. “They need to know that you grew up in the kitchen. They need to know that it’s Grandma’s recipes. They need to know that you went to school down the street, that you and your family are involved in the community every day. That’s what makes you different from the giant chain down the street that’s got millions of dollars, and that’s when [Ward] took a whole other approach to marketing that nobody else has.”
To hear more about Ward’s journey—and other inspiring restaurant operator stories—check out the Heroes of Hospitality home page.
