By Rick Hynum
When Hengam and Matt Stanfield bought the failing San Antonio restaurant that would become Mattenga’s Pizzeria in 2014, they assumed it had cash-cow potential. But by 2019, even after opening a second store the previous year, they were seriously looking at selling and getting out.
“Obstacles, challenges, you name it,” Matt told PMQ. “AC goes down in the summer, and it’s 105 degrees? Yep, we had that. Walk-in goes down—what do you do, who do you call? Yep, had that. The kitchen is too smokey? All staff walk out? Yes, we’ve had that, too. Bomb threats from former staff members? We’ve had that. We’ve had the gas turned off by a former employee’s relative. Oh, yeah. The list of stories, it’s like a Dilbert comic.”
Yet the Stanfields persisted. Not only did they power through those obstacles, the couple—both former engineers by training—has grown Mattenga’s at a stunning clip in the past few years. In 2022 alone, they opened four stores. Today, the total stands at eight, with store No. 9 expected to open in mid-September and a tenth location possibly coming before the end of 2024.
“It has been our view to say, ‘Hey, go big or go home,’” Hengam says. “I mean, if you’re going to do it, you might as well go big.”
Safe to say, you can’t swing a dead cat around the streets of San Antonio nowadays without smacking a Mattenga’s employee upside the head (please don’t try—just take our word for it). But, for all their success, the Stanfields aren’t making it up as they go along. Born perfectionists, they have built their business around systems, processes and formulas proven to work. They shared many of their strategies—including extensive use of checklists, employee time trials for stretching dough and slicing veggies, even quizzes to test a new staff member’s knowledge of the menu—in PMQ’s June-July 2024 cover story. But, due to limited space in print, that article didn’t cover everything we learned from them. In this Q&A, Hengam and Matt talk about their 3xWin philosophy, the 10-20-30 rule for ensuring guest satisfaction and having fun in a tightly structured, business-first environment.
PMQ: Key to Mattenga’s success is what you call 3xWin, inspired by Kip Tindell’s book, “Uncontainable: How Passion, Commitment and Conscious Capitalism Built a Business Where Everyone Thrives.” Tell us what 3xWin means at Mattenga’s.
Matt: So we stole that from the Container Store—if you’ve ever read that book, it’s fantastic. The bottom line is that the team must win, the guest must win, and the company must win. All three have to take place in order for the company to be successful and grow. The guest has to win first because they’re paying all the bills. So you’ve got to make sure they get the right food with their order and get it when they expect it, and they’ve got to be taken care of. They’ve got to receive that hospitality experience that they’ve come to expect. And the team, our employees, should have that same experience. They’ve got to win, too. As an example, say the guest wants some free item, but it’s really hard for the team to prep that item, and it takes too much time. Now the team is losing while the guest is winning. So that’s not a good decision. And if the company is not making a profit, if the company isn’t being successful, it’s not a good idea.
PMQ: What do you mean by a free item?
Matt: Sometimes people will call us literally demanding free food for some event because of our reputation in the community or something like that. So they might win. But the team may lose because the client is being very demanding and difficult, and the company’s also losing because they want free food. So it’s simply a no in that case.
PMQ: You’ve also mentioned your 10-20-30 rule. Can you tell us about that?
Hengam: Before our POS was able to automate this, we had a team member track and document the ticket times as they were being fulfilled. So we came up with our 10-20-30 rule, which is, dine-in must be served within 10 minutes, phone order pickup within 20 minutes and deliveries in 30 minutes out the door. So these are our standards for our ticket times. Everybody needs to know that. As a company, you’ve got to create standards, and you create training to make sure your people are equipped to hit those standards. Then you have management systems to hold them accountable, the checks and balances. So this is an ongoing process.
PMQ: So that rule aligns nicely with the 3xWin formula; it’s a win for the customers and for the company. But much of it depends on building a winning team that really clicks. When it’s time to hire team members, what do you guys look for?
Matt: We try really hard to hire our customers. Even on the application, we ask, “Have you eaten our food?” How can you apply to work with us if you don’t know how good our food really is? When you hire fans, that helps because they already know what they’re serving. We’ve been in business long enough that some of these kids first had our pizzas when they were 10 years old. Now it’s seven years later, and they’re applying for their first job with us. We’ve got one girl who’s a manager now. She started with us when she was 15, and it’s been four-and-a-half years.
Hengam: A lot depends on the position that we’re hiring for. For our folks who work in the front—the servers, our customer-facing employees—we really want them to be bubbly and smiling. And we set that expectation upfront: “You are going to be pushed to smile and to be friendly.” We always say, “Hey, go get the names of two customers in the dining room and come back to us.” That’s important for a server position for sure. For our kitchen, maybe not as much. If you’re washing dishes, it’s OK if you’re, like, a quiet high schooler, someone who is happy not really seeing or talking to anybody. So it’s just really about discerning the position you’re hiring for and each candidate’s personality. Not everybody wants to be on camera (for video posts on social media), so we’re just leveraging what we have.
Matt: We’re not doing the interviewing, hiring or screening ourselves anymore. But we’ve found that the person who does the hiring makes a huge difference because they tend to hire people that have personalities similar to their own. So, if we’re looking for those bubbly servers, we have the bubbly people doing the interview. They will get turned off by the person who is their opposite, while they will appreciate someone who is enthusiastic, ready to just go and do it. So that has made a big difference. If you have someone who’s very good in the kitchen but doesn’t have that personality to engage with a guest in that Texas-style hospitality way that we need, they should not hiring servers because they’re going to hire somebody whose personality is a little bit more low-key. That’s not bad, but that’s not what the guest is paying for.
PMQ: Once someone gets hired, judging from your social media, which is some of the best we’ve ever seen, Mattenga’s looks like a really fun, high-energy place to work. How do you create that kind of environment for your employees?
Hengam: I think a lot of it goes back to culture, and that comes from the top. As a leader, as a manager, when you are there, present, and the shift is very stressful—which happens to all of us—you set the tone so the team knows how to handle the stressful situation. So you can’t be really bubbly during those times, but you can say, “Hey, guys, we’ve got this. Let’s get through. I’ve got five more [orders]! Hey, let’s do this!” We do have stressful shifts, of course, like Friday nights. Our people get yelled at by customers, delivery guests complain if there weren’t enough black olives on their pizza. We get all of that. But it goes back to having a culture to manage those stressful scenarios—knowing what makes people quit and really processing those stressful times, with our managers being there [with the team] so they know you’re not a hands-off leader. Walking through it with your people and building that team during the stressful times. So it seems like it’s more fun, but we have hard times, hard shifts.
Matt: You need to have a balance. We’ve gone back and forth. Sometimes, if it’s too much fun, there’s not enough work getting done and people are not happy or they’re not being productive or guests aren’t being served. So it’s a fine line, and I would not say that we hit it every time or even often enough for our standards. But when you do hit it, you’ve got that manager who can tell somebody that they’re in trouble for being late, or, on the other hand, say, “Hey, let’s go have a good time. We’re going to have ice cream because we just killed it tonight, and it was Halloween. We’re going out to this restaurant or to run go-karts.” It’s about that balance of having fun, but, on the other hand, “We’ve got to get the work done, get your inventory in, get your numbers in.” There’s tension between the values of that engineered process versus the hospitality and fun that has to be there to engage customers. It’s give and take.
PMQ: So it really seems like your background as engineers has made you guys better restaurateurs, even though the two fields seem worlds apart.
Hengam: To support and sustain your business, there needs to be a lot of structure. To build a tall building, you need a solid foundation. So over and over we tweak these systems. You just continue to improve and tweak and look at what works and what doesn’t work. Because you won’t know what you don’t know. So, I would say, people need to start where they are and constantly tweak. Investing in your business’s systems is what gives you the freedom to grow. Whether you have one location or 10, the path to freedom is the same. And that is for things to operate without your consistent involvement. That’s when you have a machine that can drive itself, without you needing to push it all the time.
