Do Cool Sh*t (18 page)

Needless to say, the
entire first month we were open was rough. Once the
Daily Candy
article hype was over (and before the big Food Network show was coming out in January) the dust settled and I found myself with the opposite problem—slow traffic coming into the restaurant during Christmastime.

Ninety-five percent of restaurants close in their first year, and many times within the first six months of operation. And usually it’s because the restaurant doesn’t deliver on its promise. Either the food, service, atmosphere, or the overall execution doesn’t work. Most people will not try the same place twice if their first experience wasn’t positive. Unless you’re family or a close friend, you will not give the business the time to figure things out and get it right. This is why having a soft opening was so critical! Rich’s advice finally made sense to me but now it was too late.

My back was already against the wall financially. How did this happen so quickly? I had just started! WTF?! I had two options. Either I could throw in the towel after all this work and be one of the 95 percent that doesn’t make it, or I could fight and win back the customers who had sworn us off.

I thought about my parents and the time they took out a loan when we were kids in order to take the family to India and Japan to visit our families and teach us about our heritage. It took my parents many years to pay back that loan, but to this day, they agree that it was money well spent and they would do it all over again.

Years later, my parents also made the tough decision to send all three of us to Ivy League schools, again going into debt but feeling that there was nothing more important than a great education to get started in life. My four years spent at Cornell were so important to my growth as an individual and my experience there changed my life in ways that still affect me every day. I owe my parents a lot and admire them so much for their willingness to fight for something that we grew to believe in just as much as they did.

I knew I couldn’t give up on my little place. It would be a hard fight, but I knew that the effort would be worth it. I knew that I would learn a lot about myself and how to strengthen my backbone amid a tough, humbling challenge.

With this renewed clarity and purpose, I pondered what to do first. We had to fix all of our issues, including those with training and food preparation. Everyone learned how to expeditiously take orders on the phone or in the store, and we hired proper delivery guys. Through it all, we grew more cohesive as a team and even started to have a little fun.

Once we ironed out all of the issues, we were ready to spread the word and encourage more people to visit. I knew I needed to make significant moves to win back our customers’ trust. To make a golf analogy, I was asking for a mulligan. I needed a second chance.

Honesty always being the best policy, I handwrote another letter, but this time it was different. It said:

Dear Friendly Neighbor,

We are finally ready to reintroduce you to the tastiest, healthiest pizza you’ve ever had. We’ve worked hard to get to this point, and we are looking forward to sharing the improved version of ourselves with you! We support local farms and local suppliers and we are excited to talk with you about where the food you’re eating comes from. We think you will be pleased!

Do come in with this note and have your first slice on us.

All the best,

Miki and the SLICE Family

I then printed five thousand copies on quality parchment-like card stock and spent the next two days signing and folding them by hand one at a time.

The following week, I snuck into every building in the neighborhood again and flyered every single apartment. I knew that some of these people never tried the food at my restaurant and may have been confused by the note, but I figured that it would intrigue them enough to come and check it out. Everyone wants to be part of an underdog story.

I probably could have hired someone to flyer for me but, again, it was important to me that it got done properly. I was also willing to take the risk of being caught loitering, and since I don’t look very suspicious, I knew doing it myself would give me the best shot at a successful guerilla marketing campaign quickly. Eventually, I had to learn to trust my staff because I simply could not do it all, but in those early stages, it was all me.

The only run-in I had was from one of the fancier doormen buildings in the neighborhood who caught me and stopped me after I flyered two floors. I explained to that doorman that I just opened and would love to invite him to my spot and dine on the house, and he was more forgiving thereafter.

Once I got done with flyering (it took about three days, morning to night), I moved on to the next thing.

I needed a way to win back a group of people all at once, rather than having to actually win them back one by one. I thought about all of the places in the neighborhood where I might find potential customers. Healthy pizza would appeal to those who lead a healthy lifestyle. Gyms, playgrounds, yoga studios, schools, and office buildings would be a great place to start.

I headed to the gyms first, with the goal of making the experience MB always in the back of my mind. I approached the gym manager and said, “Hi, I would love to offer a free sample of my pizza for your guests. It’s healthy, tasty, and I think they would find this a nice perk after their workout.” I quickly explained my business to him. He said, “No solicitations, thanks.” Not fazed, I took a weekend course in Pennsylvania and got my spin instructor’s license to teach at gyms. Now, on the inside, it would be much easier! And it was.

The manager practically rolled out the red carpet for me, giving me the best spot in the gym to sample my pizzas for three days and allowing me to promote my business by putting flyers in the locker rooms and at the front desk for a whole week. Wow, what a break! Now he was excited because he thought it might entice new members to join. He too understood the magical power of free food. I was excited as I imagined just how many people I would reach this way as well.

I stopped by every other gym within a ten-block radius and secured tastings at every single one using the same MB technique as before. I locked in fifteen evening tastings over the next three weeks at pretty much every gym in the neighborhood. This was going to help a lot.

Next stop: local playgrounds.

First I took the time to observe the parents, who would usually just sit there on the bench watching their kids play and either read a magazine or fiddle with their cell phones. It was the perfect opportunity to go and talk with them about a new healthy place for their kids to eat. I showed up every sunny day for a week around two thirty in the afternoon and sampled the pizzas and handed out flyers. Some of them mentioned that they had gone once and had a bad experience, but most offered to come back now that things improved. It’s amazing how far free food and a personal touch can go.

I moved on to yoga studios and office buildings, and within one week, it all started paying off! The phone began to ring and people starting coming in again, and business grew—little by little, person by person. It had worked! My business was officially back on track.

Do Cool Shit Lessons

• As much as you can, try not to make your customers be a part of your learning curve. They won’t be willing to let you catch up and fix mistakes. It’s a harsh reality that all they will remember is that their experience wasn’t great. As much as you can, wow them from the start!
  
• Have a soft opening first. Quietly open your business and work out the kinks with friends and family over a couple of weeks. When you “go live” with real customers, do it slowly, and once you feel like it’s flowing well, then you can have your grand opening. Consider a soft opening as a dress rehearsal, where you can get your lines down before the big night.
  
• Set up free tasting nights for neighbors or a free product test for the locals. That will ensure that people will come in to try it out and, in exchange, will give you valuable feedback for their experience. This will enable you to adjust and make changes as comments come in. These free nights are MB for both parties—guests get free food and you get free and real feedback.
  
• Time it with the press that the opening day will be two to four weeks after you actually open quietly. It can take several months of lead time before an article will get written sometimes, so plan ahead as best as you can.
  
• Figure out where your customer base lives, works, and spends their leisure time. Approach them with an MB idea. Offering a free perk is always a great way to open a door.
  
• As part of the soft opening, create an event where you offer free tastings or trials to draw your customers in and start a word-of-mouth campaign.
  
• If you make mistakes the first time around, do everything you can to deliver properly the second time. Otherwise, you’re going to have to do it all over again and your customers may not be as forgiving the third time!
  
• Honesty is the best policy. Especially in today’s climate and economy, your customers are highly suspicious of being duped or taken. Admitting to your mistakes and offering honest and concrete ways in which you are fixing them will make your customers much more forgiving, and is more likely to bring them back for a second try.
  
• Don’t take no for an answer. There’s always a way in.
  
• Business is iterative. Nothing is ever absolutely perfect, and it often takes much longer than you’d expect for a business to get on its feet. It’s OK. Just keep improving. Never stay stagnant. The minute you do, that’s when the business stops. No matter what, celebrate the little things that go right, even if the rest doesn’t go according to plan. You have to celebrate the positives so that you and the team can stay motivated!
  

12

PARTNERS IN CRIME

How to Find the Perfect Business Partner

Life is meant to be shared.

—
I
NTO THE
W
ILD

S
he said it in a matter-of-fact, dismissive way that unnerved me and made me want to reach through the phone and shake her.

“We ran out of dough, so I have to close the restaurant down at six p.m. today. Sorry.”

“Wait, what? How on earth did we run out of dough? We’re a pizza place! We can’t run out of dough!”

“I have no idea, but I don’t know what to do from here and I think we need to close.”

“No, we can’t close! Please figure it out!” It was a weekend and one of our busiest nights. We count on weekend business to make back some of the slower weekday business.

“I don’t know what to do. I’m out of ideas.” Click.

She hung up on me.
What?

I was still three hours away in upstate New York, checking out a local farm from which we were hoping to source some of our ingredients, and I couldn’t get to my restaurant to solve this big problem. My general manager had completely dropped the ball.

How did I get in this position, with a manager who clearly didn’t have good problem-solving skills and who clearly didn’t understand the restaurant business? But of most immediate concern, how was I going to get out of this jam?

I’ve always had a
partner in crime: my identical twin sister, Radha. And my dad’s nickname for her—Rocky—perfectly sums up her personality (Rocky refers to Rocky Marciano, the American heavyweight boxing champion). Let’s just say she lives up to the qualities her nickname suggests. You don’t want her as your opponent.

Rads managed to squeeze into the world and take her first few breaths five minutes before I did. She came out kicking and screaming—and with jaundice. I came out next—breech. Interesting way to enter the world—one yellow and the other butt first. Our parents knew from the get-go that we’d be a handful.

We were also born a month and half premature and weighing only five pounds each. We were teeny tiny. My dad used to be able to hold one of us in each of his open palms.

Now, while this could have predicted a difficult journey for some, the story goes that we were supposed to be incubated at the hospital for six weeks but practically drank the hospital out of milk, put on pounds very quickly, and were discharged within a week. It seems our fighting spirit came right along with us at the time of our birth.

Our older sister, Yuri, was born only eleven months before we were, so the three of us grew up doing everything together. My parents would dress us alike, we were all part of a twin club in Montreal (Yuri was allowed in too, since there was less than a year between our ages), played soccer on the same team growing up, and went to the same schools at the same time.

Throughout the course of our lives, we had to learn how to share, how to take ownership of our own things, and how to compete with each other in many areas—including boys and sports. So often, Radha and I would end up playing against each other in the finals of badminton tournaments (think Serena versus Venus with a birdie). It was hard because we were always on the same team in an “us against the world” kind of way, and to have to face each other in battle was so strange. Not to mention the annoying refrain of “You’re just mad because I won” coming from the backseat of the car after those competitions.