From Zero to 72,000 Customers: How Seth and Katie Built a Small-Town Pizza Powerhouse

In this episode of The Hoel Truth Podcast, Bob sits down with Seth Hardin, co-owner of the Chicago’s Pizza franchise in Cambridge City, Indiana. Seth and his partner Katie transitioned from mechanical contracting and pharmacy to launching their first restaurant—and crushed expectations with 72,000+ guests in their first 8 months.

Seth opens up about entrepreneurship, hiring teens, their dough-making secrets, how they've handled setbacks (like frying an entire home's electronics), and what’s next for their business.

If you’re a small-town dreamer or food-loving entrepreneur, this one's for you.

Transcript

Hey, Seth. Why, did you choose to put a Chicago's pizza location in Cambridge? And what are your operating hours? So we we chose Cambridge because Cambridge is a great small town. And the Cambridge and the surrounding area seem to really support small businesses. And your operating hours. So we are seven days a week, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m..

Welcome to this edition of the Hoel Truth podcast! Today our special guest is Seth, and he is owner operator, with his girlfriend Katie at the Cambridge City, Chicago's Pizza. If you follow our Facebook page at all, we just did a small business spotlight with them.

So I'm going to let you introduce yourself. To kick this off, my name is Seth Hardin. And like I said, Katie and, and I own the, Chicago's Pizza there in Cambridge City. And we're coming up on our year of being open in that location. So, we've talked before. We got kicked off. You know, you're an entrepreneur by heart.

So is this really is this your first restaurant experience as an entrepreneur? This is Katie and I's both first restaurant experience. So I came from, mechanical contracting company, and she came from the pharmacy world. So she and I, other than going to restaurants, we were we were both new to the restaurant industry. Well, it's funny, I seen you guys at number nine.

It's been probably 3 or 4 weeks ago, and I was going to go up and her ass there and ask her if she was tired of pizza, but I figured you guys were out by yourself. You didn't want somebody walking up and bugging you. So, yeah, we, I mean, we we love our pizza, but at the same time, we do eat a lot.

So anytime we get a chance to sneak down to the number nine, we'll we'll do that. So kind of tell the story about, opening, the, the franchise there. Chicago's pizza there in Cambridge. Yeah. So Chicago's is a franchise. It's an Indiana only franchise. There's 24 locations now. We were actually the 23rd. They just opened a new location in, Portland.

The guy, the group that has the Winchester location did the Portland location. So, we were taking the kids to French Lick, to the water park down there, the big splash adventure water park. And at the bottom of the hill, there's a Chicago's. And we would go in there to eat. We loved it. The kids loved it. And I was like, man, we should we should really put one of these in Cambridge.

And she looked at me like I was crazy, because I think she knew that if I had an idea it was, it was going to turn into work for both of us. So, some time went by and I actually reached out to the through the Chicago's website, and got a response back and actually ended up talking to the gentleman that's the franchise owner for Chicago's for over a year before I convinced him to come up and talk with us in Cambridge.

So. So where did it start at then? You know, so it started in 1979. Two fellas, that had been high ups with noble Romans. So get off. Bob and, Oh gosh.

Bob, Bob, Bob and Ron. Bob. Bob McDonald. Ron. Epel. So they started, they started in 1979. One of the first locations was actually on Monument Circle in Indianapolis. That location is no longer there, but, they're scattered out, mostly from Indianapolis south. The French Lick City, Bartlesville. Like I said, it's kind of a new addition that there's some northern northern stores.

I was going to say, like we were discussing off, off camera earlier. I think my family's probably been to half of them, in Indiana, the Franklin one. Fortville. Greenfield. So. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that was one of our, when we were exploring the option of doing Chicago's. We went needed a bunch of different ones to kind of see what we liked about the different ones or didn't like, and kind of brought all the best of what we liked, of the ones that we went to into, into the Cambridge City location.

So it tell us a little bit about that. Like what what did you like? What? I mean, I know it's a franchise. I'm a business nerd, so I kind of understand that all the guests are all everybody was watching or listening may not totally understand that, but I'm sure there's certain restrictions that you have to do. But what are some things that you guys try to do to make yours, you know the best that you feel like you can?

Yeah. So there is some flexibility with it. It's not like a McDonald's. Everybody's building doesn't look identical. There there's some variation in the menus. There's the core pizza group, you know, of the the franchise pizzas, and we have those in the franchise app or the core group of appetizers. But there's a lot of flexibility there. So we kind of we like that, that, you know, we could use an existing building or the building that we're in was built in 1860.

So it's seen a lot of life as a lot of different things. At one point in time, it was an auto parts store, and there's some, there's some great darkness in the grain of the wood, over by the salad bar. And a gentleman came in a while back, and he had told me he had refinished those floors after it had been a, an auto parts store.

And that's where the brake lathes sat. So the darkness in the wood was from where they had been turning brake rotors back in the day. They're on that hardwood floor. And I mean, speaking of that, the the building is, is a it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful building. The inside is is nice. I mean, that was that was one of the things I was going to say when I encourage people to go check you guys out like it's clean, but it it's just that cool small town vibe.

Yeah, it definitely, definitely has that feel. And when we started the process and Dave, the franchise owner, came up, we walked the streets and that was pretty much the pick of the litter as far as the buildings that we wanted. So the fact that it kind of everything fell into place and it worked out and we ended up in that building was kind of kind of a miracle.

So you when you decided, and in my wife's married to, someone like you that, you know, we we always have brand new ideas. And she's, she's getting better at this, where she's kind of putting her foot down on the last flip our side ball. She's like, you can buy it. She's like, I'm not working on it.

Yeah, we're running the roofing business. I'm trying to help. We're trying to raise three kids. So, you know, she she gets it like she she knows it's going to be work, you know, for both of us. But. But why Cambridge City for you guys? It just seemed like a good fit. My, my other business was in Cambridge.

Katie was working in Cambridge, and Cambridge seems to support other, other small businesses in that town. And Cambridge is kind of a I don't know what the term would be, but like a destination eatery type town, people come from all over to come to Cambridge to eat, whether they and they don't go to the same place every time.

Sometimes they come and they go to lumpy, sometimes they come in, they go to number nine or hilltop for ice cream or Lakeview. So they're coming to that town to eat. So it felt like a good a good option and a good place to be, and especially right there on 40, you catch a lot of traffic. And, there's a lot of events going on in town.

Yeah, I ordered some pizza. We were building the barn and I ordered like 6 or 8 pizzas for the crews that were out there one day. And there must have been some, I don't know, antique weekend or something. And like, I couldn't even hardly park the truck to run in there and get the pizza. So I kind of, I laughed, I'm like, man, they should be busy today.

That that's the that's the good part. And the bad part about the way that building's laid out is we don't have a parking lot. I mean, we're limited to street parking and some parking in the rear. And I got a lot of pushback about that in the beginning. People aren't well with parking, so won't be an issue.

And my my argument with that was well over smorgasbord and Hagerstown. Yep. They're kind of like that. They're sandwiched between other buildings and they have nothing but street parking and it's worked for, you know, 70 years for them. So people will find a spot park. So.

What, as an entrepreneur, like, you know, we've kind of talked, you know, like, I guess what has been the biggest challenge as an entrepreneur? And it doesn't even have to necessarily be the pizza place. Maybe it's businesses before, and kind of like, what? Why, like, what's the drive behind to be an entrepreneur? The drive behind being an entrepreneur is I didn't want to work for somebody else.

And at this point, after 14 years of being self-employed, I probably wouldn't be a very good employee. So, I feel like you have a more of an option to control your own destiny. And people will be like, oh, it must be great to be able to make your own schedule, and you can do whatever you want, which, you know, that's the farthest thing from the truth.

Or, you know, you're your own boss and like, well, you know, and the one business I had, I had over 800 customers. So I had 800 bosses. Just to be able to, to control your own destiny and provide opportunities for other people. And, you know, the one thing that I didn't think about with Pizza Shop is, you know, we've got a lot of high school kids and they're working, and sometimes some of them, it's their first job.

So that's pretty cool to be able to give them their first job opportunity. But on the flip side of that, the part that I don't like is you get them in there and you get them trained and they're kids that you really like, and then they graduate and on to bigger and better things. So I think that part of it's going to be, probably a never ending revolving cycle.

So. Well, and we've got a couple high school boys that's working for us, right now and good kids, you know, they're willing to put in the work, you know, you don't have to push them at all, you know, but but, you know, being honest and transparent, having you know, having some issues and some things that we got to work through.

And, you know, I want to be liked. And especially one of these young men I've known for 6 or 7 years. And, you know, it's but it's having them conversations too, that really could change the trajectory of their life or set them up of like, you know, I want them to look back and I say this to everybody.

It's worked for me. Like I want them to look back and say, I grew during that period working for Bob and Emily. Like, you know, it may have been six months, it may have been six years, but they're I mean, that's a huge part of me, you know, like, now that I'm, 37, I think, you know, that I kind of look back and, and I laugh because my first what I call my first real boss out of college, he was so anal, and I was just 20, 20, 21 year old kid and just, you know, his truck was real neat and tight, and my truck wasn't.

And it would drive him nuts because we did operation and maintenance on, environmental systems. And you can send a blind monkey to his truck because he knew exactly where his tools at. I had the same tool in my truck. You just. It might take you five minutes to find out where. Yeah. So now I laugh because I'm like, sometimes these boys, they just drive me nuts.

I'm like, why can't we not? Like, I bought a new battery charger the other day because somebody said we didn't have one in the shop after I bought a new one. Guess what? You found the other one I found. The other one that I knew was here, you know, so in the two before that. So you got a.

Yeah. No, no, not quite hopefully. But I mean that's I think that's the one thing that people like to be an entrepreneur. You've got to want to like invest in people. In the me like one thing for me is for us. For me right now is like investing in younger men. Like, you know, I'll say this till I'm blue in the face.

This world are the world problems we have. 95% of them would be cleaned up if men stepped up and did what we're called to do. And, you know, is that lead young men, you know, encourage them to start a business. You know, I mean, to me, that's the that that's what I like about entrepreneurship. I laugh when you said, well, says I didn't really want to work for anybody else.

Yeah, you're right. You know, people say like, oh, it's nice to be your own boss. Well, I guess, but when your phone's gone off at 6:00 about this problem or holidays or weekends or when you're at kid's events or in the nude and it never ends. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, but I know, like, when you're called to do that, that's what, you know, that's kind of that's what you call the new kind of what you got to do.

And if you're not doing that, you're not going to be happy. Right? Right, right, right. Now, what is Katie think of coming over from, you know, doing the pharmacy stuff, over to this, like, like, I mean, always got a big smile on her face. Always got, I mean, look like she just got her hair and makeup completely done.

I mean, I don't care if I'm in there at 3:00 in the afternoon, like, you know, she's, you know, she's she's a pretty face to be in there, let's put it that way and work on her tail off also. So yes. And she needs to be the face of the place because that's not me. But, she she's done great.

So she, you know, coming from pharmacy, it was definitely customer service oriented. So that part was easy for her. Managing people. That was kind of a new challenge. And, you know, I'd been doing it for a long time, so I've tried to, leader along the way, but she picked right up on it. I mean, she's a hundred times smarter than I ever thought about being.

So she's done. She's done great with it. Now, are you in there? Much for the day to day. You're kind of like, what is your role? So I kind of take care of a lot of other things during the day. Like I'll go in and do building maintenance things and in the morning before we open, and then I'll go do other stuff, mowing at our properties and whatnot.

And then I come back in usually around four, and I'm there for the evening rush. Okay. Make do, help with dishes. Help with what? Pretty much whatever needs done. So okay. I mean, I've never noticed you in there, but you know that again. She's the face. So yeah, I try to stay behind the scenes. It's better off. So like what?

What a so. So do you have to make the dough and use it. So like what's. Yep. So all the, all the dough is made made there in-house. Other than we don't make the gluten free crust and we don't make the crispy thin, but all the traditional crust and deep dish cast of all the sizes, we make all that in-house.

So it gets made, balled into specific sized balls for whatever size pizza that's going to make, coated in olive oil and, and put in a cooler. So, really so like dough you make today 3 to 4 days is like, is the shelf life on it? Be on that. It'll actually because it has yeast and it'll start swelling.

Yep. But we kind of got it. We got a pretty good rotation now or we know how much we need to make and, you know, gear up for the weekend, make more going into the weekend. So do you make dough every day then? Pretty much every day okay. Yep. Some days it's a little. Some days it's a lot.

But yeah, we pretty much make no dough and sauce every day. So you make your own sauce. What's that? Make do what? What entails in that. So it's not too difficult. So the tomatoes come from a farm in California? For Chicago's. They're canned canned tomatoes made into a paste. We had, despite the spice mix water, a few other things we can't talk about.

And then it goes into the cooler as well. Okay. Yeah. So that's that's for the shelf life of the of the sauce too, I take it. Or the page, right. Yes. Yep. Through 3 or 4 days and we make it. It's made by the bucket by the five gallon bucket full. Okay, okay. What is, what what is the challenge that you've had with the pizza place that maybe you didn't see come up?

Since you've been a business owner in other in other industries? Yeah. So those challenges, the best part is people and the challenges people. So. I I'm sure you can relate. I mean, you know, you fill shifts and then somebody calls off and then you go to somebody else doesn't can't pick up that shift. And, you know, everybody else has got to carry a little more weight.

So have you had any problems of hiring help? No. In the beginning, we, you know, we hired and the ones that weren't going to work out pretty much weeded themselves out. We just had a hiring event, to replace some of the seniors that had graduated a few weeks ago. And she just did open interviews on one day for like, two hours and had, like 18 people show up nice.

So how many people do you guys have employed it? So currently right now I think we're at 18, 18 plus Katie and I, so we're, we're 20, 20 people. Any of them full time? They mainly all part time. How's that work? So we have some full time adult, daytime help. Okay. And then evenings is pretty much primarily filled in with the with the high school kids.

And then you're kind of in there managing the the high school kids. Yeah. Katie kind of takes care of the front people. And I kind of take care of the back people in the evenings. Okay. So, like, I mean, every entrepreneur has to be optimistic because for sure, you have to be what is I mean, like, how is a year been like from what you expected?

Kind of I don't know if the franchise, the franchise kind of sets any expectations or how's that work? The franchise doesn't set any expectations just because we're in, you know, there's some in large towns or some in small towns. So, you know, there's a lot of variation there. A year went by fast, a lot faster than I thought it would.

And I was just telling Adam, we, a couple weeks ago, we had tallied up some numbers as far as, trying to figure out how many people had been through the front door. And we were north of 72,000 people have been through the front door. And that was in that was pretty much eight months. Wow. Which was kind of mind blowing in a town of less than 2000.

Right, right. Well, we so so what you're saying is it's kind of surpassed your expectations. It did, it did. And I my expectations was kind of set off of like the Winchester stores. They've been open like for years. You know similar sized town, similar kind of in a building. They're in a building they're off of, like where the courthouse is at.

Okay. So my expectation was set off that and we did surpass my expectation. So, any, any crazy idea of having multiple locations one day? It's been discussed. Katie would kill me at this point. Probably, but, we've we've pinpointed some areas that we think would be a good fit. Yeah. The main thing there would be finding somebody to run it.

We have a, we have a girl that works for us now who kind of seems to be does a really good job. She could run the pizza shop by herself now other than she just turned 15. So we got a few years to decide maybe where the next one might be. No, no, that's, that's that's awesome. And and as an entrepreneur, like, that's what I was I was literally just talking to her about it.

Owns a roofing company in Lafayette and he's had a case had a he's had a challenging 12 months, you know, and he's like, I think just kind of stay where I'm at. And I was like, no, that's that's fine. Like I'm crazy enough that I want to hire more people in the next 12 months, and that's okay too, you know?

So and I think that ebbs and flows. I think some, some years you're more engaged than other years or certain periods of time where you're engaged and you're like, hey, let's go conquer the world. And other times your pull back a little bit and like, we're good where we're at. So what, what is a what is a failure?

That's just, you know, just hilarious and in business in general and, and and I'll start it off. I haven't told this story in a while, but. So I know, I know my own business. Really didn't know what that was supposed to be. I was doing environmental consulting. I kind of dumb lucked into that. I went and got an environmental engineering degree.

It happened to be the same degree that my dad went and got after he had two back surgeries, farming full time so he could support his family. My sister actually has the exact same degree. And so I went and got it and fell into a job. And I started listening to Dave Ramsey. You know who Dave Ramsey is?

I listen to Dave Ramsey. So and like, he pretty much one day said, in ten years, make sure you're intentional what you're doing. And I was just like, and you know, at this time I'm married, I think we've got a kid on the way, and I and my wife, we baled hay on the side to make extra money or really not make extra money, extra work.

There's there's no money in it. But, 8000 small square bales. The first full year that me and, Emily were married, and we both had full time jobs. And then were the days before the accumulators and all. All that fun stuff. All hand loaded. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, that's kind of. So I knew I wanted to be a small business owner.

I didn't know what that entailed. And, we got our finances straight. We started the Dave Ramsey program as soon as we got married, like, I was, Man, I gotta rack my brain here. You know, I was 22, 23, 23, 24 when we got. I was 23 when we got together. She was 21. And I was like, hey, here's kind of what I want to do with my life.

I'm really not interested in, like, dating around, like I'm looking for a wife. Like, here's my goals, you know? And, I was like, but I found this Dave Ramsey guy, and I really think this is where we need to live. She's like, she had heard of them and she was she was fine with it. And, so we we started off on that foot.

Poor girl. The reason, the entire reason we did this was for her to be a stay at home mom. And now she's, the chief operating officer around here because we'd be all Sol if it wasn't for her, but. So we get doing some things, but on. Hey, she's cleaning, commercial buildings, residential on her days off, you know, to help pay off debt.

And, I start doing property management for, like, now. This was ten years ago, probably almost now. So foreclosures were left and right everywhere. And, you know, we'd go in there and we were supposed to mow the grass and this and that, and I went the first two work order I took, was like an hour and a half south.

And at this point, I think, I think it my boy was he was very little, I think. And, there's no water in this place. And somebody had taken a dump in the toilet and in the work order. Was there a fecal removal? Okay. And it paid like $8. And I'm not making any of this up. I wish I was.

So I called the lady back and there was a couple issues of some things they had on the work order. Once I got there, I sent her some pictures and with a straight face she's like, well, you could go ahead and perform that fecal removal. That'll pay you $8 while you're there. Now, granted, I just probably drove 72 miles, you know what I mean?

You spent $20 and gas to get there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like. And I mean, everyone's allowing me and Emily's is having a rough day. We just, like, we'll just say fecal removal and let us let me out cry because we laugh so hard, you know? So looking back, like I was I was grasping at straws. They're trying to force something and learn real quick that that wasn't necessarily the route that I needed to go.

So yeah. What's a what's a hilarious, failure or or a lesson, I guess. I guess I should refocus it as a lesson, because I learned real quick that I didn't want to work for some place like that. That dictated very low pricing. You know, for fecal removal. For fecal removal. Yeah. Oh, gosh. I mean, if you're an entrepreneur, you have failures and I don't think you ever outgrow them.

I mean, not everybody Dave Ramsey, everybody thinks everything's hockey sticking to the right. And that's far, far from the truth. Failures. One of the first. So we were we did, generator installation. Okay. And one of the first ones we ever did, we got it all done. We had it connected to the gas. We had it wired in.

Everything was great. We fired it up, transferred it. Everything seemingly was going well until the homeowner came out. And he's like, hey, I got, like, smoke rolling out of my VCR and our play station. We'll come find out. There was a neutral issue inside that particular generator, and we pretty much fried everything that had any sort of electronics in it, almost in his entire house.

So luckily he was a down to earth guy and we had good insurance. So everything got fixed and we fixed the generator. And now, his name's Ron. Ron's a great guy. Ron actually came to me and I helped him. I was on his, did some advertising and stuff for him. He's now the judge of Wayne County.

And he comes and eats at the pizza shop all the time. So 15 years ago, we about destroyed his house, and he's still supporting us all these years later. And I'm sure if he's a judge, he's got a nice house, on top of that. So. And there was a lot of stuff in there that, I mean, everything.

Yeah, everything you can imagine from, like I said, TVs to curling irons to electric blankets to any, anything that had any sort of circuit board in it, it got fried. So are you, so are you a tradesman? By trade? I guess maybe that doesn't slow. Right? Electrician. And then I had a plumbing license, too, because we did gas.

Plumbing. Okay. Did natural gas plumbing. So. So did you work did you do some of that before you did the generators install and whatnot or. No, I got into it because of those. No, because of the generator installs and how, how big an area did you cover when you did that? Probably bigger than we should have.

So we were covering pretty much a maybe a 50 mile radius. From Cambridge City. So and then we had customers in Muncie that had lake houses, other places. So we had gone further than normal to do some jobs for some people because they were repeat customers and they had multiple homes. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. What, what what got you into that business?

I was working for a company in lapel, Indiana, and they had had a contract with T-Mobile doing generator service at cell sites. Okay. So I did that, for a couple of years, and then that contract ended. And when that contract ended, I left there just because that was pretty much primarily what I was doing was that.

So they didn't weren't necessarily going to have a place for me. So I was 2012, I split off and started doing that. You know, that's that's ironic because that's why I ended up getting out of the environmental field. Because what I noticed there was it was you're one contract away from nothing. Nothing like it. My story was I was on my honeymoon in the Friday.

I was going on my honeymoon. The company I was working for got a certified letter stating that that they were they were this contract that I was getting probably 60% of my work from was getting terminated. And at that time there was me and another guy that we did the same job. He kind of covered. We both covered and he went north, I went south, and then we had a boss, and then we had another guy that kind of worked with us too.

And, you know, I walk in there, you know, the Monday after my honeymoon, I'm on cloud nine, you know, and, I walk in my boss's office, and, Roger's in there to the guy that, you know, we we had similar jobs, and my boss, like, hey, did you hear that? We lost that bulk contract, and I was like.

And I made my stomach just turned in knots and great company. We had to finish some things out because the work we did, it wasn't something like they could cut us off tomorrow because we we stopped getting new work. And, I didn't get laid off until, like, the first part of February, but, yeah, that, I mean, and then I went to another company and then it was like, literally then I would lose the cell contract and I was just like, okay, this is this is old, you know, and I would always go find something else before the first time I got laid off.

And man, as a man, as a provider, like I felt like worthless, like it was February. It was cold, it was depressing. And yeah, that was that was the nice thing about residential, you know, if I mean, something's going to happen somewhere and you lose a customer. But when you have over 800 individual clients, it's better than, you know, one large client.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And like, yeah, that's so that's it's always ironical. Like, you know, you're nudged out. You know, I believe in God. I believe in a creator like, you know, sometimes we're too stupid to listen. Like I'll even tell this story. Like I wanted to go sell roofing and, I actually ended up back at that company that I was let go from or I was laid off of.

Then I went and found a job, because they got more work back. And then once again, it was starting to kind of fizzle out again. And I went and interviewed, got a job, and I just told my wife I was like, I just I don't feel like this is one of us to do. I'd already got a job offer to go sell roofing, but it was October, so it was later in the year.

Couldn't really build the pipeline up before it got real cold. And, me and Emily went on a vacation right before I started the new job. And we went and seen some people that they're like our grandparents age and they, they're like, you guys gotta do what you gotta do. Like, don't worry about the money God will provide, you know?

And, on our way back, I was like, hey, you don't know how to start that job tomorrow. And I said, I have to because I, I gave my word to a company that was going to come and work for him, so I worked. I worked through that winter. But it was to me it was obvious, like, okay, I've got to go do something different, you know?

And seems like there's always highs and lows, but everything. I feel like if you're out there and you're and you're working hard and you're doing the right thing, everything always seems to work out in the end. There's parts in there where you might not agree with how it's going, but in the end it always works out well. And my dad always said, growing up, work hard and be honest and you never had to worry about a job.

I've try to take that to the next level and say, if you work hard and you're honest, your business will be okay. Like there's Evan flows of it like, God forbid if we have another Covid. Yeah. And they tell you you had to close your pizza shop, that's going to be devastating for a period. You know, and, you know, as you know, every day there's a there's a new challenge in business.

And that's what people that's what people kind of forget, you know, that that was actually one of my first questions to the franchise guy. Because, see, we're 25 so 24. So it was probably 20 sometime in 2023 when he and I started talking. Was what happens if another Covid happens? And he said, well, you know, the the good thing is, is pizza is the most portable food.

You know, most carryout food that there is. And across the whole chain, they'd only seen about a 12% drop. So even though they had to make some, some changes, as far as, you know, the buffet and dining and all that, the carryout business, carried them through. Awesome. So, no, nobody got in. Nobody in the Chicago's family got super destroyed through Covid.

So other than some, there's a couple places that give up on the buffet and kind of went to a different model, but, everybody kind of weathered that storm. Yeah. No, that's, I mean, for us as a contractor, it was actually I don't want to say more of a blessing, but people weren't going on vacation, so they kept looking at ugly siding, and and they had extra money they wanted to spend.

So they were like, can you do this? Yeah, absolutely. You know, so, but then it came to you couldn't get material. Then you start driving to Michigan to pick up two boxes of siding, the to do a job. And let's just hope we don't have to deal with that again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm actually kind of glad because I feel like people are finally not using the covet as an excuse.

I mean, it was two years past. They're like, well, you know, still from Covid. I'm like, shut up. Like, no, you know, we ran into that with supplies and wire in particular. You know, there was a service entry wire that should be, you know, under $5 a foot. And at one point in time, I think we paid almost 20 for some of it.

So yeah, hopefully the excuses are over and everything's back to back to normal for now. So what, so what future plans are just to continue to grow Cambridge right now? Like kind of what's the next, you know, 2 to 5 years maybe look like for you guys. So 2 to 5 years, keep doing what we're doing in Cambridge.

I think we were working right now on some new menu items to give people kind of an option besides pizza. We're kind of judging off what some other places have done with that. And possibly another location. If we find the right, the right spot. So can you can you share what kind of future menu items? Sandwiches.

Okay. Pasta and possibly, bone in boneless wings. Okay. So that's that's kind of where we're at on that for now. Just just to give people more of more of an option because I felt like we were missing out sometimes on you, you know, not everybody in the group wanted pizza. So give give other options for everybody. And other locations have had some success with that.

Some other locations do. Since Katie and I did not come from the restaurant industry, we kind of kept it simple. You know, we were green, the staff was green, so we kind of kept it to the core, you know, just the pizza, and then the basic appetizers. And now that everybody's kind of comfortable in the role, and she and I are more comfortable in, in everything, that's what we feel like we can branch out just a little bit.

We're not going to get too far, too far out there. But you know, past pastas. Thanks to Pizza Hut, every pizza place thinks it needs some wings. But, people have kind of come to expect that. So. Well, and, you know, and I have me and my wife talk business all the time, you know, and I mean, unfortunately, like, restaurants are one of the highest failure businesses, but like, I mean, my wife thought like, I can go buy a semi load of fell or some kind of accessory or nails for our company.

And as long as they're stored properly, they're fine. You know, you overbuy or you over make dough and you're throwing it in the dumpster, you know. So now you lost money with labor and in supplies. You use, and now you're paying a dump fee to go throw it away. So lose it three times. But yeah, yeah. So far so far we've been pretty good with that.

We have the fresh produce is delivered three days a week. So, Katie's got it down pat. Pretty much what we need. So we don't we don't really have a whole lot of waste there. So keeps the rotation going. Everything. Like I said, three days a week, fresh produce is coming in the door. So. Yeah. And I mean and that's, that's another thing that a lot of people don't understand.

Like you've got to have a system and a process that, you know, that you're following and you know, you know, however however, that however that looks like. So, is there anything I didn't ask you about as we wrap this up that you wanted to share or talk about? Not what I can think of. And then, how can we support you guys?

Just come to Chicago's Pizza and Cambridge City and and join us for the lunch buffet or the dinner buffet on Monday nights for, 11 to 9 every day of the week. So you're leaving the nine every day of the week? Lunch buffet, then dinner buffet on Monday evenings. Lunch buffet is every day or five days a week, Monday through Friday.

And then, Monday evening we do the dinner buffet from 5 to 730. Okay, I probably should not tell my kids that, for my pocketbook. For your pocketbook. In my work, at times we see people for both in the same day. Oh, I believe that, I believe that, so thank you for coming in. I appreciate thanks for having me, Bob.

I appreciate it