Beyond The Dough Presented By

Mark Duffy, an old boss and mentor of mine, used to always say, “I’ll see you at the top!” He said that to everyone. It was in his email signature.

I always loved it. Why? Because it says a lot of things.

1. I’m going to the top.

2. YOU will be there.

3. There is enough room for EVERYONE at the top.

4. He wasn’t on top to look down on you.

5. He wanted to help you BOTH win.

After I’d been working for Mark for four years, we attended a Zig Ziglar seminar. Zig said, “I’ll see you at the top!” What?!?

Yes, Mark had “borrowed” that from Zig. It was the title of Zig’s book from 1974. I’m sure Zig would have approved!

Today, on your journey, bring others along. There is room for many at the top.

To learn more about Perfect Crust’s pizza liners and other products, visit perfectcrust.com or email Eric Bam at Eric@perfectcrust.com

About Eric Bam:

A Boston native now living in Tulsa, OK, Eric Bam is VP of sales and marketing for Perfect Crust, with 20 years of experience in the foodservice industry. A powerful force in the workplace, Bam uses his positive attitude and tireless energy to encourage others to work hard and succeed. He has a wife and three children and loves helping the men and women of the pizza industry grow their businesses.

advises Douglas Liantonio, a marketing outreach analyst with Gravy in Atlanta. “If you don’t have pooled tips, that will attract more workers as well. Promote how much your top servers make. People need numbers in times like this.”

Darren Easton, vice president and creative director of The Cyphers Agency in Crofton, Maryland, says perception of your pizzeria’s brand online is particularly important in attracting high-quality candidates. “This will lead candidates to seek you out, look at your website and social channels, etc. And, if you seem like a great brand, they’ll want to join your team and become part of it,” he says. “With that in mind, you should showcase everything that makes you great: your happy employees, your pay and perks, your philanthropy, your goodlooking restaurant interior and exterior, and your great food— in a nutshell, anything and everything that you promote to your consumers.”

The late marketing guru Tom Feltenstein often said restaurateurs should create an employee-first culture and think of workers “not as hired hands but as internal customers,” which goes back to Lastoria’s point about treating employees with dignity. In turn, your employees become recruiters for your brand. “Because our employees are happy with their work environment, they tend to be our best bet for word-of-mouth referrals,” Goodman says. Russo’s New York Pizzeria even offers a $50 bonus to existing employees who recommend a potential candidate that gets hired for the team.

Easton agrees that your top employees can help recruit new team members. “You could hold a grand opening-style recruitment event, inviting your current employees to bring their friends or family to learn about job opportunities over free food and drinks.”

Kristin Dyak, digital marketing director at The Cyphers Agency, adds, “It’s always critical to promote your restaurant online with great content and engage with your customers in a timely and polite fashion, but you should see prospective employees in the same way,” she says. “That means posting your jobs regularly, using hashtags, encouraging the public to share the opportunities, engaging with people who ask you questions, etc.”

“It’s also important to not dismiss the power of more traditional media, including your own real estate and products,” Easton adds. “For example, you should put a ‘We’re Hiring’ announcement on your digital signage and your menu board and include an insert in your menus and on your pizza boxes. Depending on how often you print them, you could even print a hiring announcement right on the box.”

Whatever your approach to hiring staff might be, you should use every resource at your disposal, including advertising on social media and job boards like Indeed.com. But the aforementioned Black Box Intelligence report makes one thing clear: “For the job market to fully recover, the increased wage trend must continue.”

And not just for chains like &pizza, Lastoria says. “If you are a smaller, independent operator, the best way to manage [a wage increase] is to do it now and reap the benefits of being one of the first. In the short term, it will impact the bottom line, but, over the longer term, it will lead to improved product quality, labor efficiency, workplace and customer satisfaction and, ultimately, higher sales and margins. Like technology, wages are now a disruptor, and, like technology, you don’t want to be the last to adopt, or you will be left behind.”