A quick preamble: We are Rush Order Tees, a custom screen printing company based in Philadelphia. We deal with thousands of people from all over the country, and every single one of them has an incredible story to tell. And that’s what this blog series is all about.
In our inaugural post, we decided to cover Mason Wartman and all he’s done with Rosa’s Fresh Pizza because his story offers a beautiful and interesting perspective into the mind of a successful entrepreneur, and is a perfect example of how people don’t have to be greedy in order to succeed in business; that charity, philanthropy, and a good heart can have a profound impact on the world around us.
Mason is a young guy who left a cushy finance job in Manhattan to come sell pizza and feed the homeless in Philly. You’ve likely heard of him, but you’ve never heard his story. Until now.
The Man Who Left Wall Street for a life of Pizza
I walk into Rosa’s Fresh Pizza on South 11th Street in Philly’s Center City. Multicolored Post-it notes are spattered across what seems like every inch of wall in the room, each with encouraging scribbles on them. Some simply say, “Enjoy!” while others invoke the power of God, tell personal stories, or even paint pictures. Some encourage people to keep going, and others simply reassure readers that “Things Will Get Better.”
But the encouraging scribbles and promissory notes of good days to come are more than just words.
Each of the notes is a voucher for a free slice of pizza, pre-purchased by kind strangers and patrons of Rosa’s, as part of owner Mason Wartman’s now-famous Pay-It-Forward program. Basically, a customer comes in, buys a slice of pizza for a dollar, and then for another dollar, purchases a Post-it, which gets placed on the wall and can be claimed by someone — anyone — in need.
Thousands of multi-colored, hand-written vouchers, just waiting to turn into pizzas at the right moment.
Today, the small shop is packed with people, and the lunchtime rush is bustling in and out. About 30 patrons are gathered inside — a balanced mix of paying customers and hungry people in need — all happily munching away on some of Rosa’s Fresh Pizza’s signature dollar slices.
It’s a pretty sharp contrast to the near-empty shop I first walked into last November, filled at the time with just a couple hundred Post-its, placed sparsely along these very walls.
I look around and toward the back of the room, behind the cashier, stands Mason Wartman, owner of Rosa’s, pizza peel in hand, looking out over the small sea of customers.
He’s smiling when we make eye contact, and I yell a quick “Hey!” over the constant hum of people talking and chewing. His reply is polite and quick, as he turns around to check on the five pies in the oven, just waiting to be yanked and placed on the counter to cool.
Clearly, business is booming.
Mason has been featured everywhere from Business Insider and Philly.com, to Upworthy and even People Magazine. He was just recently featured on “Good Morning America,” and, perhaps his crowning jewel, “Ellen.”
And despite his newfound fame, It’s good to see Mason is still downstairs, kneading dough, preparing pies, and doing what he loves most — feeding hungry people.
But where did things begin? Why on Earth did this successful Wall Street finance guy leave his life of comfort and security in Manhattan to come sell pizza in Philadelphia? And what, if anything, has he learned along the way?
Mason took time out of his schedule to sit down and talk me through the last couple of years, from start to finish:
March 31, 2013
“I remember him looking at me and saying, ‘I can’t say I’m surprised.’ He told me that he could see that I had the itch to start something of my own, and the drive to make it happen.”
Mason had just moved into his new office. He’d spent a good deal of time brokering the promotion that put him there, and when it came down the pipe, he’d spent even more time negotiating the terms. He was 25 years old and had been with the small financial analysis firm since graduating college. Mason was young, diligent, and good at his job. He was comfortable.
Which made it all the more peculiar two weeks earlier, when Mason told Chip, his boss and mentor, that he’d be leaving the firm — all of its certainty, its comfort, and its establishment — to move back home to Philadelphia and open a pizzeria.
Mason remembers Chip’s reaction.
“I remember him looking at me and saying, ‘I can’t say I’m surprised,’” Mason recounts. “He told me that he could see that I had the itch to start something of my own, and the drive to make it happen.”
But there Mason was, sitting in his new-to-him office, tying up loose ends and making sure his partner in Boston would be all right without him. Mason recounts calling his family — there wasn’t much work to be done, it being his last day and all — and talking to them about how weird of an experience it was.
He and his co-workers went out for a celebratory goodbye lunch. They got pizza.
“We went to this spot on 43rd Street that I loved,” he remembers. “It was a dollar-a-slice pizza spot, and was one of the key places that inspired me to do Rosa’s. Gill [another of Mason’s bosses] and I got a few pizzas and went back to the office.”
Mason remembers how his colleagues lovingly joked with him about his decision to leave, after he and Gill returned that day; how one coworker bit into a piece of crust and said, “So this is it, hmm?”
But Mason loved his colleagues. They were supportive and encouraging, and they taught him a lot. And when Mason left that day, they all wished him luck — Chip, too.
“That was March 31st, 2013,” Mason tells me, as we begin walking upstairs into the room above Rosa’s, where I’d be interviewing him. “It was a Friday.” Nine short months later, on Dec. 20th, Rosa’s Fresh Pizza opened its doors for the first time.
A New Life, And All The Comes With It
“I knew all of the landmarks, businesses, and knew that good pizzerias are few and far between, down here.”
Mason hit the ground running after leaving Manhattan, but there was a lot of empty space in his pizzeria playbook. There was no location, no business plan, no menu… Hell, there wasn’t even a pizza. There was, however, a great idea, some rock-solid perseverance, and cash, saved after a few years of excellent investing.
Before making the decision, Mason looked into the basics. He checked with food suppliers and equipment manufacturers to figure out ballpark numbers for how much everything would cost. He spent months developing the right recipes for his dough, as well as his famous sauce, which, to this day, is still made in house, by Mason, from real whole tomatoes. He had real-world precision breakdowns of exactly how much it would cost him to make a pie, and worked cost of production into his estimated equipment purchases, possible overhead, etc.
“The storefront? I actually had no idea where I was going to put Rosa’s,” he says with a laugh, as we sit at the large desk in the storage room above the shop.
The light is peering in from the window, and contrasts weirdly with the fluorescent tube lights hanging above. In another partitioned part of the room, there are security cameras keeping an eye on things below. Mason’s desk is cluttered, but there’s no doubt in my mind he’d know just where to look if he needed something.
“I knew that I wanted to bring it back to Philly, where I’d grown up, because I was already so familiar with the lay of the land. I knew all of the landmarks, businesses, and knew that good pizzerias are few and far between, down here.”
Mason doesn’t speak too in depth about the planning and development phases leading up to the opening of Rosa’s Fresh Pizza, but one critical aspect of the process was the input of his family, who were indispensable leading leading up to opening day.
He describes his father, Bennett, as a strong and silent type of man, “a real Gary Cooper-type.” From the onset, he didn’t push Mason down one particular path or another, instead trusting him to make the decision he thought best for himself.
Mason, by both virtue and upbringing, is a prudent and generally sensible young man. At age 27 and the owner of his own successful small business, one could expect nothing less. He loves comic books and finds the stock market “fun” and “fascinating.” Mason places a lot of emphasis on family, and if his performance in Manhattan was any indication of his approach to his own business, he was destined to do just fine — and it was this notion that his family adopted as he moved forward with Rosa’s.
His mother, Rose, for whom the restaurant is named and who I had the pleasure of meeting on a separate occasion, was a lot more vocal in helping Mason get started. Mason says that she was his sounding board and confidant. He would bounce ideas off of her and gather her input — on things like recipes, menu items, and equipment. Rose played a small but not insignificant part in everything.
“She helped talk me through everything,” Mason says. “Neither of us had any kind of idea about starting something like Rosa’s, but she was great for unbiased advice, encouragement, and wisdom.”
Mason’s sister, Alaina, who also works in finance, was exceptionally supportive of Mason’s decision to start Rosa’s. To Mason, the support of his family was critical, especially in the beginning.
“I really don’t think it would have happened without them,” he says.
But that isn’t to say the family eats, sleeps, and breathes pizza the way Mason does. When she and I met, Rose recounted a story of how she and Alaina chastised Mason and his father one evening for a conversation about pizza, wherein they discussed the legitimate actual cost of a slice of pizza, down to the very penny.
“It was ridiculous,” she told me, laughing. “The two of them, just sitting there, discussing every little thing, down to the most minute detail. Alaina and I couldn’t believe it! The conversation was intense and so animated, you’d think they were debating politics or something!”
Sometimes it’s simply better to leave the workplace in the workplace, I guess.
Early Trials and Tribulations
“I was terrified. We didn’t make any money. In fact, we were losing money, at that point.”
To date, in the nearly two years the Pay-It-Forward Program has been implemented, Mason has given away over 45,000 free slices of pizza to some of Philadelphia’s most needy residents. On any given day, Mason gives away upwards of 150 slices of pizza, and he says business is doing so well that he doesn’t think twice about it.
But things weren’t always so swell.
The first time I met Mason a little over a year ago, he was still his same smiling self, but he was far less polished. The orange-beige paint on the walls of Rosa’s was still prominently and wholly uncovered by notes, and the tables and seats were mostly vacant, save for a few passersby. The future of Rosa’s Fresh Pizza was all but certain, and it terrified Mason.
Today, from his desk upstairs, Mason laughs when I bring it up.
“Oh my God, that was so long ago,” he says, almost surprised.
That is to say, before I remind him that it was probably a little less than a year ago.
“Wow! You’re right. It feels like a million years ago.”
It’s easy to recount how difficult things were back then, now that the future seems bright as could be for Mason and Rosa’s Fresh Pizza. But as he lived it, Mason says it was all very tough.
“I was terrified,” he remembers. “We didn’t make any money. In fact, when I met you, we were losing money, at that point. I wasn’t a very good boss, so I didn’t have good employees. We just weren’t selling a lot of pizza, which made everything so much worse. It was tough.”
Mason slides back into his chair, and looks passed my gaze and into the wall behind me. It’s clear that he’s remembering things that seem to have become distant memories over the last few months.
He tells me about how he would work every single day the business was open, sometimes until 3 or 4 in the morning. He would work from sun up to sun down, and still, nothing changed and things didn’t get better.
“That was, by far, the toughest time in my life,” Mason says, now looking down at his sneakers. “It was a formative period for us, though. It really forced me to get a good handle on what did and didn’t work, and what I needed to learn in order to survive as a business. I learned what to avoid, and it was a real wake-up call for me, as a business owner. It was really humbling.”
I believe him.
Two days prior, when I called Mason to arrange this interview, it was the first time I’d spoken to him in months. There was a distinct difference in the tone and manner of his voice, and the lapse in correspondence provided a pretty telling contrast to the Mason I’d first met, and the Mason in front of whom I now sat. He is no longer a kid trying to figure things out; he is a young and successful entrepreneur, making moves, taking phone calls, and doing good business.
Pay-It-Forward
“It’s really just crazy to look back from here and see how different things were, not too long ago.”
Everyone knows Mason because his Pay-It-Forward charity program has garnered the attention and support of dozens of news organizations, countless television personalities, and millions of people from all over the country.
But ironically, Mason’s kindness, generosity, and willingness to give back to the people of his community are exactly what gained him the recognition and patronage to succeed, at a time when he was so unsure of his future. Mason says he learned more about finance and people from owning his pizzeria than he ever did in Manhattan.
“It’s really just crazy to look back from here and see how different things were, not too long ago,” he says.
Mason’s Pay-It-Forward program had been live for months before he met with Rush Order Tees and discussed the ideas for his t-shirt and hoodie program, the idea that would bring him into the media spotlight for the first time.
At this point in the conversation, Mason and I get up, and he guides me down a corridor, leading into the very back room of Rosa’s, where he keeps all of the hundreds of t-shirts, hoodies, and sweatshirts he has in stock, along with his century-old telephone circuit board, which still powers the phones to the building.
Sales from the shirts and sweatshirts also go directly to the needy. For every $20 shirt sold, Mason gives half the cost — 10 whole slices — to the program. And for every sweatshirt sold, Mason donates another sweatshirt to the needy.
“It took a really long time for the program to catch anyone’s attention,” he says, thumbing through the piles of clothes on the rack. “There were a couple smaller stories and blogs about it, but it just wasn’t getting traction.”
In the first nine months, Mason had only given away a little over 8,000 slices of pizza.
But things changed.
Ellen
“Ellen is really when things started to take off,” Mason remembers. “After that, it was like the sky was the limit.”
Ellen DeGeneres has a way about her that makes people smile. She’s the kind of television personality you could watch while your TV is on mute, and still inexplicably find yourself smiling, despite not being able to hear a word of what she’s saying.
But on the day Mason appears on her program, you smile because her guest deserves what’s coming:
“When our next guest quit his job on Wall Street to open a pizza shop in Philadelphia, he had no idea the number of lives he’d be changing,” Ellen says, before playing a video interview of Mason that tells just a fraction of his incredible story.
After the video plays through, Mason takes the stage. He’s wearing a blazer with a nice button-down shirt and jeans, and he’s clean-shaven; a stark contrast to the scruffy bearded man in the apron and flour-matted t-shirt who sits before me now.
On stage, Mason is self-assured, and flashes the same smile for Ellen and her audience as he does his customers. If it could speak, it’d say something like, “Hi, I’m Mason, and I’m really, really happy to be here.”
Ellen talks about Wall Street, brushing over his time there, and jumps right into the Pay-It-Forward program everyone keeps buzzing about.
“You’re 27 and you changed your life from working on Wall Street, probably making decent money, to opening a pizza shop to help feed the homeless, which is an amazing thing,” Ellen tells the audience. “It’s very moving. It’s fulfilling and gratifying.”
She presents Mason with a distinctive “As Seen On Ellen” sign, which still hangs front and center in the shop window today, and then presents Mason a check for 10,000 dollars which, at the time, was a staggeringly high donation amount.
“That’ll help you a little bit too,” she says.
Ellen isn’t wrong when she says Mason’s work is gratifying. And Mason definitely isn’t short on gratitude.
“Ellen is really when things started to take off,” he says. “After that, it was like the sky was the limit.”
Rosa’s Fresh Pizza’s social media accounts flooded with an outpouring of people from all over the world who wanted to wish Mason well, thank him for his inspirational program, and pay it forward for others.
Slowly, Mason stopped having to worrying about the future. In first nine months following the introduction of Rosa’s Pay-It-Forward program, he gave away just under 8,500 pizzas. But in the last year, that number has more than quadrupled to nearly 50,000 slices of pizza given away in the last year, alone.
What’s Next?
“Anything is possible. I’m looking forward to the future, and everything that’s coming with it. I really want to see what we can do with this.”
We’re back downstairs now, and the crowd has simmered a bit. Mason jokes with his two employees, Janine Hill and Derrek Wallace, about adding new pizza toppings to the menu.
He grabs a rolling pin and starts smoothing out a ball of dough, and sprinkles a little flour over it to prevent it from sticking to the table. As he begins to toss the bread and stretch it out, weaving it from one hand to the next, I ask him what his plans for Rosa’s Fresh Pizza will be in the coming year.
Without stopping or skipping a beat, Mason tells me his focus will be on opening a new location. There will be another Rosa’s Fresh Pizza coming soon.
“I can only help so many people with one point of distribution,” he says.
I’ve never heard someone apply fundamental principles of economics to helping the homeless before, so I’m taken aback.
… Lest we forget, Mason is a Wall Street guy, after all!
“It’s simple,” he continues. “I’m really looking to open a second Rosa’s because we have all this great stuff that we can help people with, but we’re limited by having one single point of distribution. Additional locations means more readily available resources to the people who need it.”
The most exciting detail comes when Mason says he’s considering branching out and trying different foods entirely. I ask about things like tacos or burgers for the new location, and he shrugs.
“Anything is possible,” he says, laughing. “I’m looking forward to the future, and everything that’s going to come with it. I want to see what we can do with this.”
But with Rosa’s Fresh Pizza, Mason tells me he’s also going to focus hard on expanding the menu in the coming year, but still keep things very economical and affordable. He’d like to see another starch, a protein, and a vegetable, and figure out a way to keep it between $5 or $6. He has a lot of potential ideas, but is still in the process of sourcing materials.
Mason also talks about the additions to Rosa’s online storefront. New for this season, customers can purchase Rosa’s Fresh Pizza winter socks and Rosa’s Fresh Pizza touchscreen-responsive gloves. For every pair of gloves or socks sold, Mason will give away a pair to someone in need.
This last year was, without a doubt, the biggest year of Mason’s life, and spending a few hours with him reveals that he’s grown a lot in the last few months. I can say he carries himself differently; he communicates more effectively, demonstrates a deeper understanding of what it means to run a successful small business, and seems to see a clear and well-drawn path ahead of him.
Above all, he hasn’t gained any grey hairs in the process.
This is Mason Wartman — the man who left Wall Street to come sell pizza and feed the needy in Philadelphia.
