Ideas in the Wild: How Author Mike Bausch Aims To Help Pizzeria Owners Create Standout Restaurant Experiences
Pizzeria owners know something most people don’t: the pizza business is more cutthroat, stressful, and multifaceted than Wall Street. Every day is a constant struggle to manage overhead, attract loyal customers, stand out from the pack, and keep your employees motivated. Running a pizzeria is hard. But it doesn’t have to be impossibly hard.
Industry leader Mike Bausch wrote Unsliced to be THE resource for elevating a pizzeria — from managing staff to mindset, marketing, and everything in between. Mike explains how to make a restaurant unique and in demand based on his twenty years of experience. He shares systems that will help boost sales and help keep owners keep their sanity. I recently caught up with Mike to learn what inspired him to write the book and his favorite idea he shares with readers.
What happened that made you decide to write the book? What was the exact moment when you realized these ideas needed to get out there?
I knew I wanted to write a book for a long time. The exact moment I realized that it was a tenable proposition that could really help a lot of people was when I was doing a presentation in Las Vegas. When I got home after delivering the seminar, I had over a hundred different emails from people who had attended my seminar, asking for notes from the speech, different Excel spreadsheets definables about what I had mentioned in the speech. All of this was from, at the time, a hundred page training program that I had made for my staff members to make it clearly defined what was expected of them. I then took my other notes about being an owner and my other processes and just things that I thought were funny in general, and put it together.
After doing that, I thought I had not just a book that would be a declaration of love for myself, but rather something that could genuinely help a lot of people.
What’s your favorite specific, actionable idea in the book?
My favorite idea in the book and in business was that if you’re not impressive in a restaurant (or just in any business), by default you’re unimpressive. My original thought owning a business was, “I need to desperately try to fit in, so I don’t fail or die.”
Only when I stopped doing that did things actually start to click and work out for me and separate us from the pack. That made our business model viable and made our restaurant stand out and become, instead of just a place to eat, a place that people had fandom for.
What’s a story of how you’ve applied this lesson in your own life/business? What has this lesson done for you?
I follow this lesson in my life any time I do something that I want to have a resonating impact. I try to do the complete opposite of what the norm or the cliche would be, whether it’s gift giving, whether it’s looking for a way to be meaningful in anything. If it’s cliched or it’s been done, then doing it again will yield me little to no results. I mean, you could break it down to, instead of giving a greeting card, give something that you’ve never seen done before, even if it’s a massive poster as a greeting card. No one has ever seen that before. When you do that, it’s immediately impressive and memorable. People want to take note of it.
