“Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping your watch to save time.”
– Henry Ford

As a very young manager, I learned the importance of marketing. I was a 22-year-old manager working for one of the big pizza companies. Once per month, four managers from the Pittsburgh region would travel to meet up with 11 managers from the Ohio market.

Each meeting went about the same way: The boss stood up and made an example of the GMs who had experienced a sales increase the month prior. He would say stuff like, “Tom in Ashtabula is up 10 percent; everyone clap for Tom … ” Each meeting went like this, month after month – a different GM getting applause after a sales increase.

During one of these trips to Ohio, the other Pittsburgh GMs told me the supervisor was talking about firing me because my oven and walls were dirty. Keep in mind, I was 23 years old with two kids at home and was working 80-plus hours a week. This GM position was my first big shot, and I was giving it my all.

That’s when I learned the most valuable lesson of my whole career: Sales fix everything.

At the next meeting, the boss stood up and said, “Everyone clap for Nick, he’s up 10 percent.” During the next meeting, he said, “Nick’s up 20 percent, everyone clap for Nick.” And at the next meeting, he said, “Nick’s up 40 percent. Nick, tell everyone what you are doing!”

I was doing what I called “hot selling.” I had three drivers coming in each morning at 10 a.m., and I made 30 pizzas for each driver. They sold them for $6 per pizza, of which the store got $5, and the driver got $1. So, without the phones even ringing, we sold 90 pizzas – or $450 for the store per day, five days a week, or $2,250 per week. This did not include the afternoon hot selling.

We were bringing in about $3,000 extra per week by going to big-box stores and construction sites to sell pizzas around lunchtime.

I then went after concessions stand orders at swimming pools, baseball fields and football stadiums. Then, I targeted school lunch contracts. This all might be foreshadowing Caliente’s stadium deals, because the lessons I learned early on still apply today.

My supervisor eventually got fired, I became a superstar GM, and the rest is history! What I learned was that every store is different, and what works in one might not work in another. With that said, sales really do fix everything. When times get tough, we double down on our sales efforts.

I had always done our own marketing at Caliente, but when I had one of our long-term employees tell me she’d finished her degree in marketing, our in-house marketing department was born! I was finally able to get all my ideas out of my head and into action. In my next column, I will rattle off a huge list of marketing ideas!

Nick Bogacz is the founder and president of Caliente Pizza & Draft House in Pittsburgh. Instagram: @caliente_pizza