187. Failing DELCO to High-Volume Pizza Company

Send us Fan MailListen to Sean Rowe, owner of St. Angelo’s Pizza in Atlanta, Georgia.Join this one-on-one conversation with Executive Editor Denise Greer and Sean Rowe, owner of St. Angelo’s Pizza in Atlanta, George. St Angelo’s is a pizza company with two locations with very high volume.Sean has a philosophy that he’s always only about 60% there which keeps him striving to improve his business. The company wasn’t always successful. Sean kept dialing in different areas. Hear how he fixed the product, streamline operations, dialed in delivery and most importantly enhanced his employee retention and employee culture.Denise visited St. Angelo’s in 2022. They talk about how the business was and how it has changed. In the article, he also shared St. Angelo’s origin story….Very successful in the software business for six years, Rowe was ready for something new. His uncle approached him in 2002 to invest in a carryout and delivery pizzeria. “Well sure, how hard can that be as I’m strutting?” he says. “Big mistake.”But hindsight being 20/20, Rowe says, “The place is a disaster. The food is horrible.” His only recourse he felt was to open a new location and change everything. Wait, what?   “The definition of an entrepreneur is to be able to pay for your mistakes,” he says. “But the ego will not let me let this go away. So, I find (a location next to the) Kroger. It’s $35 a square foot in 2003. But it’s not more than 1,000 square feet.” Rowe eventually bought out the business from his uncle. “I upgraded the cheese, pepperoni and sausage,” he says. “I didn’t change everything immediately, but the dough did change and slowly then the sauce. Everything was wrong,” he says.“The first day we opened over there we did like $850, and I thought it was made from Heaven,” he says of St. Angelo’s 2004 launch. “Then we started tweaking the menu and then I developed those garlic knots.”He tackled reformulating the pizza dough. “I must have made 300 to 400 batches of dough that I threw out in the course of a few months,” he says. “With enough of the expertise from the guys I had working for me, we sort of came into figuring out the dough. That took a good year or two.”Read the entire St’ Angelo’s entire On the Road feature: https://pizzatoday.com/topics/people-pizzerias/on-the-road-st-angelos-pizza-atlanta-ga/