Ilir Sela

pizza all over the world. He's created it not too long ago and he's now built it to one thousand, seventy five employees and they're going to do a billion dollars in pizza sales this year. The story is totally incredible. He's a first generation immigrant from Macedonia, grew up in Staten Island, went to local college and just figured out

what his passion was and so many other things. Also, he turned down an offer to sell the company once for eighteen million dollars or he said no. That was a really really tough decision for him, and then again for three hundred and fifty million dollars he said no. We go through the whole thing. I'll be like it typically there's so much information that I'm like trying to pare it down. I'm like, all right, how do I

be as efficient with questions as possible? Right with you? Like, I know just enough, but you're also kind of like the secret Ninja entrepreneur, Like there's not a lot out there, and so, um, I kind of want to like dig into it. People know your background and they're listening to this, so they've obviously read the caption and the description of what the podcast episode is. But your first generation, Yeah, I moved here when I was ten years old. Came

here from Europe. Um. I remember literally vividly remember flying into JFK. I come from a town in Europe, in southeastern Europe that has zero traffic lights. I mean there's no there's barely ading lights. And coming into New York City from from JFK. You look around, you look out the window, you're ten years old. I mean it looks like magic, It looks like anything, anything could be possible, which is kind of the it's stuck with me from from that moment forward. And what brought your family to

the US into New York. Yeah, My my family actually has been um, going back and forth. My um, my grandfather, my parents lived in the city in the seventies and they owned a pizza shop called Charlie's Pizza on sevent and the Wild Story. As a real estate U person, you'll appreciate this. Yeah, they earned a lot with their

pizza shop. It was seven operation, saved a lot of cash there at least ran up and the building owner offered them to buy the building for dollars h five man and they turned it down so they could all move back home. Got it to take the money exactly. But yeah, they moved back, moved back home, and then

um decided to come back again. And I think part of it has to do have to do with the fact that my brothers and I we were, you know, getting older in a in a sort of sense, and they wanted to provide opportunity for us, specifically on the education front, so better schools, better opportunities, and they made a lot of sacrifices to come back. I'm sure. And

you spoke English at the time, No, not really barely. Yeah, it's like just so classic, right, like your parents put you on an airplane and take you to the US and don't really know English, and they're like, go figure it out, go to school, go on and be somebody. But fortunately I have a twin brother and identical identical and are you the twin are you really? You never know? We are in a lot of places. I am in a lot of places at the same time. Let me put it that way. I'm kidding, but we um it was.

It made things a lot easier. Obviously, I have a twin brother, You're kind of going through this journey together. You don't feel so alone, and you don't have to sort of have this pressure of making friends. So it kind of softened the experience a little bit. What did you want to be when you were a little kid. I'm trying to imagine you is like nine years old in Macedonia and then eleven in New York. Yeah, I I'll be at my My dad really instilled this sort

of entrepreneurial passion from from the early days. My dad worked incredibly hard. He was, you know, part of the family's pizzeria business when he was younger, and then he became a master tailor and opened up a shop in Manhattan when we moved back, um and really made a name for himself because the suits he made were just are are incredible? I Mean, we've got to we've got

to talk after this. But he's retired now and world words sort of spread out, and um, you know, John F. Kennedy Jr. Was getting married and needed a suit for his wedding and my dad handmade his suit for his wedding. Um, and that was sort of his own small business, right, he was just a master tailor. What he sort of taught us was kind of going back to the same point I made earlier, which is, when you come to to America, every opportunity is available to you. Literally everything,

it all is um up to you. It's all up to you if you want to, um really take advantage and seize the moment and sees the opportunities. And basically what he said, what are was that the rules of this country favor entrepreneurs. Um. Nothing wrong with having a job and working for others, of course, but but that is what the system is designed to do, is is

nurture and enable entrepreneurs to launch businesses. And so yeah, from right out of school, I mean, my my first job was a my own business where we built websites in the early two thousands. Um, is that nerd Force nerd Force A great. I got great, simple to name. Yeah, I got really lucky. UM Geek Squad launched with Best Buy nationally and um it was not a franchise, but people wanted to get into that business. So we started

painting calls NonStop for people who wanted a franchise. I had no idea what that meant, but if they wanted one, I needed to sell them that. So I franchised the model and we launched the hundred and twenty four locations. That's insane. How old were you? I was twenty well when I launched those twenty one, so twenty one to twenty seven you we Did you go to college? Did you get out of college? I went to CUNEI. I

went to the College of Staten Island. So I always did really well in school, but albeying culture is one that we're at the time. It was like you have to be home, you can't really go away to school, and so I went to the College of Staten Island. Yeah, I graduated in three years. I had a bunch of college credits from high school. I don't know why, I think just I've got this way of memorizing things. I guess um, But yeah, I finished school pretty quickly and

then launched the tech support company, got it. And did you always love technology? Yeah? I think I can when you're a little kid, even in Macedonia or is this like no, definitely not in Macedonia. Now there is. But I think what really led me to embrace and kind of have passion for technology is sometime maybe I was thirteen or fourteen years old and my older brother got a computer. My older brother who's five years older, he was just starting three of you, three boys, three of us. Yeah.

So my older brother, um started school, he's an architect, um, and his freshman year of college, he got a computer and we were not allowed to touch it, my brother and I. And so the moment you're told you can't touch so the moment that that became the rule meant that we you know, you obviously want to go and play with So whenever he would be in school, because it was like a desktop, we were just yeah, we were just like mess around with it, and um, it

became a real passionate for me. So when I went to college, it was a computer science truck, so a computer science to me. So you sold NERD Force correct right, And you did not go back to Macedonian retiring the beat. I did not. I boots strapped nerd Force. In fact, I didn't really know what it meant to raise venture capital and investments and things like that. Did you raise money with nord Force? I did not know. Is just started from day one, just franchise it because people are

calling and wanted to franchise. Yeah. Yeah, we started getting so many calls. Um, well, we were named one of the most thriving companies post nine eleven at the five year Anniversity. So in two thousand and six, five years after nine eleven, we were on the centerfold. Back then it was a big deal of the New York Daily News. Um, and it was sort of this company's thriving in New York Post and so that gave us a lot of

brand awareness at the local level. And so again as a geek squads started launching on a national scale, we just we got bombarded with calls for franchising. Yeah, how did you figure out how to franchise? Oh my god. I went to an attorney in State Island and I said, Hey, I want to franchise my business. And I said, well, it's gonna be two and fifty tho. I was like, I don't I don't have two. Um. I locked myself

in my office for three days. Literally, it was like a Friday on Monday, learned everything that there is to know about how to franchise your business, including trademarking your logo and brand, and I did it myself and within ninety days we had our first franchise. E wow. Wow. So the answer to everyone who's listening to this is just be smart, be super smart, get through college in three years and learned that. What you just said reminded me of like, uh, Leonardo DiCaprio, catch me if you can.

Have you seen that with Tom Hanks at the end of the movie Tom? I said, don't you know, how did you? Like? What? What was it? Like? How did how did you get into law school? Or how what was it to become a lawyer or something. He's like, no, I just studied and took the test and I passed. It's like what, No, but you're a con artist. You had a separate way to get about it. He's like, now, I just I just studied and took the test, and I would say that's Um, it's actually less complicated than smart.

I think it's just put an effort. I don't know that I'm smarter than anyone, that we all have the same abilities. But it really is about the input, the effort you put in against that you know ability, and that gives you an advantage or not. So it's really more effort than it is smart. And do you remember where your first franchise wash. Yeah, I was in Fort Lane, New Jersey. Nice. And so that person then paid you

a fee and opened up their own nerd force. Look, yeah, I got it where people doing these like out of their own homes and garages type thing or opening up retail stores. No, it was a mobile. It was like a you know, man in a van mobile on side tech support in home business. And you know, we grew to about nine hundred technicians. So these franchise e s started hiring their own technicians and we went from about thirty technicians to nine hundred. And you were getting a

small percentage of all other sales. We were getting four hundred and fifty dollars a month as a flat feed royalty. There was a marketing fee and that was it. And were you taking a percentage? So the royalty fee was on top of that right. So then you sold the franchise and the rights to nerd Force right correct to a public company called Nexus Management out of the United Kingdom,

public company where they just knock on your door. Yeah. Well, they provided enterprise level support to larger companies, and they wanted to get into the SMB space too, small business space, and they viewed nerd Force as their wedge into a small business and then they were going to provide their enterprise level products to small businesses. Did you have to stay on board once you sold? I did. I had to stay on board for a couple of years. Um, I got really lucky. So I sold in June of

two November of two thousand eight. The world changed economically and access to capital just completely went away. And the franchise system is highly dependent on small business loans, which became impossible. And so I would say the next year year and a half became pretty challenging. Um, and eventually I ended up leaving got it to do what you're doing now, or something totally different, to do what I'm doing now? So where is that mindset switch for you?

You're sitting there, you just sold a company to a public company. You're in the middle of a recession, things are really really tough, and you're like, you know what pizza? Yeah, yeah, so your family has been in pizza for a long time, so I get correct, correct. So I've got a lot of family members that own pizzerias, being albeying this is what albeings do. That or construction, which is what my

twin brother does. Um. Yeah. And I started getting a lot of family members asking me for help to build in websites because we were because of the Nerd Force experience and just my background and the consistency with which these asks came across was kind of jarring. And you know, I knew everything about the franchise model. So I'm looking at Dominoes and I'm watching commercials and they're like order online. Every commercial they stopped advertising phone numbers. Everything was e commerce.

So I wanted to learn more about what was going on there, and I also wanted to learn more about the pizza industry more holistically. Um, but I didn't really I'll be honest, I don't really think about challenges Like I didn't really think, well, it's a recession, like maybe I shouldn't start a business. I don't my brain isn't wired that way. My brain is more just like what is what is the opportunity and what's the current sort of data set? And so um. Anyway, learned a couple

of things. One, you may be surprised, but the pizza industry in the US is forty seven billion dollars. That is revenue that passes through seventies seven thousand locations in the US. That's a massive, massive industry, forty seven billion. Two, only twenty of all locations are the big chains combined Domino's, Papa John's, Little Caesars, Pizza Hut. Everyone else is independent

for the most part. And three, Domino's locations were starting to really outperform independence because of the e commerce play exactly. And so I UM, I was like, wait, going back to my experience with nerd Force, these independent operators, these mom and pop locations have the same problem that the independents who were competing with us did as well. But let me go and talk to them. Let me see why did why did my uncle not open up a Papa John's, Why did he open up John Anthony's Pizza.

So what you learn is that most small business owners are really passionate about a craft, and so they go into the business because of that, and they inherit all these business problems, but they are not really business people. They don't know marketing, they don't know technology, they don't know you know, finances and all those things. They just kind of have to figure that stuff out. So the

artists first. Yeah, and so I realized that there's an opportunity to create a new model called a reverse franchise, where instead of doing sort of recreating the franchise, I wanted to unite all the independence and in essence create the world's largest pizza chain, but this time instead of all of them being the same brand, for them to

be independent brands but have the same benefits. So that was the moment I realized that those three things and and sort of that lesson for why independence go into business or mom and pop sort of owners go into business. Um, I went and bought a domain name called my pizza dot com, which was the brand of my company for the first five years. Did you to buy it for somebody else? I did. It was for sale for one and fifty thousand dollars. Yeah, my pizza dot com. Yeah

it was. It was. I mean, this is two thousand nine billion names were pretty popular. Pizza dot Com, which I tried to buy, was on sale for four million dollars. So it's like, I'll take the mine, and uh, but I negotiated that down to you are a good salesman. I mean that you can't see the storyteller, you not get down. Yeah, and so UM got that on board and we started, um yeah, we started scaling quickly, bootstrapped again,

no investments, but it started as my Pizza. Yeah. And then obviously, so this is two ten, so creating an app wasn't even an idea yet. No, it was still super early. I mean, in hindsight, I probably should have invested there early enough, but I did not. Instead, we for the most part built websites for the pizzeria powered by my Pizza, and then we have the platform and and so you would just cold call independent pizzerias and say, hey,

we're gonna help you sell more pizza online. Yeah. Well, well we tried doing that and they were like, what are you talking about? Who needs to sell pizza online? It's again, it's two thousand nine. No one really wants technology. And so UM I went and got three cars, these

like little Nissan cubes. They look like pizza boxes. UM branded them with my Pizza and I would park them in front of pizzeria's literally just moving around with my twin brother and we would leave him around town and it would give us credibility because we were a brand new like who knew my Pizza dot Com and UM. And then after leaving them, you know, in front of a pizzeria for a day or two, I would go inside the pizza and say, hey, I'm with my Pizza dot Com. If you guys want to want to work

with us, here's what we do. And that's how we got probably the first locations. But you build them all their own individual websites, correct, because that's what your friends and family were having you do, because that's what you asked somebody who starts a company called nerd force, did you exactly? But what we did was and the unlock here is that all these PiZZ threas are almost identical. They just don't know it. They all operate the same way.

And so what we did was we built a system where as long as I can enter a PiZZ reas, information on the back end, on the front end of website would be created automatically. But it was just like a cookie cutter website, same one, just different photos and different stuff. What how do you make money? So we basically charged two dollars per order. For every order we generated online, we will charge two dollars and can building

the website. You're knowing what orders you're coming through. So we built a website, We had my pizza dot com. We created some advertising channels, the marketing channels online through Google, and so for every order that would pass through, the restaurant would pay us two dollars. It would cost us on so literally like it was like create something for for a dollar, sell it for two, and do that

as many times as possible. Got it good? Think people buy a lot of pizza though, And you started just east coast to start, Yeah, just mostly in New York. And I'll tell you a story. By the way, my mom was like, what is this new thing you're doing. Why don't you go get a job, And and I was like, okay, I'll explain to you what we do. We we partner with pizzerias, We build this website, we enter all their menu items, we go and advertise, and

then somebody orders. And then when somebody orders, we make money, and she's like, okay, not bad. So the orders like thirty dollars, so you make thirty dollars. I was like, no, no, no, we make two and in fact it costs us one. So we make a dollar. And she's like, all that work for a dollar a lot of exactly you read scale of lots of dollars. So then where do you go from there? Like you just okay, now you're just gonna tackle all the independent PiZZ to reas in the

United States. Yeah. So then you know, once we started UM sort of creating some critical mass on the on the restaurant side, words started to spread. UM. Really the unlock for us was when we figured out how to turn online orders into faxes to the pizzrea automatically. So there's technology that converts um something in in you know, something digital to a facts within like thirty seconds, so that they could get like the paper order and they

would print it out and deliver it. Yeah, because a lot of pizzrea's were like, hey, I don't want all this technology, you know, they're sort of there's a lot of anxiety around that, but they all have a fax number on their menu. And so we started asking, Hey, how many times this is fax machine print in order for you? And they would say once every two weeks, and so we were like, what if that printed out

like thirty times a day. They were like, you know, it's great, and it it meant that they didn't have to change their workflow. And so we started selling my Pizza as a facts ordering service to the restaurant, but an online ordering product to the consumer. Crazy and the moment that happened, it just kind of took off. And pizzeria is just kind of because they all talk to each other, right, they all talk to you, and they're

all very connected. If if you own a pizza shop, so does your brother in law and maybe your sister, and so there's this sort of community effect and then they just all want to be a part of the same system because you're also you're making ordering easier, but we're also making them more money where they sell more pizza, No, definitely. So the big unlock here is that online volume, e commerce volume is more valuable than offline volume. So if you compare to Pizza Rea's, one of them is on

phone based where you're calling in the orders. The other one is e commerce. The difference is going to be three x yeah. One because the phone channel is the same person who's making the pizza has to answer the phone. It's busy, it's all these things, taking down the credit card numbers, all that stuff too. Once you call a pizzree, they never call you back. There's no CRM, there's no like retention marketing. They don't remind you to reorder, they

don't upsell you. There's none of that. And then um three, it costs a lot more to serve that customer because you need people to answer the phone and so, and you make a lot of mistakes and all that good stuff. So really the primise here is that if we can flip all of these independent pizzreas, these family owned businesses, to e commerce businesses, they'll make a lot more money and they'll save a lot a lot of money. Nice

and so then take me up to switched. So a couple of things happened between then and one is first, did you raise any money? We didn't raise money, just operating purely off cash flow, purely off like yeah cash flow bootstrapped started to build out a team in Macedonia, so you're profitable. Yeah, we were hiring some family members in Macedonia to do some of the menu work that we spoke about. Because you wanted to do this for

p thres No, it's all us. But I wanted them to help me do the work, and so I went, yeah off shore. I went to visit family in Macedonia and they were asking me about this new company. And one of my relatives said, hey, why don't you give us that work and we can do it for five dollars. It was costing us a hundred here and so. And by the way, five dollars over there five dollars per hour is maybe five times the national average. So you get this amazing job in an office, you get paid

really well. Um. And so we started hiring people there, and by we had a team there of about twenty or thirty people doing a lot of the admin work, yeah, the back office operations. And then I picked my head up February. I'm in Starbucks in stud Island and I'm looking at these um at my books, at my financial books. And in January of twenty fifteen, we had profited two and fifty thou dollars just for the month, straight to

the bottom line. UM. I started doing some silly things so I went to Manhattan Motor Cars in Bora Bentley just cash, and I was like, I'll make it up next month. So so some silly things like that, where where's that Bentley? Now I sold it in three years later. But you know things you do that you're like, you know what am I going to do with this money? Um? Then I realized, wait, I'm being kind of silly. I need to reinvest this thing, and could you to reinvest

in the company. Six months later, I got an offer to sell the company for eighteen million dollars and it would have been you know, life changing. Yeah, and I almost did it. Who makes it kind of over private equity fund interest. Couple of brothers had sold their own tech company and they were starting to create a portfolio of companies and they saw what you guys were doing and just came to you. Yeah, yeah, came to us,

and UM got really close. They took me out to dinner and the whole thing got really close to selling. And my twin brother was like, well, what are you gonna do next? That I was thirty five, and and you know I thought to myself, I was like, you

know what, I'll probably do the same thing again. The third time around, and for me, it was like, you know what, Um, this is still the beginning are We were growing so fast that I kind of asked myself, Hey, what if I treated this company as the new thing and I don't sell, But what if I really come in with that level of energy of like launching something

brand new? What would happen? And so I turned down the deal and I reached out to one of the founders of Seamless who had sold the company on Twitter and um they responded and they're like, yeah, let's jump on a call. Get on a call. He's like, hey, like, what is this business? My pizza dot com? I've never heard of it. I don't even know what this is. But hey, when you have like five restaurants on your platform, just call me back and we'll we'll work together. I

was like, well, I've got three thousand. I had three thousand restaurants by then, and he's like, come to my office tomorrow. UM. I go to the I go to the office. Um. They got really excited and invested a million dollars. For me, it was access to their network to help the scale the business, and that was kind of the beginning of the second phase of the company, but it was still my Pizza. It was still my Pizza.

This was late October November. So when did you make the switch from all the different websites into the one app platform. Yeah, so that must have been a huge that's a huge planned shift. Yeah, well everything changed. Yeah, and we we still actually power all the websites. So we we decided to go from just being websites only

to being omni channel. So one is we made a deal with Google, so we are a direct partner of Google, where if you are a pizza shop and your partner with Slice, the consumer can order through Google, Google Assistant, Google Food, Ordering, your name it all these channels freely

without you having to do anything extra. And then we started to invest in a director consumer app um and we launched that in October of and that was that coincided in parallel with us going from the My Pizza brand to the Slice brand, and it was kind of crazy business business inside. I wrote this article that said, this one man company is so profitable that they've hired one hundred people in like ninety days and now it's called Slice kind of things. I think it's still still

out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is still out there. It's such a cool, such a crazy cool story. Um, why did you do all this? Like? What's your mission? Is it to takedown dominoes? Is it to empower? I listen? You know, I could have nine hours of question for you. Um, but your story is just so unique and inspiring to a lot of people are listening, Like I have a lot of ideas right now, um, and so I know a lot of other people are probably thinking, you know,

for themselves too. But like you, you now are at a point where is the goal just to completely shift the way people order food? Is it to change the paradigm? Is it just to build something as big as possibly can be? Because have you had other offers come to you to try to buy you out? Left? And we have? Um, we we did. We had another offer in twenty nineteen.

Haven't made this public, but I'll share it here. I won't say who, but we didn't have an off trailer and the trailer I haven't that's great, But we did have an offer to sell for fifty million dollars in nineteen that I turned down. You turned it down? Did you tell your mom? I did? Okay? So to make sure because maybe she'll listen to this. We are and at the time I own more than fifty percent of the company still, so it would have been that would

have been life changing as well. But uh, in hindsight, it was absolutely the right idea and it was the right decision um because again we're incredibly early in this digital transformation e commerce transformation phase. And to your question, like what what motivates me, it's you know, money is a is a lagging indicator of wealth that you can create for the world, and I don't. Wealth isn't defined as money. Wealth is making people, making things people want,

and so that's one too. I also don't like, I don't operate with the mindset of in order for me to win, I gotta make sure somebody else loses, because that assumes that wealth is a finite pie. That's not true either. Wealth in fact, is an infinite um game. If you create wealth, it's incremental to everything that already exists um. And so I admire dominoes, I admire some of these chains. I think they're doing incredibly well, and I take some inspiration from what they're doing. But I

want to make that accessible and democratize that. As much as I don't like that word UM to everybody else. So for me, what I'm really passionate about is how do we keep the debate of what is your favorite pizza? Going? Because that debate will be gone if local family owned businesses go out of business, of course, and the only way for these family owned businesses to have a shot is for there to be an operating system, ultimately a platform that will allow them to focus on what they

do really well but solve all the other problems. So having said all of that, the way I think about the opportunity looking forward is instead of somebody going and wanting to open up a franchise, I want someone to open up their own local brand, their own authentic brand, with their own recipe, their own story, their own history, UM and focus on what they do best. But everything else is sort of saw for by slice, which is

the real estate side we should talk after um. The financial side, so access to capital, the entire technology platform, brand, creative marketing, all those things. Do you give small business loans? Now, company, Yeah, we're we're actually launching two locations this month with great operators who have had one location for a long time, have always had a dream to open up their second location, but they don't have access to capital or had a lot of anxiety about where and how to do it.

One of them will be in Greenwich, Connecticut, and another one is in a small town in Massachusetts. And are you taking ownership stakes? And those we are not now they're just exclusive customers to Slice. Interesting. So what's your what's your daylight now? I mean, are you hiring and managing this entire time? Is that like your Monday through Friday? Yeah? You know, for a while it became really reactive, and I'm not really it's not really a great feeling to

to react to things at this scale. So I've actually put some structure to my week, and so I've created themes for every day. Um, and so you know, Mondays are my days with my direct management team, so with our chief business officer, chief technology officer, you know, and so on and so forth. And and also we have our exact team meeting. So I know what Monday is about. Um, Tuesday's sort of a focus on products. Wednesday we've got no meeting days like we don't we just don't meet.

It's it's a data to do. Get it done. Can I say that? I don't know if I can um, and then you know, so every day has the theme. But um, you know what's been pretty awesome is meeting a lot of different people and learning about different stories being here today and you know, learning hopefully learn more about you know, your journey as well. But um, and I think that's most of most of how I spend my time. And then on the weekends, I literally live

inside pizzerias. I just go drive around and I'll sit at a pizzreia. They don't really know who I am, but I'll order a pie. And when you order a pie from a from an owner and you tell them it's good, they start they start talking, so you can ask him questions. They're like, well, what are your baby challenges? Yeah, and so I try to stay really close to the customer because the last thing I would want to do is loose touch with what exactly is happening in the market.

Big Money Energy is hosted by me Ryan Sirhant. It's produced by Mike Coscarelli and Joe Loresca, an executive produced by Lindsay Hoffman. Find more podcasts like Big Money Energy on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.