Chad Franzen 15:35
So when you open up a new store beyond kind of establishing that culture that you want, what else are some of the keys to, you know, long term success? Like, you know, I’m sure there’s a lot of competitors in the pizza industry, does Pizza Guys speak for itself? Or, you know, what do you have to do to kind of establish yourself within this new kind of market that you’re in?
Kenneth Price 15:54
So the big thing is I look at is, is, you know, when I come in, and I, and I, you know, take over an existing store, I always, you know, look at five things that I can fix, that will drastically change, you know, the way the operation runs, and, and that equally equates to money, more money, right. So that’s what I look at first, right? Because, of course, we’re going into the business for more money. But to answer your question for the long term of it is we look at, I don’t ever pay attention to what competitors are doing. I don’t ever pay attention to competitor pricing or anything like that. If these guys were running promotion for 10 bucks, seven bucks, 12 bucks, I could care less, right? Because I’m giving you the service that you don’t find anywhere else. And I’m giving you you know, some good pizza. We’re not the best best, but we’re good, right? You know, you know, we’re good enough. You know, you could walk into a beautiful store, my drivers are awesome. You know, service is outstanding. I can charge you $16 A pizza $17 A pizza easily. Right? And you know, for medium fees, I can totally $26 For a large pizza, right? You’re gonna pay it. Right. And and if I’m building that foundation with you tourists like every time you walk in, I’m like, Hey, are you doing Chad? When you pepperoni sausage today? Yeah, yeah, awesome. Definitely go, Hey, I made you a garlic bread too. And I want you to try this out. You know, I mean, that right there that like that? How many pizza places would give you something? Right? Every time I do it, I say, take a pizza card. And I call it internal marketing. So I have free garlic bread cards, free cookie free munchies free sent it to us. And I put it in the box and say next time you order your free garlic bread, your free bacon bread. So I do that all the time. Because how many places give you something for free? You know, and that’s kind of, you know, something I’ve built I, I go above and beyond. And I think that’s the most important thing, especially when you’re in the restaurant industry. And right now, you know, because now we have nowadays, you walk into a lot of Russians, I, you know, I just took my daughters out to a breakfast restaurant. You know, they miss school for a few hours, like, they wanted to go for breakfast. So they Let’s go. And you know, the service was pretty bad. There’s no customer service, there was no grading there was, you know, it was like, we just give our pool and never came back. And we’re like looking for like, my kids wanted some apple juice isn’t something and I’m like, you know, there was so there was nothing but am I gonna go back? Yeah, probably so. Right. But there’s nothing, you know, until I find another breakfast place, you know that that has better food, better service, you know, they have good food. But nowadays, you don’t find great customer service, you know, and you know, and I think that’s going to change as soon as the the employee market changes, I think that’s going to change drastically to where people are going to see so much better services. And, and the next few years you’re going to be competing, you know, are struggling if if you don’t keep up with that, because once that employee market changes and employees are actually coming to work, you know that now customer service is a big factor. Now that you know that the key players, the big players that play that customer service game is going to win. So
Chad Franzen 19:06
your your story with Pizza Guys is incredible. Tell me about KAP’s HVAC and kind of tell me about the service that you provide, you know, just coming up with a general general customer type information and what led you to start it
Kenneth Price 19:19
I mean, we do everything from commercial residential, you know, install everything, everything, you know, heating and cooling we do. We actually just expanded KAP’s HVAC back into KAP’s HVAC and remodeling. Now we remodeled bathrooms, we remodel houses, we’re actually remodeling restaurants right now. You know, so that, you know we do everything in heating, cooling. How we started is another funny story. And I was in Oregon, about six months. Actually, I was in Oregon. I just moved to California in February. But during that time, I called my buddy up and he was my boss at the time from Pizza Guys. And you know I’ve been trying to do a deal with him, you know, because he’s one of the smartest guys I’ve know, I know. You know, he’s so much knowledge and business and everything. And I think, you know, I’ve always wanted to partner with him. He’s always taken care of me always helped me out everything you know. And I know if I partner with him, if I can do 5 million in sales in two years with him, I can do you know, 10 million in sales, right? So I always wanted to do that and build something big. So I called him up and I was like, Hey, let’s let’s do something he’s like, Okay, well, here’s what you do. He goes, you build a business, in one year, do a million in sales and make it profitable? And we’ll do it together. Well, they’re like, Okay, a million in sales make it profitable in one year, like, Okay, what am I going to do? I couldn’t think of anything, I can build that fast to do that fast. And we kept talking for about a month, month and a half trying to figure out what business go on. And I was like, Okay, can we do an auto shop, I can do an auto shop, right? Give me do this, this this, I was thinking, I was like, Okay, I was, I’m going to do an auto shop, you know, I’m going to do an auto shop. And he goes, No, he goes, do HVAC. Like, I mean, I know nothing about HVAC. Usually, I do think it’s pretty good. I see a lot of trucks and one things you see one guys there, they make pretty good money. You know, they charge a lot. I was like, okay, so I started looking into HVAC. I didn’t know nothing about it, but it had to make it profitable. So I couldn’t hire a really good guy in the beginning, right? So started watching YouTube started studying, start reading more and started reading about it in about a month and a half. I felt confident like I can do this. So I called my cousin I was like, Hey, let’s, you know, like, calm, let’s do this. And, you know, he’s because he’s, you know, he doesn’t know anything about HVAC to. But he’s, you know, this guy is he’ll do anything like, let’s go, you know, let’s learn it. Let’s do it. You know? He goes, and we’ll make some money goes, Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s like, okay, so I call him it comes down, and we do it together. And we go into a customer’s house, we don’t know anything, like trying to figure out what’s wrong, we go back out, what were you doing it coming back in, you’re doing it fixing it? Yeah. And we would fix it. And if we couldn’t fix it, we wouldn’t charge the customer. Literally, we’d come back the next day, fix it again. And then whatever it was, then we like we would break even and just to keep learning, like learning learning because you know, we couldn’t charge the customer $400. And we were there for, you know, three and a half hours. And we’re like, we can do that. We tried it for an hour, just you know, like, it should have only taken an hour. But that’s all we’re gonna charge you. But we wouldn’t tell him we’re learning or anything, you know. So, and we would do that go in and out. And he would go outside in the car and YouTube it and tell me what’s going on. I’ll tell him, Okay, this is what’s happening. This is what’s happening, then we would switch out and we would come back out meet together, go through it together, put our ideas together, go back and fix it. Boom was like, Oh, yes. And we got then we started getting better and better and better. Now we walk into, you know, an HVAC problem or customer’s house. And we can just hear it see it and know what’s wrong. Right? But I mean, that’s how it started, then we, you know, I I hired a project manager. You know, he was like, 52 years old, something like that great guy, one of the best knew everything about it knew everything. Then we started landing some big contracts, T Mobile contracts, Oracle, you know, so we started doing big projects, massive build outs, you know, new new build outs, reconstruction, you know, remodeling. And from there, we just grew. I mean, within our first year, we did 1.2 million. Our second year, we did two and a half million. You know, so it grew fast, you know, two and a half million, and it was very profitable. They’re very, very profitable, you know? Yeah. Yeah.
Chad Franzen 23:45
Wow! You are crazy. Yeah. So what mode? I mean, you’re already you know, you’ve already kind of you’ve been with Pizza Guys for more than a decade. So you’re kind of, you know, things aren’t going good things were going terrible, but now they’re going okay, what motivated you to? To kind of stick with this? What do you admittedly didn’t know what you were doing?
Kenneth Price 24:06
Because I really wanted that I wanted to be big, like I want to do, you know, I want to end up, you know, having a company, you know, doing 20 million in sales, 30 minute sales, you know, um, you know, I want to be a company to where, you know, it’s kind of I because I think the bigger you get, the easier it gets, you know, and I think expansion is a lot easier. So you can expand all over, especially something like this. It’s so easy for me to expand in California. You know, in next year, I’m going to be expanding into Texas, you know, so it’s so easy to expand, especially when I have one central system, central office. But I don’t know, you know, honestly, I I don’t think about it too much.
Chad Franzen 24:49
You just You just kind of like, grind through it and get through it. And then afterwards, you’re like, oh!
Kenneth Price 24:55
Yeah, yeah, I’m just like, Okay, I think it’s more I love the rush a lot. The I love the rush. I love it when like, everything’s piling on me, I’m working, you know, 18-hour days, you know, we’re starting early in the morning, you know, sometimes we, we, you know, we would take an install, which would take probably now we would take three and a half hours, four hours, we were taking, like 1011 hours that we will be working all through the night. We’re asking customers, Hey, are you okay to have us here late? No problem, we’d be staying to like 1am Putting everything together and we get there and everything is in and we’re like, what did we miss? What did we miss, we miss just a simple wiring. And we’re like, man, and it took us like three hours to figure out that one wiring. And it was tough. It was really tough. I mean, it you know, a lot of a lot of times you sit back and like, what am I doing? for you this hour has been 11 hours just on this thing? And, you know, there’s no way you know, we’re we’re missing some things that take another three, four hours to figure it out. I mean, there was so much problems that we ran into, but you know, we always took care of the customer made a right and we we ended up having like, in the first year, we ended up having like over 125 star reviews, you know, we built them, right? Yeah, so it was where our online presence crazy good.
Chad Franzen 26:08
I thought your Pizza Guys story, it was incredible. But this one is this one is almost just as incredible, if not more. So, what how did did COVID affect you guys with Pizza Guys, or with the with KAP’s HVAC?
Kenneth Price 26:22
Um, you know, COVID affected us by the employees, you know, the, the the employees were really, you know, they they wanted time off all these things, everybody, you know, they didn’t they didn’t want to work. That was a lot of it. But as for sales wise, you know, we grew, you know, almost 20% across the board. For the HVAC side, we accelerated tremendously, you know, because everybody was at home they had projects to do they want to do this, you know, using their AC their theater more. So, we’ve you know, we were busy, busy, I’m in for sales wise, it was great. Employee side, it was it was it was hard, because a lot of our guys were working overtime, double time, you know, that was kind of it, you know? And, you know, so that was it. But yeah, it was it was it was it was good. making more money, but having a lot more problems on the employee side is everybody, you know, they needed time off? Or, you know, take care of their families, things like that.
Chad Franzen 27:19
Did you? What would you say, are some of the things that it made you successful enough to, to expand from Oregon, then to California?
Kenneth Price 27:29
Um, so some of the things that were is because I, I build to everything I do, I have a system, I build a system, right. So because everything is once you have a system, just follow step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And, and you’re good, right, I have a system for everything. And, you know, creating a system and writing it down and putting it all together, I think that was the key points to it, you know, versus just keeping it in my head and trying to play it out as it goes, you know, having something to go by. That was I think that was a big part of it. And then the next part of it was, you know, being able to understand that hiring, paying more for better guys that know their stuff, and can do it. It might, you know, some people will say, Oh, this guy’s, you know, $35 an hour, you know, that’s, that’s high already, that’s expensive. And this other guy’s $45 an hour? Why would we pay this guy when we can save $10 an hour? And actually that $45 An hour guy does it in half the time, no mistakes, no calls back. Customer service is great, you know, he ease who you want to represent you, you know, so it actually makes you more money in the long term. You know, so, by me understanding that part, I think that was a big factor in it, you know, especially I can come in right now, you know, by, you know, opened my HVAC here, you know, put one guy that’s really good, even though he makes like $45-$48 an hour. And I know I have no problems, no worries, I don’t have to show up. I don’t have to call him you know, he wakes up in the morning does what he needs to do office will call him if they need anything, send him to this customer, this customer. It’s 5:30 and he’s like, you know, he’s, he’s supposed to be home. But we got an emergency call that he needs to go back to or go take care of another technicians job that they couldn’t finish, you know, so that was a you know, and he’s like, he’ll go do it. You know, he won’t say, Ah, it’s 530 I gotta go home, you know, things like that. He knows you’ll be taken care of, you know, he’ll know if he needs Friday off and he says, Hey, I need Friday off. He’s gonna get Friday off. You know, I mean, he knows you know, they need a week off with pay. He knows he’s got a week off with pay, right? Well, when we need something the company needs something. He goes, no questions asked. You know, I mean, even if he has to stay from 6am to 3am He’s going to do it. You know, and I think being able to find people like that and and taking care of people like that is is a big part of my growth. they’re a big part of my growth.
Chad Franzen 30:01
What is the biggest difference in running a, maybe you already talked about like maybe the maybe it’s just the type of employees of the age of the employees you have, what’s the biggest difference between running a Pizza Guys or a bunch of Pizza Guys.
Kenneth Price 30:13
Companies difference between running Pizza Guys and cab seats in an HR company. It used said it is the the age and the responsibility level and the discipline level of the employees. You know, when your day trackside, you’re considered pearls because these guys are girls, right. And a lot of my guys, they didn’t go to school for we train in house, right? But you have to be able to want this you have to be able to want to get dirty, you have to be able to want to learn, right, and versus in the pizza guy side, they just come in to look to get paid, right? I just need a job, I just need this, you know, I mean, versus really understanding that with pizza, guys, you can grow, right? You can grow. I mean, most of the Pizza Guys owners, they started from nothing. We started from nothing. We were dryers we were flying guys, you know, I mean, they don’t understand that in the Pizza Guys, in small business like that you can grow from being a driver and insider to actually owning your own Pizza Guys, you know, on Pizza Guys helps make that possible. Like the corporation is really amazing about that, you know, and they don’t, you know, they won’t even if we tell them or things like that some reason it doesn’t click in them, you know, and I you know, that’s the I think that’s the biggest difference of it, you know, I mean, I have to a lot of pizza stores, I have to have a really good manager, really strong General Manager, versus my age backside. I don’t even have a manager. I know, unless I want to have big projects, then I have my project manager there, you know, of course controlling the entire project, just making sure everything’s in place, you know, t’s and i’s are dotted and crossed. But other than that, we I don’t call my guys my office don’t really call my guys don’t ask them, Hey, where are you at? For this customer, they take care of everything they do go on lunch breaks their schedule, you know, things like that, you know, and you don’t have to call them and check on them. You don’t have to call them and say why you didn’t you do this, this this this versus, you know, the pizza restaurant? It’s and you’re, you’re pretty much you’re babysitting a lot.
Chad Franzen 32:10
Yeah. Do you ever have any employees that kind of recognize the growth opportunities? Or is everybody just kind of like I’m here until I can figure out what to do next?
Kenneth Price 32:18
No, you you get a few you do you get a few. This, you know, the sad part about it is you get a few, but then they come with some things, a few things that just hold them down. And they hold on to that, you know, I mean, and they have so much potential. And you can tell them, they have so much potential and be like, hey, I want to help you get to this level and do this and give this for you and do this for you. Right, but you need to do this. And they just don’t want to do it. They’re like, Oh, I can’t work on Sundays, I can’t work on Saturday, because of this. I’m like, Man, you do that for a few years, you get your growth, you make your money, and then you can take your weekends off, you know, what they’re like I want the weekends off, my friends are doing this, this this and I’m like, you don’t realize just five years, put five years into it do great, become a great manager, run your own store, you know, and then eventually you’ll be good at it, you save the money, you go to your own, and then you can take all the weekends off you want, you know, and they don’t you know, they don’t understand that, you know, they want it now i want i only want to work four days, or six days, you know, work more, and, you know, working weekends, that’s where the stores are the busiest where we need you, you know, you know, so that he has some things that hold them back. But the few that do they end up? You know, it’s it’s less than a ham. You know, I mean, I’ve been in industry for a long time, it’s less than a handful. It’s really, it’s really hard until like later on, we get a lot of employees that come back, you know, they leave and go try another job. And like all these, you know, they everything’s so sad. Well, you can make your own schedule at Starbucks, right versus with us. You can say, Oh, I don’t want to work Thursday and Friday. I don’t want to work at nights, you know, we’re very flexible on those things. And they don’t really, you know, realize that’s a big thing. Right? So, but we’ve, we’ve had a few that gone on to I mean, we just had, you know, San Diego stores pop up and they were a buddy of ours, another franchisee his his employees that were there. His managers actually went on to San Diego and actually opened their own stores. You know, and then now they’re actually within two years, they’re multi store Oh, and they’re just, you know, doing probably over $2 million in sales. So, you know, it. It’s, it’s, it’s very rare, but it’s very, you know, it feels so good when when they do really understand that because it’s like you, they’re doing great. And you want to see people do great around you, you know.
Chad Franzen 34:43
So, so you’ve got all these things going on when you came here to play sports and go to school. Would you have ever imagined that you’d skipped going to school and now you’re kind of you got you got to kind of companies that you’re working with them that you’re basically in charge of?
Kenneth Price 34:59
Yeah, so I never thought that you know, I never thought I would make it to this level you know, I mean, I lost you know because I mean when I lost everything the first time I lost everything again in 2013 You know, I mean you don’t give a 23-year-old $150,000 A year and a bunch of money to blow you know, so I started buying cars taking trips doing all these things so I lost everything again in 2013 and then I rebuilt everything back from there, but I never thought I would make it to this level I never dreamed of being you know, you know, really, I would say like you know, the beginning I told him I want a Ferrari eventually I want to buy a jet I want to do all these crazy things, you know, like one day and you know so when I first made a ton of money and everything I did that I lost everything you know, I went under and then you know I was grateful that my brother-in-law had my back again and moved in with him did the same thing again rebuilt it again. But you know now I’m doing okay I’m comfortable on few properties, few companies all these things I’m you know, relaxed, be able to pick up the kids when I want. Take the kids to school do what I want. You know, I don’t I don’t want the fancy cars. I don’t want anything. I just want to be comfortable. I just want to relax. I want to fish you know, take care of my stuff. Take the kids out. That’s it just comfortable. It’s going to be comfortable and enjoy life. But yeah, it was never you know, it was never I never thought it would be a reality.
Chad Franzen 36:28
I have one more question for you. But how can people find out more about both Pizza Guys and KAP’s HVAC.
Kenneth Price 36:35
So KAP’s HVAC so KAP’s HVAC California, you know, we have our website KAPsHVAC.com. With a k KAP’s HVAC in Oregon. I actually just sold in August. So I sold that in August. I think they just converted the name to like Valley View or something like that. I sold that and then Pizza Guys PizzaGuys.com Actually just another thing I just I’m actually in escrow right now I’m closing escrow in the next two weeks, I just sold my to Portland locations to so so last two Yeah. So I’m actually at this point, I’m out of Pizza Guys in like two weeks. And then I sold my gap stage back. I’m building a massive one in California up and down California. So this is gonna be all my focus my one big and this is my retirement.
Chad Franzen 37:27
Okay, so that’s kind of your goal. That’s kind of what you’re that’s what you’re moving toward on the future then this? This big one in California?
Kenneth Price 37:33
Yes, absolutely. This big one in California and we can expand we can use this to expand anywhere you know, we can put a location in Florida, Arizona, Texas, you know, we can just go to a place where we think is gonna be good. We have our office staff already, which is you know, all where we’re at. And then all we have to do is put in a technician on ground put everything together online while and presidents put some marketing together and we’re all good mobile.
Chad Franzen 37:59
I was gonna ask you my final question was going to be what what are your goals for the future but but there you go that instead of asking you when you when you order a pizza from Pizza, guys, what do you get? When you order a pizza? When you personally order a pizza from Pizza Guys, what do you get?
Kenneth Price 38:15
When I order a pizza from Pizza Guys, you know, I’m a cheese guy. I just love cheese. That’s it. Just give me a red sauce with cheese. That’s it. I think if you want to compare pizzas and see which pizzas are good, you got to you know, it’s got to be you got to taste the dough on the cheese and those are the most important things you know, because toppings they all but similar same you know, they’re a little bit of a difference you know, depending on the brand and the quality of the pepperonis and things like that but you want to taste the pizza taste the dough and taste the cheese and you know with Pizza Guys, we make our dough fresh, you know, and our cheese is you know 100% Whole milk so it’s good cheese, you know, expensive cheese, you know, but I’m just a cheese guy like just just plain cheese and nothing else on it. No ranch, no parmesan on it, no peppers. Just cheese.
Chad Franzen 39:00
Very nice, very nice. Hey, Kenneth, it’s been great to talk to you. I really enjoyed hearing your story is incredible. Thank you so much.
Kenneth Price 39:08
Yeah, I appreciate you for having me, man.
Chad Franzen 39:11
All right. Have a good one. Thank you.
Kenneth Price 39:12
You too. I’ll see you.
Chad Franzen 39:13
So long, everybody.
Outro 39:14
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