Business Innovators Radio - Mike Bausch: How to Turn Your Passion into Profit and Help People Along the Way

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

Mike Bausch is president of The World Pizza Champions and one of 40 co-authors of the bestselling new book, The Pursuit of Pizza: Recipes from The World Pizza Champions. Bausch is a recognized industry leader whose restaurant, Andolini’s Pizzeria, is a top-ten pizzeria in the US, as named by TripAdvisor, BuzzFeed, CNN, and USA Today. Since 2005, Bausch’s pizza empire has grown to five pizzerias, two gelaterias, two food hall concepts, a food truck, and a fine-dining restaurant. He is a World Pizza Champion, a Guinness World Records title holder, and a writer for Pizza Today. He now adds “best-selling author” to his industry accomplishments.Check out the book at https://amzn.to/3VUk5LD.Rebelpreneur Radio with Ralph Brogdenhttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/rebelpreneur-radio-with-ralph-brogden/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/mike-bausch-how-to-turn-your-passion-into-profit-and-help-people-along-the-way

You're locked in the United Station of the planet. Resistance is futile. The revolution has begun. You're listening to Revopreneur Radio, helping you break the rules and build the business you need for the life you want. And now, broadcasting his pirate signal. Through somewhere beyond the status quo. Here's your host, best-selling author, marketing and media strategist, Ralph Brogden.

Hello and welcome to Rebel Prenuber Radio. It's the show that helps you build the business you need so you can live the life you won. I am Ralph Brogden. Do you love pizza? Well, if you do, you are not the only one. Who doesn't love pizza? I mean, just saying the word and thinking about it makes you hungry, ready to go out and grab a slice or grab a whole pie. If you like pizza, if you love pizza, if you're passionate about food,

food in general. You're going to love today's guests because I'm interviewing Mike Bausch. He is an industry leader whose restaurant, Andalini's Pizzeria, is a top 10 pizzeria in the U.S. as named by TripAdvisor BuzzFeed, CNN, and USA Today. Mike is a world pizza champion. He is a Guinness Book of World Records title holder. He is a writer for pizza today. And he is also the co-author of of an exciting new book titled The Pursuit of Pizza Recipes from the World Pizza Champions. So let's get right to that conversation with Pizza Extraordinaire Mike Bouch. Break the rules. Build your business. Live your dream. You're listening to Rebelpreneur Radio with Ralph Brogden, www.orgdon.com.

Mike Balsh, welcome to Rebelpreneur Radio. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. I've been looking through this new book. You are the co-author of The Pursuit of Pizza Recipes from the World Pizza Champions. I haven't had lunch yet, but I kind of have an idea of what I want from looking just through the beautiful photography of this book. And I want to find out all about it. First, tell me a little bit about your background. I understand that you are part of a book.

Marine Corps family. You have lived all over America. Tell us about that and what got you interested in cooking and then in pizza specifically. For sure, you know, yeah, I come from an interesting background. My parents were born and raised in Manhattan and I've lived in San Francisco Bay Area and my brother got transferred here to Tulsa and we opened a restaurant and we had both worked pizza restaurants. We both love pizza. That is not a high bar. enough to open a restaurant. Being really passionate about food is something we always have been and loving food, loving quality.

Again, that is not enough to be a successful restaurant owner. I think that's just the ticket into the door. It gets you into the carnival. It gets you no ride tickets, though. And the rest of it is predicated upon systemization, truly connecting with not only your customer, but also your employee.

and having something different to say. And that's what we've done over the last 19 years, is not simply sought to fit in, but to be the best possible pizzeria we could be, along with helping people along the way, which sounds cliche, but we truly do. We don't talk about our charity stuff that we do.

It's, you know, being a not, and again, the community aspect of it is not just saying it, but living it is a big part of what, were about and that's how we've been able to be here this long, you know. And for us to stand out, we had to be the hyper version of ourselves and connect with not only the blue-collar audience, but also the white-collar audience, and do it simultaneously, which is why I think by the time we opened our second store, we are so successful is because we had learned how to be approachable in multiple demos.

And you have expanded over almost 20 years now from that first pizzeria that you opened up in 2005. Give us a sense now of your pizza empire. You've got a lot going on right now. We have five full-blown brick-and-mortar Andalini's pizzerias. We also have our Andalini's mobile food truck and our Andalini's catering arm, which does a lot of weddings for all things, not just pizza. We have a fine dining restaurant, known as Prasimo. We have two locations inside of a food hall. One is another pizza concept done by one of our employees called Zaza's Pizza and Wings, along with Metropolis Cheesecakes.

We have a location at the Tulsa Airport. And, yeah, we have many things at this point. We learned that the mindset of what we do is applicable to multiple types of food. but the biggest thing is to have it be the ethos be the same of making the best possible thing that we're stoked about and never condescending to the customer but inviting them and to enjoy it with us. Yeah, and I think one of the key things that you mentioned here right in the very beginning is passion. It's easy, I think, for business people to get into a thing. and begin to make decisions mostly on profit rather than passion.

And those are two different things, but it seems to me that without passion, you are not bringing the motivation to the business, whatever the business is, if you're not passionate about it, it will not give you the steadfastness you need to stick to it and to master your craft. Food is something that people can really get passionate about. But then, as you said, going the next step in, how do I turn what I'm passionate about into a business that's actually doing something, making money, yes, but also making an impact in the community.

And you've mastered that in many different ways. What would you say is the biggest lesson you've learned just from a business perspective on what it takes to turn your passion into something that's profitable and is making a difference in the world. You know, there's a lot to digress on it. And the word passion is a very important word. It's being used so much in society right now that I almost, I started changing it to stout because, you know, some people are like really passionate. I'm like, no, you're a jerk. You're not passionate.

You're just yelling at people about, like, I'm so passionate. I yell. I'm like, no, you're a jerk. No one yells when they're stoked. And so we're stoked about food. We're stoked about pizza. We're like, this is really cool. You guys like this?

That's great because there's two things in the world that are deeply, deeply contagious. One is apathy. And the other is true authentic stokage or passion. You know, the most, the first Netflix documentary was Hero Dreams of Sushi. It was a documentary about a hero, the Japanese sushi maker, who's Michelin Star rated out of a subway station in Tokyo. It's not hero sometimes does sushi on the side. It's hero dreams of sushi.

And that's why anyone can get into it because passion is contagious. And that makes life easier. Here's the other thing. It's systematically and fundamentally easier to conduct your day passionately or stoked because other people then are stoked to be there. It's really crappy to have everyone not into it. and everyone has a case of the efforts. That's a hard day.

So if everyone's into the job, and if I care about it to, you know, to this 90 to 100% degree, then I could hope that they're going to care to the 70% to 90%. If you are phoning it into 40% and you think that they're going to care to 80%, you're telling yourself a lie.

So to have people that are doing the stuff, you've got to be into it. It's not, and that doesn't mean you're an expert. It doesn't mean that you're perfect. It means that you're into it, which I will take every day of the week, every day of the week over knowledge. We'll have new bartenders or people that are like, I've been bartender for 20 years. It's like, and cool. I'll take the person who turned 21, six months ago, who doesn't know the difference between a logger and ale who's excited to talk to people over the guy who's a Ciceroon guy, but it's too cool for school.

Right. Yeah. So a lot of it is a mindset. A lot of it is attitude and bringing joy. And you made a good point, especially for business owners who are looking to expand and to grow beyond the solopreneur stage, which is something that if you're going to have multiple locations, be in a retail situation and in food service, you've got to have a team. And the performance of the team and the attitude of the team will never exceed. the attitude and the performance and the passion of the owner or the supervisor or the manager there. So the mindset is such a critical part of the success. Along with that, you've discovered and tapped into passion not only for motivating employees, but also to gather other professionals around you. And I'm talking now about the fact that you are the president of World. pizza champions, which is pretty cool. It's like, okay, here we are, the best of the best.

And like a professional association of people who are passionate about pizza. But tell us how that got started and your vision with world pizza champions. For sure. The world pizza champions is, it started about 20 years ago by Tony Giovanni, who, if you Google Tony G. Pizza or Tony Jiminyani pizza. This is beyond the Michael Jordan of all things pizza. Best Pizza Baker, pizza acrobatic, pizza steward, been on The Tonight Show, written the pizza Bible, masterclass, like the actual master class with like Scorsese and everything. He's the one who represents pizza in that. So he started this group and that he was picking out a pizzeria owners

who he thought were deeply passionate. Maybe they didn't have awards or maybe they did. He was going after people who were moving the needle of the industry. And it was a solid competitive pizza team for many, many years. And then it transitioned to being also a cohesive organization 501C that does charitable works and is a mastermind group in and of ourselves. And I was a part of that transition in 2017 and then took the helm from Tony to become president a few years ago. And as part of being president, I wanted to do some bigger, grander stuff.

And the idea was thrown out by Laura Meyer, co-author of the book, to do a cookbook. We have all this pizza talent, the murderer's row of pizza makers. Let's do something with it. So we all came to Tulsa. And after documenting all their stories and all the recipes to have a more avant-garde pizza book, this is the greatest, logistical nightmare landing of a ship of a book you've ever seen. No one's ever done a cookbook where the authors physically made their product for every photo with multiple authors. Usually it's one person does it or something to that degree.

This is every single person actually made their item on site, showing it off and done impeccably well. Here, we pulled it off in Tulsa because I have all the different pizza ovens to do it at enough locations. And because we were all here, we then did the other aspect of what we do, which is to have a charitable event. So we said, what's a Guinness record that we haven't touched yet? And we did the world's largest pizza party, Guinness record, not just any record, a Guinness record, which holds itself to an incredibly difficult and high standard, especially when it's a group participation event. And the current record was a little over 1,000,

I believe, 1,000, 47 people, which had been done in Rome. And we... sought to beat that. And that record had been failed in New York, Chicago, and L.A. all in that year. And it was being attempted a few days before us in L.A. by a YouTuber with Pizza Hut. So we were prepared to beat him if he beat the record. He did not. But because we so logistically were tight with everyone at Andalini's and, of course, the World Pizza Champions, we more than tripled the record to now 3,357 and sent seven kids

to grant their make-o-wish witches. So that's the culmination of this book. That's the epilogue of this book, which if you love charity, cool. But if you are a pizza maker, whether professional in a restaurant or at home, this is all the greatest pizza makers in the world and some of the ones you might not know

showing stuff they haven't seen in a pizza book. There's a lot of great books on how to make an exquisite margarita. This is an incredible gluten-furtain. three, we have Tony Jiminyi, Cordo Pace. You have John Arena, the godfather of pizza getting into his techniques. There's so much going on in this book that any pizza purist is going to really lose it for what we created here. And we're very proud that also the money from this book goes to send more kids on their make-a-wish wishes. Yeah, perfect.

So, and we should mention also that this. cookbook, the pursuit of pizza recipes from the world from the world pizza champions. 40 pizza chefs co-authoring in this book, including you might, to contribute their unique take on everything, beautiful photography, mouth-watering photos. Who came up with the idea? Was that kind of a mutual thing, or is that something that you dreamed of and saw the vision through? You know, the original idea was Laura Meyer to do a book who, like I said, is a co-author.

And then the logistics of it was me and how we're going to pull it off in Tulsa. I was like, I got to know I have the kitchen right. The photographer is my food photographer for Andalini's, who is one of the most talented food photographers in America. I would put bar none of Valerie Weighis. we also, you know, had a great help along the way in how we got everything else done. We just pulled it all together and got the stories done right along with the recipes that we evaluated heavily to make sure that this was doing something that had not been done before. And it was a team effort after that.

And everyone had to participate and everyone had to put their best foot forward and show up in Tulsa, ready to rock. Yeah, and you definitely pulled it off. The book, again, is titled The Pursuit of Pizza Recipes from the World Pizza Champions. And you can look that up on Amazon like I did. It's available on Amazon.com. Just search for The Pursuit of Pizza and you will find it. And it'll make you hungry. It'll also help you to better appreciate the

the world of pizza and the passion that exists in this one particular food group that you can do so much with it. And congratulations to you, Mike, and to all the co-authors and everyone who contributed to make this project a success. And thank you so much for your time on Rebel Renewber Radio and for sharing your wisdom and your passion. with us. Very cool. Thank you. You've been listening to Rebelpreneur

Radio with Ralph Brogden. Download the show notes and much more at Rebelpreneur.com.