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Everybody Else is a podcast about the invisible people who make life happen. What began as conversations with behind-the-scenes builders in the music industry has grown into a broader exploration of how people think, work, and carry responsibility across industries and across disciplines. Hosted by Wes Luttrell, the show centers on thoughtful dialogue with creatives, leaders, and operators whose work often goes unseen but shapes the world we live in. New episodes streaming every Tuesday.
speaker-0 (00:02.22)
This is the Everybody Else Podcast.
speaker-1 (00:11.318)
Most of the authors of the human story are unnamed. Invisible contributors to the greatest story ever written. So who are the invisible people writing our chapter today? Because behind every great city, industry, movement, and way of thinking are people who dedicate their entire lives to work that'll go virtually unnoticed. Work that builds on where we've been, shapes where we are, and points us towards where we're going.
There are those in the spotlight, and then there's everybody else.
speaker-0 (00:43.214)
you
speaker-0 (00:57.646)
had been working at the ESI bookstore for a long time, but that's only open eight to five, nine to five, something like that. And hours were kind of between classes. So with my schedule and everything I was involved with, I couldn't get a ton of hours over there. And one of the organizations I was involved with, my buddy Zach Mishler was in there too. And he had gone to high school with Brad, knew that he was starting this pizza company. He had, I think, tried it before and it's like...
It's a build your own pizza place, kind of like Chipotle. It seems like a cool thing. He had told a couple of us about it, like, this is coming soon on the West Side, so if you're looking for a job, go apply there. So I did and was one of the first employees. My twin brother applied at the same time. I think he interviewed, I interviewed right after him and they said, yeah, I'll take them both. We just did the same thing twice. I think it's Brad and Blake.
speaker-1 (01:50.018)
who interviewed you.
That makes sense. Probably wasn't a whole lot of people around to interview people.
speaker-0 (01:59.008)
Not at all. So it's a pretty small crew at first, probably 20 or so of us. Mixed college kids and non-college workers. Brad was in there 80 hours a week early on, working every shift to see what he can do to make that dream come true. Yeah.
speaker-1 (02:20.014)
What do you remember about Reether on opening day?
speaker-0 (02:23.95)
I was on, I think, the third day.
speaker-1 (02:27.343)
What do you remember about that early time?
speaker-0 (02:30.926)
It was trial by fire. mean, we had, we were supposed to have a training, maybe two days of training or something beforehand and one of them got snowed out. It was in February, so you never know with ice and snow. One got canceled. The other one is like, okay, here's a quick run through the kitchen. We're compressing everything from two days into one. And there's a lot of ducks falling around Brad Blake like, okay, this is everything you need to know about making the pizza. Here's the dough. Here's the sauces. Those kinds of pieces. And then.
Yeah, basically you get thrown up on the line. We'll trial by trial by fire. Listen to customers understand what they want, put together on the pizza, move on to the next one.
speaker-1 (03:11.448)
Was there very many processes in place yet, just in terms of how things are done?
speaker-0 (03:18.247)
Yeah, we had a lot of our old processes, most of which have been replaced.
speaker-1 (03:23.374)
It's like theoretical processes before the store launches.
speaker-0 (03:27.382)
Yeah. And some things are tested on the line or in the morning for prep where you think it's going to work one way and then you could, I quickly realized that's not going to work. Like we used to dock every pizza to order on the line and now we've gone through a couple different iterations, changing our Docker types from like a more flathead, roller Docker to a pinpoint Docker. And now we actually have
roller dockers. So as you're rolling out your sheets of dough, the last pass docks it for you.
speaker-1 (04:00.001)
Nice.
speaker-0 (04:01.592)
That's been a lot more consistent and helps maintain the crust integrity. If you dock it too quickly, that doesn't actually perform too close to when it bakes. That doesn't perform as well on the line. You might get more pieces bubbling up, stuff like that. That's one thing that's changed.
speaker-1 (04:18.833)
For people who don't know, docking is putting these little indentions.
speaker-0 (04:23.278)
little pinpricks throughout the dough that way steam or anything has a route to escape through. But yeah, that's something that changed early on. Kids meals used to just be a little zip cut in half or big zip cut in half. So you had these kind of like half moon shaped pizza things that didn't work super well. We used to pull out every dough ball by hand. We'd make dough, get it out of the dough tub and say,
Okay, this one has to be this point, this ounces, weigh it out and then roll each one by hand. Within a couple months, I don't remember the exact timeline, but we got something called a dough maiden that you pick out 18 times the amount of dough you need, press it into this container, and then it'll separate it into 18 even pieces for you. All those tools and processes changed over time, but made everything more efficient and kind of make more sense.
speaker-1 (05:21.228)
more consistent across each pizza too. What do you remember about the customers or the culture of the store in the very beginning? Do you remember how people are reacting to it?
speaker-0 (05:36.454)
It was a lot of excitement, some confusion, like, we're doing what with pizza? You don't have a family size, anything like that? Yeah. It's all personal. You had to choose everything from your crust, your sauce, all the way through the end. And just getting people to adopt that Chipotle, Subway, whatever kind of build your own restaurant you've been to before idea and apply it to pizza. And then understand that it's like, I can get exactly what I want on here. I don't have to do pepperon.
pepperoni mushrooms for the entire pizza. I can also add banana peppers to my half that maybe someone in your family doesn't like.
speaker-1 (06:12.526)
I didn't even think about that. I remember that now, having worked there. I remember that. But I didn't even think about the education part of being a newer type of pizza product in an area that is used to Papa John's or Spanky's or Torone's. The education part of like, this is what this is. didn't really, you know, that's a different...
speaker-0 (06:34.99)
It was just a lot of conversations on the line and then our customers kind of became our educators. They'd be like, oh, come into this new pizza place. This is how you do it. And they would pass on what all of that information was. Used to we had Italian red, as it pesto, and then put them together. We called it spicy red. Now that it was spicy, but it was spiced, had more flavor. And after we took that off the menu board, was probably...
Another five or more years where it's like first time customers coming in say, my friend told me get it spicy red. So sometimes they educate what they know for a long, long time without getting the updated information. Not a problem. It's just like, Oh, you've either been here for a long time or you know, someone who has been. It's cool seeing that kind of percolate over the years.
speaker-1 (07:12.995)
Yeah.
speaker-1 (07:23.118)
What do you remember about your, terms of the, like once the restaurant started growing, just even in terms of that first store, did you personally or the people around you contribute to refining the processes, adding training, hiring? Like how did you, what was sort of the journey of honing in that initial launch into like, okay, we gotta make this, we gotta get this tighter.
speaker-0 (07:52.938)
It was a lot of iteration, everybody trying to help out everyone else on, this is how you can roll faster if you do this process instead of X, Y, or Z. You're have more consistent crush shapes. You're going to an easier time getting it through the roller. We'd start off, you'd roll one single dough ball at a time all the way through the process and then started the things we would call like tandem rolling where two people attack it at once and you're a little bit faster than
How to explain that? You pick up speed by having more hands at work at once.
speaker-1 (08:26.784)
Yeah, like assembly line on most like boom boom boom. Yeah.
speaker-0 (08:30.338)
Things like that helped things over time.
speaker-1 (08:33.016)
Did anybody write anything down in terms of training manuals and things?
speaker-0 (08:36.502)
Yeah, things eventually made it back into training. Some was just word of mouth until it was fully vetted and finalized. Yeah. A lot of recipes did not change. Dough recipes, sauce recipes, those were pretty locked in. Blake is the chef. He already knew how to make a lot of that stuff. That's probably what it's going to be. Over the years, they've probably been tweaked a little bit, but a lot of those have stayed super similar to what the original recipe was.
speaker-1 (09:05.078)
So what is your role today?
speaker-0 (09:06.666)
I'm the director of marketing and then have split the IT role at AZIP for a little bit. So yeah, it's anything from digital placements online for anything on social media, YouTube pre-rolls, over the top, TV ads, like Roku ads, Disney Plus, those kind of pieces, email. We rolled out a loyalty program last year.
managing a lot of that, our Pizza at the Month Club, IT installs for new stores, camera management, pretty well our whole website for forms, blogs, any pages that need updates, of anything marketing related, probably got a hand in it. Some of our community efforts with donation requests, silent auctions, raffles, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, it's one where we all wear a lot of hats and we try to wear them well. Sometimes you pass a hat off and you get two hats back in return. It's kind of evolution as we continue to grow.
speaker-1 (10:18.754)
How does a guy go from working there on the third day that it opens to becoming the director of marketing 12 years later? What was the journey if you took us through?
speaker-0 (10:30.83)
Sure. Some was trust and effort. So we had the Westside store that was opened, let's see, we opened in February of 2014. And then about six months later, we opened the Newberg store. As Brad and Blake were trying to locations, they were able to pass off some of the stuff they were doing online. I was a marketing student at USI and like, hey, you do marketing. Do you want a chance at running the Facebook page and Twitter account? That's Twitter then, it's X now.
Yep. Still call it Twitter.
speaker-1 (11:03.31)
And they needed help. I'm sure they were like, hey, you take this, you do this.
speaker-0 (11:08.108)
and yeah, I can free them up to do the things they're really good at, that's a good chance for me to learn how that works in the real world versus just the theory of it in class. That's one where we tried a lot of things. Used to we would hop on more of the trends, the memes, whatever that were going on. It was fun, but we definitely found more of our own voice over time where we don't have to chase, okay, someone just put out this.
tweet this TikTok, this Facebook challenge and try to jump on that anymore, we can be our own brand. Yeah. There's a continued iteration on that. then...
speaker-1 (11:49.89)
Did you work out of the family basement?
speaker-0 (11:52.206)
Out of the kitchen.
speaker-1 (11:55.022)
Kitchen, dining room, okay. Was that their parents' house? Yep. Because there was no HQ yet? That was HQ.
speaker-0 (12:01.454)
That was HQ for a little while and then as I started coming on as the marketing intern or I don't think we ever had a real name for it. was like, do you want to do this? I split my time between mostly in the store and then some hours a week for that. And then if we had a meeting, we would occasionally go over to Dana and Laura's house, Brad's parents. And then within the first couple of years, we had an office downtown over on MLK Boulevard.
And then eventually I made the switch from mostly being in the store and doing some marketing to kind of being in the store, doing mostly marketing. And then eventually it was full-time just marketing.
speaker-1 (12:41.73)
That was a gradual journey. wasn't necessarily a quick
speaker-0 (12:44.812)
Yeah, was probably two or so months after graduation that I was able to fully separate from the store as a shift leader and just do marketing. Still happy to help out in the store from time to time if they needed it, but it really full-time on the marketing efforts.
speaker-1 (13:03.278)
Did you, it's interesting thinking back that the people who would eventually, I mean a lot, is it maybe everybody who would eventually work in the office in the company executive team started in the store or at least has had considerable amount of time on the front lines of making pizza to understand like the reality of it.
speaker-0 (13:31.958)
Yeah, I'd say probably 70 or 80 % of the home office staff had kind of come up through the stores. Now that we've grown and have hired some regional managers in different roles like that, they bring in other company experience and may not have been a frontline ASAP employee or shift leader, AGM, GM, anything like that along the way. they have the skills and then are able to see and learn everything we're doing. Now that you get a lot of in-store experience with that, whether it's...
talking to their team members or helping out with shifts. So they do see it from that same team member through GM perspective. yeah, a lot of us were there in the early days and have grown with it into these different roles. Our Terre Haute store, we have two now, but the one in the south was kind of a wellspring of talent. Our director of operations was a, I think he started as a shift leader.
eventually became the source GM, our Northern Regional Director, then moved up to the full Director of Operations role.
speaker-1 (14:42.958)
across the whole company. And there's 13 stores today, is that right? That's right. Tell me about like the systems that Azip has deployed over the last 12 years. When it first started, it was a single store. I'm sure making a lot of things in-house at the store, but it's since grown into a regional brand. How do things work across all the different stores? Like,
Just how does product travel between the stores these days? Do people still make their own stuff? How does it all work these days?
speaker-0 (15:16.632)
Yeah, we still make a lot of products in store. Some things come from distribution partners like Delco's based out of Indy. They supply a lot of some made, some raw ingredients. We work with Creation Gardens. They do more of our produce. They're more in charge of getting that stuff to the stores on their delivery days. And then the stores will transform it into, if you had sour cream, buttermilk, a different
ingredients for that, turning it into ranch at the store level. But something else like our Iso pepperoni, Iso's company out of Ohio, I believe, they send their product to Delco and then Delco distributes that to all the stores where they get a big box of pepperoni. That's not one that we're hand or machine slicing to order. It's a mix. And then we have a sister company that acts as a commissary kitchen and
They make a lot of the more unique products like our sauce bases for the pizza of month. That's when we're – their commercial kitchen, they can send those things out and then we use it for those unique flavors that we're kind of known for.
speaker-1 (16:30.828)
does when a new store opens up, let's say in Indianapolis, what role do you play in helping launch that story and get that message out to that local community being based in Evansville?
speaker-0 (16:47.246)
Sure, that's, some of it's through ads for every location. Pretty well. We have an individual Facebook page and we'll start putting out what our story is. Very similar to the email drip campaigns we'll run for those new stores, especially after we have more customers in the system. We'll tell the, what we're talking about right now, the little bits of the startup story.
What makes our flavors unique and different? What a pizza of the month is? What a, really what Aza Pizza is, that builds your own process, creating something delicious that's just for you. We try to take those main talking points and then put them out on social media where we have that little bit more discoverability for the customers. Some communities have different...
like a Facebook community group. Sometimes they allow outside people in there, others are more insular where it's like, if you didn't grow up on this street, we're not going to let you in. understandable. You don't want every business spamming you when they're opening in a new town. But yeah, if can find those little footholds into a community, we do want to be basically your neighbor. We're hiring people local to your town. We are relatively local. Evansville, indeed, not that far.
We want to be those good community partners. So it's also outreach to say their library for their summer reading program. We'll sponsor reading prizes for their kids. Nice. If there's youth teams, nonprofits, anyone who's doing a silent auction or raffle. Eventually that is more of a, they come to us. Yeah. They've seen how Zip is donated. So like, yeah, we've got this coming up. They'll send in a...
email contact form, anything like that, and I can fill out a donation form. But earlier on, I try to find more of those nonprofit groups and say, hey, these are some of the opportunities we have. do a Dine and Donate give back programs. We do gift card sales for more so like team fundraisers, youth sports. And then I tell them about the different ways we can help out, whether it's maybe a banner for an outfield for a high school team.
speaker-0 (19:11.938)
gift cards for a silent auction, coupons for a race packet if you're having a 5K, different things like that where we want to be there helping the community.
speaker-1 (19:21.87)
Do you share the impact of how those programs have impacted other territories where it's worked? Other cities where it's worked? Does that matter?
speaker-0 (19:35.97)
I think it does to the, especially the nonprofit leaders, say. this has worked in Evansville and Terre Haute and Blanton. not in Indy?
speaker-1 (19:44.888)
We've raised this much money doing this. Try this.
speaker-0 (19:48.568)
Yeah. And then we're trying to do more of that with, so Evansville has had multiple locations for years now. We've got the three in Evansville, the one in Newburgh and those all feed off of each other. Now, as we continue to expand our most recent two openings were in existing towns. So we'd had a store on the south side of Terre Haute, we opened one on the east side. We had a store in Lafayette, we opened one in West Lafayette, kind of where all of AISOP started. So being able to...
Talk to the same community and be like, hey, we've done all these good things here. We're that across town. That's going to keep going. You reach people that, even if it's five miles away, that can be, depending on where you are, kind of a long drive. You start building those different lunch and dinner habits, fundraising habits, finding what works for that community based off that new kind of five mile radius.
speaker-1 (20:42.178)
What is the... How do you think about the voice of A-Zip?
speaker-0 (20:46.296)
try to be fun. More so in the old days, was probably a lot more wordplay. I'm a pun fan. yeah, that still comes through a little bit. But we don't have a full-on persona where it's like, this is Asa Pizza talking to you, but we want to be engaging, informative, show you why we're doing things. The Asa company as a whole has read a lot of leadership type of books over the years.
There's like Simon Sinek, start with Y. So we try to get the Y behind things. There's 40X. That is, that Covey? I'd have to look that up.
speaker-1 (21:28.984)
I don't know who wrote that. I know Simon Sinek though.
speaker-0 (21:31.848)
With the 4DX process, you're looking for a wildly important goal. If we're trying to really focus in and say, this is the thing we want to change, what do we have to do to affect that change or elicit that change? Customers don't need to see the full nitty-gritty of what that is, but as we're starting results and we can share it, we can say, okay, this is what we've done to make AzaPizza better for you.
speaker-1 (21:56.526)
Do have an example of that?
speaker-0 (21:58.446)
More recently would be our dough process. Can't share too, too much, but yeah.
speaker-1 (22:05.07)
Don't give me the deets, but just the overarching case study.
speaker-0 (22:09.794)
Yeah. So we've changed. mean, one of the big parts was the dock or roller docker and just changing our approach to somehow the dough is made to make it as fresh as possible for customers whenever they're getting it. Used to we'd make, we'd roll out all over dough in the morning. And if you roll the dough out at seven or eight AM, then if you're using that same dough at eight PM, nine PM, right at close, it's not going to be as good. Yeah. So doing different processes, whether it's a
staggered rolling or other things to make sure that dough is as fresh as possible for you. That's been a big change.
speaker-1 (22:45.752)
you make that change, let's say, then your job or your task is to communicate that change to the customer as to what the benefit is to them.
speaker-0 (23:01.646)
It can be. Some would just let the taste or change speak for itself. We don't have to say, oh, this is different. Because then you can get into a Coke versus New Coke situation. Who knows how it really did or did not taste. Once you say you've changed something, people will be like, oh, this tastes way different. Exactly. So maybe it is better. But if people are resistant to change, they think they've always enjoyed it. They know they have.
speaker-1 (23:21.556)
For better, worse.
speaker-0 (23:30.636)
And then you say, I've changed it. That might get on the wrong foot when they take that first bite and they're like, well, something's different and I can't immediately put my finger on it. But now that I know it's a change, I like my old thing better. But if you've done a blind taste test or you didn't talk about it, they'd be like, huh, A's have been tasting better recently. Some things would keep quiet. Others, especially for like new product rollouts, that gets a lot more of the customer education.
behind the scenes process of why we're doing this. All that put together.
speaker-1 (24:03.63)
How do you listen to customer feedback to improve processes?
speaker-0 (24:11.534)
all day every day. We have a good number of feedback channels. There's our regular contact form, feedback form. We have our online order feedback form. We have an in-store order feedback form that we launched within the past year or so. That's one that when you check out in-store, it'll send you a follow-up text and say, hey, if you want to get extra points for your creative rewards account, which is our loyalty program.
speaker-1 (24:12.898)
All day every day.
speaker-0 (24:41.422)
We know you just purchased your pizza, take a picture, send that in, let us know how we did. All of that kind of funnels into a not fully unified system, but we get feedback on different parameters depending on what type of order it was and then use that data to say, hey, the store's really accurate and they're really on time for all their online orders or the store's doing well, but their net promoter score on how good their in-store pizzas.
has been shifting down recently. Let's investigate that. And then you can look into pictures that customers would attach to their feedback. it's like, the past four days, we're seeing a whole lot of uncovered crust, a really wide crust edge without sauce, cheese, anything like that on there. It's like, oh, well, we had a new hire. They've not been making pizza squad as well on the line. You can coach that and then immediately, almost immediately see that trend lines start to go back up. They're making good pizzas.
people have good experiences and that it's reflected in that feedback.
speaker-1 (25:43.992)
That is beautiful.
speaker-0 (25:45.946)
Thank you. There's also the chance for myself or GMs or anyone to follow up with the customers. Some have a little radio button on there that says, yes, I do or no, do not want someone to reach back out to me about this experience. So when they click that, we see what happened. Normally the yeses are when it's not a great experience. So you do have that customer recovery process to go through, whether it's an apology or refund.
explanation, something that they're looking for out of it to show you've heard them, you want to understand, you want to make it better for the future and you want to fix it right now. Like if they, if we missed something from their order, we didn't send out their cookies and we only refund them and apologize and then figure out, okay, which shift was it? Who was working? And we need to follow up with them on the online expo station to make sure they see how an order comes through and they're getting every piece of the order together.
If there's something that company-wide, we launch something and say, we're getting a lot of accuracy misses or anything like that, is there something we can change about the entire process that helps our teams be more accurate?
speaker-1 (26:58.911)
Is customer feedback generally constructive?
speaker-0 (27:02.651)
Generally, yeah.
speaker-1 (27:04.898)
Some probably use it as a channel to talk.
speaker-0 (27:06.796)
Yeah, some vent. Yeah.
speaker-1 (27:09.526)
nothing really to do with the pizza as much as it has to do with their day or their life is going.
speaker-0 (27:14.562)
Yeah, some use fake email addresses where it is a valid concern, but they put in bogus information. We can't reach back out to them. So it's like, okay, we've got the picture, we've got the feedback. Hopefully they come back sometime, but no, gmail.com is not going to allow me to email you back.
speaker-1 (27:34.03)
Do you or does the company use AI for systems or processes?
speaker-0 (27:41.396)
We do.
speaker-1 (27:42.766)
How does it benefit your work? What does it look like?
speaker-0 (27:46.83)
For us, it's been more of an effort multiplier. So looking at sales data, forecasting, seeing how much we need to order, we can use these AI platforms to code out tools and say, okay, we can track how much pepperoni, for an example, the store has been using. Look at what we think the sales are going to be over the next couple of days, the next week.
And then tie that back to when their order dates are, what their usage rate of pepperoni generally is and say, okay, if you don't order on this next truck date, you're going to run out of pepperoni. So we say order 2.4 cases. So then they would see that and say, okay, you can't order 0.4 of a case. So I'm going to round up to three. then as they continue to take inventory and the system can see those different orders and uses, that's where it can say, okay, this is
Now we know how much pepperoni we have on hand. With the next projection, let's see how we did. Let's see where we're going. And maybe next time you only need 1.9 cases, so you order two.
speaker-1 (28:55.502)
How has the AI implementation of just that simple thing of ordering, of forecasting orders, how has that impacted the business both in terms of the benefit of being more accurate on what you need, but also just the speed and the process of getting that task complete?
speaker-0 (29:20.11)
I mean, it's been very helpful. It's now that we don't check the data or aren't doing our own work on it. Yeah, but because there's sometimes we might say, okay, you're gonna need 400 cases of pepperoni. It's like, so which would be a great problem to have. Our pepperoni is really good.
speaker-1 (29:27.852)
Yeah, human auditing.
speaker-1 (29:39.63)
We need a separate warehouse in blue.
speaker-0 (29:41.902)
Yeah, sure. But yeah, if anything like that pops up, we can dive into it and say, oh, they were counting X, Y, or Z incorrectly or something in how it was calculating change based off maybe our backend inventory tracker misclassified something. And then that feeds into the calculation and gives you the wrong answer. Then you can go in and fix it. But as a pretty trustworthy rule of thumb,
It helps our GMs spend less time ordering. It lets them order more accurately and then helps control food cost, waste, different pieces like that, and gives them more time back to be in the store, attentive with their teams, talking to customers, doing all those things that... I mean, if a GM never had to do inventory or admin stuff, they could just work with their teams and customers. That'd be ideal. It's not the reality or world that we live in. Someone has to press the buttons and do those orders.
But it does give them more confidence in what they're ordering, a little bit less gas work, and then it's a kind of a flywheel effect of that system feeds itself, good information, and then you can ideally trust it more and more as time goes on.
speaker-1 (30:57.826)
Are you building the tools or are there tools available now?
speaker-0 (31:01.324)
We are, we're building them. Nice. A lot of it has been at Brad and Andy. Just iterating on, okay, we have this. These companies have open APIs that they can call on and start doing data fetches, data loads, running through whatever kind of database they have set up. And then for the user facing end, eventually that all culminates in an answer. The 2.4 cases of pepperoni. And then they can use that.
enter it on their online ordering tool and then place it to Delco, Creation Gardens, whoever they're placing that order for.
speaker-1 (31:38.83)
Do you remember the initial conversation about using AI in the company?
speaker-0 (31:43.822)
Kind of, mean, it all blew up very quickly and got better really fast. The initial ones were a little more, haha, this is what chat GPT or something can do. A lot of just hallucinations, bad information, all that stuff, but less on the LLM chat bot side of things and more on the low code or prompted code environment.
That's where it feels like a lot of strides have been made where you can give it a context, different tools and parameters to respect for the tool you're trying to build. we'd all love to be like coding by hand and doing all of that, but we're not full stack developers. We don't have all those skills yet. So being able to get at least a template built out. then if you're familiar enough with any sort of code.
Eventually you learn how to like parse through some of it and say, okay, this is where it's not understanding what I said. You can start making some either handwritten tweaks to it or reprompt it and say, hey, on this part, this is actually what I need and then get it to rewrite it in that right context. So yeah, there's some moral questions about AI. I'm sure on the creative side, you've seen a lot of it, especially more on the music side. That's where it's a...
probably a little more fraught with should we, should we not use that from a business use case. If it's helping our teams be more efficient and can deliver a better product, at least the way we're using it feels okay.
speaker-1 (33:27.49)
The, well, this is, it's an interesting thing because a lot of companies, I was talking to somebody over the weekend who's, you know, their company has basically said, we give you guys permission from the inside to begin experimenting with it. This was like a year ago. And he's like, we've like, a portion of us have been developing tools and really like making strides over here. And then there's a, there's like a, side of the company who's older.
a lot of them are just really fearful or hesitant towards the technology out of fear that it's going to replace their job. And so they are adverse to trying it. And then there becomes a communication breakdown between like, but look at what it can do. they're like, don't touch my stuff with that. And I think that companies who adopt it for the right reasons of, somebody told me that one of their company, a company they work with,
the company policy is that we are not going to replace any jobs with AI. However, if you leave or if a new hire is needed, we're going to assess if AI could take that or could do that. But we're not going to replace you. We're not going to fire you and replace you with AI. However, if, you know, but we do encourage you to adopt it and to try it out and make things better. And I just think the companies who are adopting it,
I guess if the leaders in the case of Azip are the ones leading the way of using it and improving the company and like you said, freeing up the people to spend more time on what matters, the people, other people around them, the food, the product, that's a net positive. It's gotta be.
speaker-0 (35:12.625)
Yeah, think some of the probably more industry specific question of should you or should you not use it, let's talk about the music industry. If you're in cyber security or healthcare, different places like that, there's probably a more limited scope of what you can use it for. I don't know if you've heard about Claw or Clawedbot. Some of these AI agents that people let run rampant, they pick up.
And you get distribution and say, yeah, this code is good code. I'm going to use it. You can introduce a lot of malicious backdoors into your products. If you don't quarantine your, let's say was healthcare, your patient information, that could be a huge type of violation. So while there are things where, let's say it's a AI tool analyzing MRI scans, maybe it's picking up things that humans didn't catch the first time and anything like that.
But they've got to be careful about, okay, is this anonymized? Is this person's file? Does it have any chance of leaking out and saying like, okay, everyone can see John Johnson's MRI scan?
speaker-1 (36:26.87)
Yeah, yeah, so Tell me about Your like through your journey with last 12 years. How have you stayed? creative personally within a zip in terms of Making content or creating systems. Is there a part that gives you life in terms of creativity?
speaker-0 (36:52.046)
Uniqueness would be one aspect, like as these new tools come along, as we get new pizzas, new programs, like the Pizza Month Club launched I think five years ago. So we'd had A's up going for seven something years. I was like, okay, let's do a program where you can purchase every pizza month for the next year as a card. Originally it was a punch card style where you go in and then in January we'd punch out your January stamp.
February, you're going that way.
speaker-1 (37:24.28)
So you, tell me about, I don't know about this. So you pay for the club in advance at like a discount rate or something?
speaker-0 (37:29.464)
Yep. Yep. So I think it was originally $88 and that would get you all 12 pizzas of the month. There's a registration process where you would also be able to get a t-shirt, potentially bonus coupons, pieces like that. The first year was a plastic punch card. We looked at paper, but that's not going to survive for a year in a wallet. we did a little plastic cards and then
got some heavy-duty hole punches that could handle that. The second and third year we did more of a, maybe in three years of that, we did perforated ticket sheets where you would keep the envelope probably at home, maybe in your car, and then for that month tear off what your coupon was. That's where we could more easily put in bonus coupons for like, here's some cinnamon sticks or here's some garlic cheese sticks. You could turn those in with your order and then you've already paid for it at that discounted rate, but then within the month you're getting it for free.
And then for this most recent iteration of it, we tied it into our creator rewards program where now all the coupons are fully digital and makes it where if you're ordering in-store or online, it's the same coupon code. We had an issue with the old ones where you could either use it in-store or online, but there was potential for double dipping or some sort of abuse with that when you had...
specific codes for accounts. They weren't just open codes where anybody could say, March of Crabness 2026, and then everybody's getting that one for free. We would see every single one walk out the door. Yeah, we had a white listed group of customers that when their accounts signed in and would use that code, it was a one-time use deal. being able to move that to our own rewards program and say, okay, now here's your one copy of the code. You can use it wherever you want.
speaker-1 (39:26.06)
They access that through like an app.
speaker-0 (39:27.694)
Yep. Well, it's a web app or website that they can go to. Okay. They can also just check in with their phone number and if they've registered correctly, that coupon would be on their account at the register. yeah, being able to grow things like that over the years. started with probably 250 members the first year and now we're north of like 750 in the club. Wow. And some of that's supported by store growth, some is by just
per store trust and growth in the program. Repeat with customers and then people have had it themselves and buy it for a gift for someone else. They get more of their family members signed up for it. Things like that have helped it grow.
speaker-1 (40:00.152)
Yeah
speaker-1 (40:12.014)
So you enjoy the creating of that sort of program or the refining of it as it goes out or just the whole process of things like that.
speaker-0 (40:22.382)
The whole process, even some of the simplest the registration form from the first year we had that there was a lot of like follow-up emailing to say, now I need your t-shirt size and I need your Home store where you're gonna pick this up because we send every t-shirt to the stores to be picked up All I would say and never get picked up. But that's one where it's a much more robust onboarding form. It's got
address lookup. when they're registering, feels more like a, if you buy anything on like a shop.com, Shopify, anything with that smooth checkout experience, it should feel more like that. And then we save all that data. And then when we're ready to mail your t-shirt for you or to you, then we can take that list and give it to our print partner. They can pack it all out and then send it to your house. it's a little bit more cost to ship the shirts, but
You also don't have to make that extra trip to the store when we say, sometime throughout the year, hey, shirts are here. It's just at your house and you can start wearing it. So seeing it grow along those lines too, from the small thing it started as to what it is now has been fun.
speaker-1 (41:37.356)
Out of all the programs you've been a part of, or just processes that you've been a part of, what would you say you're the most proud of?
speaker-0 (41:45.262)
It's a mix between that, creator rewards launched, getting it to where it is now. Those have been great. Seeing our email list grow over time. We use MailChimp and are able to reach a lot of our customers with ideally not too many updates throughout the month. We try to keep it to maybe two emails a month on average. But being able to get that information out to customers in a kind of slow consumption way.
I don't know how much you're in your email versus on an app, checking your texts, anything like that. So it's a little bit more of that quote unquote long form content these days. I'm sure you're very familiar with Honeymoon. They do a great job of like a very long email where it's something you can sit down, enjoy, see what's going on in the store. We haven't reached that level of depth to our emails. But is that touch point where...
speaker-1 (42:19.608)
Big email guy.
speaker-0 (42:42.926)
You can spend a little bit of time with it, see what's new, then move on with your day. Maybe order a pizza along the way. it's not one where we're emailing you three times a day, come get a pizza. Have you thought about a pizza? Hey, it's dinner time, come get a pizza. That can get pretty old. I was just going through both of my email accounts, like my personal one and my work one, and trying to just clean up all the junk, unsubscribing stuff, putting in better filters.
Yeah, I don't know about your emo life, but mine are just getting hammered from every direction.
speaker-1 (43:19.534)
It's a...
speaker-0 (43:22.146)
Really trying to cut down that noise into just like, this is stuff I need to see. And then some of the promotional stuff, like there are emails that yeah, they'll get you five times a week. I still want to see them eventually, but that doesn't need to be like the number one thing in my inbox.
speaker-1 (43:37.454)
Last night we went and had a zip, probably because I knew that I was going to talk to you today. I hadn't had it in a while. What's interesting is I worked there for a little over two years. By time I left, I was training manager at Evansville East and Evansville North. And the experience after I left was that when I went to the stores, it was hard for me to eat the pizza without critiquing the way that it was made.
or even just like the attitude that people like just anything about the experience. was just like checklist in my head. That's gone for me for the most part. Cause a lot's changed and I don't even know what's going on anymore. I, and I just don't, I'm removed from it so far, so far that I can just experience it for what it is. And last time I had a March crabness and it was delicious. I had on the West side. was a great experience. And that was just, I'm just saying that as a comment.
But I'm curious, do you still, 12 years later, enjoy eating a zip pizza?
speaker-0 (44:46.318)
I get some of the pieces that you get to from like being so involved with it where you're part of it. You see it every day. You know how it should be. And if it's not up to that standards, that standard, it's the same as a customer. Maybe like, that was okay. If you get one that's made really well online, you get in your car, probably some on the way home. That can be a great experience or going through the line. If you get that team culture we strive for.
really positive attitudes, engaging on the line. Somehow all that makes the pizza taste better. yeah, someone's dependent on the in-store online experience. If they're not firing on all cylinders, be like, I know you guys can do better. It's like, for sure, still gonna eat it. It's great. it had that, we talk a lot about the six-star experience that our teams strive for. And when that's not there, it's like, still a really good pizza, but I know you can do better.
speaker-1 (45:43.922)
It's funny that the team was really good last night. I read this book recently, The Law of Success. It's by Napoleon Hill, 100 year old book. He talks so much about it, so much in it about the salesman, about being somebody who is assertive and respectful and understanding of your customer.
And since reading it, anytime I go into a store now, I think to myself, like for example, we were in Dillard's last week and one of the guys who worked there was walking past me and Chloe and our kids. I was looking at shirts, clearly confused because I don't know what the hell I'm looking at, but I'm trying to get some nicer clothes. And he walked right past us and kind of looked at us and kept walking. And I thought, you just missed the chance to get a sale. You could have come over here and sold me on like five. I'm ready to buy, you know.
And I think so much now I'm so primed to that and I so I think to myself the importance of of being an engaged employee and and and just being Just being there just doing you know being about the job while you're on the job and how how? Just showing up how much that does for the experience and I think that I think it's just a culture thing that a zip does well, but it's always seems like
with my experience there and then, you know, knowing so many people who have worked there and the people who still work there, that just showing up and being a good person and giving a shit about the customer and their experience, it goes so far.
speaker-0 (47:27.662)
And that's one of those intangible things you hire for. Like, it's tough to tell exactly from an interview, are you someone who's going to show up? Are you willing to engage? But that willingness to do so, like in your dealer's example, it could take him two seconds to pass by and say, hey, do you need anything? Or do you have any questions about the shirts? But if you get so in your head about, here's the next task I have to do, maybe he was clocking out, maybe he was checking the stock room.
whatever they do at Dillard's. Just having that little touch point makes all the difference in the world. From our side, one of the failings I see occasionally is someone will come in for an online order pickup. And if our team doesn't acknowledge them, you've got about 30 seconds, maybe a minute of race period. After that, customers start getting pretty frustrated where it's like, I'm here, I'm ready to pick up my pizza. I have the skills and ability to go over to the warming cabinet and just grab my pizza out of there.
That's not allowed. then they're sitting there like, I know what I need. I'm here for it. I can see my order. But until you acknowledge me and say, hey, what'd have today? Or you pick it up, then that can stew and quickly fester into a bad experience, even if everything else about the pizza was perfect.
speaker-1 (48:41.518)
Yeah, it's an intangible and I think as I've gotten older I think about Okay, we've had a whole week. We're gonna go out and and maybe it's like the Friday night pizza thing and we're gonna go do something after we're gonna walk around and get ice cream or something if you're a parent and you've told your kid for like three or four days this is what we're gonna go do and You're gonna go spend fifty dollars on this meal and it's like
It's funny, as I get older, I really look forward to those just moments. It's not something that I just always do off the cuff or gonna go out to eat sometimes. But a lot of times these things get planned as we get older and the kids really look forward to it. And we leverage that as a way to behave through the week to build up to this moment. And I remember having some sense of that when I worked at Izip and other service jobs where I thought,
You know, we have to make this a good experience because this is like their moment for this thing that they're looking forward to doing or a date night or whatever that might be. I would say like the same is true for like being a bartender or something. It's like make the drink as good as you can make it because it's just the one drink that they've been building up towards.
speaker-0 (49:54.158)
My training tip was always, this is your grandma standing across from you in line and you want to make her the perfect pizza. Yeah. Sweet Don't let her down. And you can take that approach where it's special for every customer because for them, maybe it's their one trip that week, that month, first time at AZIP. They're going out of town and this is their last Harag and their final AZIP pizza. Yeah. Then you want to make it right for them and hit on every point of the process from making it to checking out.
seeing if it's all right, are they having a good day. And that is a tough thing to balance with how quickly you have to make pizzas, how fast the lines need to move. if you have that effort towards, yeah, I care about this, I care about the customers, I care about a good experience, it goes so far.