Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

The book Tom is reading is The Gap vs the Gain by Dan Sullivan & Dr. Benjamin Hardy. It’s available in print at https://amzn.to/3UG0leq and as an audiobook at https://amzn.to/48fQDlY.

Donato’s board chair Jane Grote Abell’s book is The Missing Piece: Doing Business the Donatos Way. It’s available in print at https://amzn.to/3wfTM8b. You can watch her episode of Undercover Boss on Paramount Plus (subscription) or Pluto TV (https://pluto.tv/en/on-demand/series/65301d20a78f0d001ace948e/season/5/episode/65496d2125fde2001aed7337).

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Women and Leadership: Journey Toward Equity by Sherylle J. Tan & Lisa DeFrank-Cole
• Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski
• Own the AI Revolution by Neil Sahota
• Time and Chance by Kim Campbell

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

With a commitment to innovation, growth, and the brand’s core values, Tom Krouse has etched an extraordinary journey as a leader at Donatos Pizza. Krouse was named the fourth CEO in the company’s history in October 2010, after spending ten years in various marketing and growth leadership roles. Krouse was recognized as one of the top four pizza executives in the country at the 2023 International Pizza Expo and was also included in the 2022 Columbus Smart 50 Awards recognizing the region’s top leadership.

Prior to joining Donatos in 2000, Krouse was Vice President of Marketing for Wendy’s International, where he spent 12 years in various field and brand marketing positions. Before joining Wendy’s, he spent his early years at various advertising agencies, including being a co-founder and partner of Daly, Lewis & Krouse, a marketing communications firm. As an active member of the community, Krouse combines his passion for music, leadership, and giving back. Tom currently serves on the Board of the International Franchise Association (IFA) and the Columbus Association of Performing Arts (CAPA). He is a Co-Founder, Board Member, and past Chair of the Columbus Music Commission, past Chair of the Board of Junior Achievement of Central Ohio and past board member of Harmony Project and SproutFive. In addition, Tom is a founding member and front man for Grassinine, a popular mountain rock band in central Ohio. Through his popular LinkedIn series, The Corner Piece: Leadership Insights by a Pizza Man, Krouse inspires and shares candid leadership advice.

Transcript
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Speaker 1 0:00
Most business leaders believe in capitalism, but which one, corporate, free market, or state capitalism? There are many more, and each one requires different leadership. With this episode originally posting on Valentine’s Day, we’ll look at agape capitalism, as guest Tom Kraus of Donatos Pisa explains it centers on a love of humankind, which we don’t often associate with capitalism. Like the flavors of capitalism, no single style fits all leaders. That’s why the Innovative Leadership Institute helps leaders find their best, unique form of leadership, from assessments to coaching, explore the tools that are right for you@innovativeleadership.com

Maureen 0:56
This is Innovating Leadership, co-creating our future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready. Helping us in this mission today is Tom Kraus, CEO of Donatos Pizza. We’ll be talking about innovation and expansion of the brand, as well as the unique ways he gives back to the community through music. Tom, thank you for joining

Speaker 2 1:19
us. Thanks for having me.

Maureen 1:20
How have you innovated Donatos?

Speaker 2 1:22
Well, let’s start with what is Donatos. So, Donatos is a 60 year old pizza company started by my father-in-law, Jim Grody, as a teenager on the south side of Columbus, Ohio. Today, we’re a $300 million restaurant company driven by franchise. In terms of innovation, innovation has actually been a part of who Donatos is from the very beginning. 1963 pizza actually in America was a bit of a new concept. Jim, when he started, there weren’t a lot of options, and it wasn’t nearly as competitive as it is today, but it also wasn’t as familiar. So, Jim, his passion is about doing business with a set of values and ethics that really drives the culture of the company. Back in the day, it was more corny things like the Golden Rule, which was more than just a phrase. It really was Jim saying, “If I’m going to be in business, I want to put myself in the shoes of the customer or my associates and make sure I’m delivering what they want or maybe even what they don’t know they want. I bring that up because I think that really is kind of the spark for innovation that causes you to think about what do we need to do that’s different, what do we need to do that really is kind of leading what customer needs are, and so he was one of the first, if not the first, I’m not sure, to have a pickup window at a pizza shop, you know, like a drive-up window that really wasn’t a thing, you know, it was mostly mom and pops, or it was the bigger chains, so the idea of having a convenient way to get pizza was an idea, how we make the pizza that is a system that actually even today is very innovative, but Jim and the company doesn’t stop there. A lot of this is how do we internally simplify the operation, so we can deliver a great product. So he’s busy, and we’re busy looking at automation, looking at how do we use technology to help make it easier to run a restaurant and make it easier for the customer. Eventually,

Maureen 3:27
yeah, there are a couple things that stand out to me about the legacy of Jim. One was that he wanted it to be a great working experience for employees. Some of your employees are young kids, young adults, and an environment that felt wholesome, and that Golden Rule Foundation is interesting to what changes and what doesn’t change.

Speaker 2 3:52
That’s a great point. The way it looked back in the day for Jim was young kids having fun, taking care of each other, making pizzas, teasing each other, and laughing, and Jim made sure it was a fun environment, whether it was back then or even today. If you think about what makes it not a fun environment, and those tend to be difficult, mundane tasks, things that are messy, dirty, difficult, difficult customer interaction, so it’s the same concept. How do I create an environment that is not difficult? Things like, instead of getting there two hours early and repeatedly sourcing a pizza over and over and over, which almost feels like a manufacturing type task. How can we take that out? So now we have an automatic pizza saucing machine, for example, that takes care of that process for us in six seconds. It sauces a pizza. So, what do I do with my time while I spend my time interacting with customers or interacting with other associates in a positive manner? You’re right, it’s an environmental kind of objective, if you think. About

Maureen 5:00
it, add that to the pepperoni slicing, and how it’s put on a pizza.

Speaker 2 5:05
Yeah, we’re really looking at everything. There’s a lot of dish washing that goes on in the back, by the way. Just a point about innovation. I think the point for us is what we just talked about. How do we make it easier at the restaurant level, so it’s easier on associates, and therefore better for our customers, not innovation for innovation’s sake, not creating the image of a futuristic company to drive valuation of the business, those kinds of things. So sometimes the innovation isn’t that sexy, like a dishwasher, that’s innovation in the back of a pizza shop, because most pizza shops, they’re washing dishes by hand, so it’s dish washing, but it’s also this automatic saucing machine is pretty amazing. We have a pepperoni slicing machine that will take sticks of pepperoni and automatically slice them and deposit them perfectly on the pizza. Now that is, and I don’t know if you’ve ever made pizzas in a high volume situation, but we have 100 pieces of pepperoni on every large pizza, so putting 100 slices of pepperoni on a large pizza is a cumbersome task. We’re still optimizing the machine, but now, thanks to Jim, we’ve got freshly sliced pepperoni that is automatically put on the pizza and ready to bake in the oven. We’re looking at, can we automatically cut the pizza? We cut our pizza in squares, so is that a process that it can automatically be cut and boxed? And we’re working on a prototype for that, a number of different things, which probably violating all of our confidentiality, but that’s okay, because Jim’s philosophy is if it’s right for us, it should be right for everybody in the pizza business, and so he’s willing to contribute in that manner.

Maureen 6:52
I think he has a whole separate business selling his pepperoni slicing machines now. Right?

Speaker 2 6:57
Yeah, you know, Maureen, I was talking about innovation as part of our culture here, and it really is rooted in this passion of an entrepreneur, Jim. I want to say back in the late 60s, maybe his early 70s, he had a few restaurants, and he was always thinking about how do I have a more consistent product so it’s better all the time. So he invented this idea of a pepperoni slicing machine years and years ago in his head, you know, he’s not an engineer by education, he’s a business person working pizza shops, so he developed this idea in his head, and he built his own, we’d call it a alpha test machine, and I’m probably exaggerating, but I envision it with bungee cords around it or his belt, and he had this idea that you’d put the pizza underneath it, and it would just go across and slice all the pepperoni sticks, and of course he’d bring it into the shop, and it would break, and springs would fly, and the kids would laugh at him. Of course, he was determined, and so he got his brother-in-law, who’s an engineer, to optimize it, and long story short, it ended up being too big and too difficult to clean, and too expensive, frankly, for restaurant use. Somebody gave him some advice and said, “You know, the frozen pizza business on these big assembly lines, they’re putting pepper odium in my hand, and you ought to go talk to them, and so in his never say die mentality, he ended up talking to the people who manufactured Tony’s Pizza out in Kansas, and went out, and after two to three years of working on some machine, I think he sold him six machines, he tells the story that he showed up in a white lab coat and had a clipboard, so he would look real official, and they said, How many do we need? And he pulls tape measure out, and he winced and said, I don’t know, six, and they bought him. Fast forward to today, that was the genesis of Groti Manufacturing, or the Grody Company, which is $100 million business that manufactures slicing and depositing equipment for food manufacturers, so not just pizza companies, but they manufacture whole lines that automate making sandwiches and slicing them. They have French fry processing equipment, so they basically build equipment for manufacturers to help them with efficiency and automation and things like that, they just turned 50 years last year, Donato has turned 60 years. So, here’s two longstanding, viable, vibrant businesses based on innovation,

Maureen 9:35
so it’s in your DNA.

Speaker 2 9:37
Sure, is

Maureen 9:38
I want to add in now AI, and not asking what you’re doing in that space, but you said something that resonates as companies are looking at implementing artificial intelligence and shifting the workload. You shifted the workload of the young person putting sauce on pizza, slicing pepperonis, and distributing them, washing down. Dishes, what I didn’t hear is we’re going to have no people in our restaurant. What I heard is we’re going to redeploy our people so that they spend time doing the thing they love, and we need supporting our customers.

Speaker 2 10:11
Right, right. Actually, for the bean counters out there, you could look at the business model and say we need x number of hours of labor to run a restaurant, and we all know labor is a challenge today, and certainly at entry-level type positions like working in a restaurant. So, the challenge financially then is to say, well, how do I cut hours, the number of human hours it takes to run a restaurant, and what do I do with those dollars? And our concept is, let’s take those dollars, let’s pay our people more, let’s upskill the job of managing the restaurant, managing customer relationships. So, again, it’s taking the mundane, inefficient, and also expensive, just because of the number of hours that it takes tasks out, like answering the telephone is one example that it actually hits hard in a couple of areas. Number one, consider the 1000s and 1000s of orders that we take a week per restaurant, that’s a lot of time on the phone taking someone’s order. Now, how do we take that order and not interrupt the operations, because many times in a pizza shop, and you’ve probably heard it, you call to order pizza, maybe too many rings. After five rings, you think, are they going to answer it? They answer it, they’re out of breath, they sound like they don’t really want to be talking to you. Well, the reason is they’re busy making this great pizza for the people standing in line, or the large catering order, so we’re interrupting the process, so the whole experience isn’t necessarily good. It’s not good for the customer, it’s not good for the associate. We’re using artificial intelligence directly for various options for taking the order. Now, number one, we’re taking the order digitally, so about 80% of the pizza orders that we take come over in an online order, mostly over the phone, you know, that’s a significant amount. The remaining 20% some are in different stages of development, but we’re using call centers, and then we’re also using voice recognition, artificial intelligence in a manner to take the orders, so you take those hours, you take the slicing the pepperoni hours, you take the saucing pizza hours, you redeploy the cost of that labor, upskill the remaining associates, and you have a better experience for everybody.

Maureen 12:37
What strikes me as I listen to you is it allows it to be cost effective for me, the consumer who loves your pizza,

Speaker 2 12:43
right.

Maureen 12:43
And when I call in, because I’m often out running around someplace, so I don’t necessarily navigate the app very well, so it’s easier to call while I’m driving rather than log on to the app while I’m driving,

Speaker 2 12:56
right?

Maureen 12:57
That I can still do that,

Speaker 2 12:59
you can still do that,

Maureen 13:00
and that there’s an AI that I may say I want to seriously cheese pizza, and that’s a special thing that isn’t always running, and the app could say, okay, we don’t have that, but here’s the recommendation, would be brilliant.

Speaker 2 13:14
That’s the exciting part of the future, which is we understand your needs, because we know you as a consumer, we’re able to help you, we’re able to facilitate the order, we’re able to know based on your ordering profile, not based on information that we shouldn’t have, but the kind of customer that you are. Based on that, we then re-engineer the order side of the equation and try to facilitate what you want or what you might want, speeds up the process satisfies your needs, and you know we haven’t even scratched the surface on the upside of all that, and the other part about AI specifically is just training processes. Internal training processes can and should and will be much easier. It’s not the easiest job. Yes, and we want to make it fun, and all the things that I already talked about, but training can be the most daunting part of it. When somebody comes into work at a Donatos, it’s a high-paced environment, they’re working with a lot of other people that seem to know what they’re doing. It can be very stressful for a young person. How do we make sure that they’re quickly and easily trained up and are able to fit into that environment, so that we don’t turn them just because they’re stressed, and so I see that as probably the other big area that will grow and be better at. So again, it goes back to that original concept that you talked about, which is the environment that we’re providing for our people, which then therefore translates into a better experience for the customers.

Maureen 14:45
You’ve been running Donaters now for over a decade, right?

Speaker 2 14:48
Yeah,

Maureen 14:49
so you’ve contributed to building and extending this culture of innovation. How would you help other leaders think about helping their culture be more change ready?

Speaker 2 14:59
That is. A great question, and I think you almost have to reverse engineer this, because you know what you can’t do is, if you’re not a founder, you know, entrepreneur, because those aren’t the answers. The role of the leader is to be a better communicator and be an authentic leader that connects with your people, and that’s easy to say, hard to do. Reason it’s hard to do is there’s so many moving parts, it’s not like things are slowing down, change is moving faster and faster. The challenge is that leaders, in response to the speed, they don’t take the time to talk about and listen to their people, and I’m not saying that we’re great at it, because every day we mess up, but we at least have an awareness. Change can be scary, technology can be scary, the word innovation can be scary, particularly in a restaurant company, because the key to success in a restaurant is having consistent, repeatable process. Right, customers come in, they order food, we give it to them. It’s great. They mess up the dining room, we clean it up. They come in, they order, they eat, they mess up the dining room. We clean it up. It’s a repetitive process. Those that succeed are really good at consistent repetitive operations. Change or innovation sounds like you’re going to mess up my rhythm. We’ve got to be sensitive to that fact. What that means is we’ve got to explain in simple terms and consistently how the technology or innovation ties to what we’re trying to accomplish. What we’re trying to accomplish, just make it easier for you, or we’re trying to make you more money, or we’re trying to make it better for the customer in this manner. What I see, we fall into the trap is we’re moving so fast we don’t stop long enough to explain, and by the way, therefore respect our people to say, here’s what this is, here’s why it’s not scary, here’s where it’s going. By the way, you’re also going to have a bump in the road, because it’s not going to be perfect, but we are moving this direction because it’s better for you and the customer. Do you know what I mean? It’s like things move so fast that we make decisions that are efficient, but we don’t act in a manner that’s effective. There’s a difference between being efficient and being effective, I think.

Maureen 17:22
Absolutely, and I just want to piggyback on a couple of things you said. One, they’re going to be bumps, having come out of technology implementation for a long period of time with Accenture. Systems are always bumpy. It doesn’t matter how well you plan, how smart your people are, they’re so complex. There are things that aren’t going to be anticipated with some of this AI stuff. It’s brand new, so what you implement at Donato is maybe the first time that thing has been implemented. Of course, it’s going to be bumpy. Of course, helping people understand that they are safe in making mistakes and helping your customers recognize that you haven’t just blown up the ship on the process.

Speaker 2 18:04
There’s probably another cautionary flag is that you have to be careful that you don’t have a perfectionist environment in an innovative process, because of that, and it goes back to what I was saying about successful restaurants, are if you execute all that perfectly, you’re going to succeed ordering, producing food, serving the food. If you do that perfectly, time and time again, you’re going to build your business. That can sound like a perfectionist culture, so that when you bring in something that’s new and different. Our president, Kevin King, does a really good job at identifying where our pinch points are, where we need innovation, and he is always talking about the why, you know, I mean, that’s a common phrase, but here’s what’s going to happen, and by the way, it may not work at first, what he doesn’t do is back off, because when you have a company that has a strong culture, people can gang up on new ideas like antibodies, like here’s a foreign element that just entered. Let’s attack, but again, if you’re communicating well, and you’re showing respect, and you’re getting people’s opinions. I did something four years ago, it was before Covid, but there was some angst, because we were implementing a lot of change, digital ordering, looking at the third party delivery, there was some angst out in system, and so I did something called King for a Day. I said, if you were King for a Day, what would you do different than what we’re doing today? And we had roundtable meetings, and I had no agenda, it was just, by the way, it was just me and store level associates or just me and managers, and I just let them rock, and we sifted through a lot of that. Some of it was they just wanted to be heard, some of it was there were some good ideas that we needed to harvest, and some of it was we cared enough to get their opinion. I know we’re talking about innovation, but back to my point, I. Think, as leaders, we have to be better communicators. We have to be better authentic humans, and not come off as the scary people are going to move your cheese every couple of weeks. I think the reason we did well during Covid is we met every couple of days with our entire system, and we said, here’s what we know, and by the way, here’s what we don’t know, and there was a lot of that, so we didn’t hide number one, and we also didn’t act like we knew exactly what was going on. Some of that humility, I think, helped people feel safe. Back to your word, safe. I think that’s a, that’s a great word for leaders today.

Maureen 20:34
You said a couple of words, going back to words, as we look at the top 10 skills leaders need to be effective at in implementing AI, and I would say implementing any transformation. The difference is there’s more of it, and the intensity is accelerating. Communication is the first one we have, and when we talk about leadership mindsets, that humility, I value my people, I get their input, I collaborate, I hear the you’re doing stuff well, but I also, what I really want to hear is, what are the opportunities we haven’t seen and captured, and what are the risks, and balancing the tension of we don’t want to put it in the field too quickly and give our customers a worse experience, but we don’t want to wait so long that we’re not even keeping up with our competitors.

Speaker 2 21:24
I’d be curious, for from your standpoint, having studied this and write about it and all that, how do you effectively get an entire organization to accept the fact that this is the new normal? Change and innovation, you know, growth is another word that I think for some organizations can be scary, because there’s a lot of unknown with growth, and there’s fear with growth. What have you found are some of the ways to get an organization to embrace the reality that there is going to be change, and it’s going to be a constant. I mean, I suppose it starts from at the very beginning when somebody joins the company.

Maureen 21:58
So, I would say there were a few things, and it’s part of why we do the podcast. I want all of my clients to have as much current data as possible. We did a podcast recently with a top futurist, and he was citing data from PWC, and you’ll find this interesting. 55% of the impacts of CEOs are outside of their control, so you now control less than half of what happens to your company, and 40% of companies will not be in business in 10 years. If people start to understand that we are not immune to this, we’ve done great things, and that’s what got us here, but we’re talking now, not a time horizon of five to 10 years, we’re talking. If we want to excel, or even to stay in business, remain profitable, pay your salary, help you put money in your 401 k. If you want to meet your basic needs, we all need to move forward. So that’s the message to the leadership team. There’s also a message to everyone in the company, amplify what you’re already doing well. Tom, what did Jim do to create safety when he changed kids’ jobs?

Speaker 2 23:12
Maybe to answer that question, and also a thought that I would throw out there, also, which I have tried, is it makes for a fulfilling life when you are presented a challenge and you accomplish

Maureen 23:25
it.

Speaker 2 23:25
You’d call that growth, and growth doesn’t mean I got to get to the next promotion. Growth just means I have a level of fulfillment, and I think Jim created a sense of fulfillment. Some of these kids were from different types of family environments, and they found a sense of belonging at the pizza shop, and Jim challenged them, and they succeeded, and so now all of a sudden I go from a shy, insecure, maybe even fearful 14 year old kid to a confident 16 year old young man who feels a level of satisfaction, and if you take that same concept and you kind of build it into organizational platform, where you’re saying there’s growth, it’s going to be a challenge. I’ll be right there with you. We’re going to work through this. We’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to benefit from all this long term. Now, How do you say that, or how you present that? I don’t know, but I do believe that that’s what builds longevity and loyalty energy.

Maureen 24:30
I’m thinking of going to our local Donatos, where my partner goes in, and he knows one of the kids working there, because he was an intern at JA. So, this is part of our community. What strikes me is these are Gen Zs who index more on purpose. They are more comfortable with technology than the rest of us, so they may not feel unsafe. They may actually lead the way in some places.

Speaker 2 24:55
That’s a great point. The whole restaurant industry suffered a bit of. A exhale after Covid, and a number of people left the restaurant industry for whatever reasons, anxiety on top of exhaustion on top of I want to rethink my life, whatever. Consequently, a lot of new young managers came into our company, and they have kind of breathed some new life. I think it’s an interesting time, where as long as we are showing a level of openness and humility, and maybe this is maybe a bit of my style, or I don’t know how to change, or I didn’t get brought up in a stuffier corporate environment. I mean, I worked at Wendy’s for years, which also had a very great culture, but I think we need to be more approachable as leaders and admit mistakes. If you have a platform of humility and you add, hey, we’re going to try this. I think you’re going to get a greater sense of acceptance and involvement, like you said. Hey, that’s a great idea. What about this? I work

Maureen 25:57
with some clients whose average age or tenure with the company is very long, so chemical manufacturing and some different organizations, you have the benefit of constant turnover, which may not always feel like a benefit, but as you’ve said, people leaving the industry, new people coming in. How about something like a hackathon?

Speaker 2 26:19
Great idea.

Maureen 26:20
The hackathon could do something else helps kids build the resilience. Young folks, we learn to do difficult things by doing difficult things,

Speaker 2 26:29
right?

Maureen 26:29
But also identifies who are our rising stars, who’s willing to step up, who’s willing to follow it through, versus who drops off when it gets hard, almost identifying your successors, early high potentials just by how they behave through challenge.

Speaker 2 26:45
I love that. Of course, now my challenge is going to be, how do I avoid the constant trap of CEO goes to conference, learns new idea, comes back, and lays it on everybody else to go. They’re gonna say, oh, you’re on another podcast, okay? Right, yeah, we’ll put that in the file over here. So, yeah, I’ll test my battle on that one.

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Speaker 2 28:39
It’s a good idea, it really is.

Maureen 28:40
Do you have a change roadmap?

Speaker 2 28:42
Not probably to the level that we need to. I think that’s key. We’ve started with Racy, and you know, we have other components, but I wouldn’t call it, you know, as robust as maybe what other companies have.

Maureen 28:57
This is something a lot of companies don’t yet have, but integrating your project management office and back to the volume of change, you haven’t needed this before, right? Jim introduced a machine in 1980

Speaker 2 29:10
right,

Maureen 29:10
and that machine has been refined, but that was the big thing, and people had time to adapt, and then you do the pizza sauce machine in some number of years ago, and then you do a dishwashing machine, but people get time to adapt. Now you’re looking at 10 changes, and this is the challenge a lot of my clients are facing, is what is the interplay between the multiple changes? So I do this and it amplifies these other things and sets a foundation, versus these are all just conflicting things that pull time, and oh yeah, the boss went to another conference or podcast or read an HBR article. Then the discipline is, how do I integrate that into the comprehensive plan, so it doesn’t get tossed, or it helps me test for that’s interesting and cute, but not for us.

Speaker 2 30:00
Great point.

Maureen 30:00
I want to ask the question about love, and then go to music, because I know you have a passion for music. Jim talks about love in the workplace, and not an inappropriate,

Speaker 6 30:11
yeah,

Maureen 30:11
but, but the purest of respect and humility, and genuine care for my colleagues, for our clients. I don’t use the word love professionally, but what it stands for: compassion and care,

Speaker 2 30:31
right?

Maureen 30:31
Genuine care, not the thing that we hear when we’re on hold. We love our customers, but we treat them in a way that enables their success, whoever they are, and whatever they care about. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Speaker 2 30:46
Sure. You know, I’m gonna go way back when Jim first started working. He was 13 years old, I want to say, and he worked in a pizza shop, had two owners, one was a gentleman that was a super friendly fellow and loved people, customers, his employees, and he would work on some nights, and then his partner was more of a miserly financial bean counter type. When he would work, you know, it was head down, but he was always trying to figure out a way to make more money, and so he would water down the pizza sauce at the end of the night, so he could get a few more pizzas made out of the sauce. He just wasn’t doing things quite right. So Jim, as a young man, would see the nights that the one gentleman worked, the first gentleman sales ended up being really strong, and then the nights that the other gentleman worked, that people knew when he would work, they weren’t, and I bring this up because I think this was one of a number of kind of imprints on Jim’s life, where he said, you know, I think business can make a big impact on people, it could be small, it can be big, but cumulatively business has a purpose, and he went to Ohio State, and he took some business classes, and he heard a professor say this is another imprint. Professor said the sole purpose of commerce is to generate profit, and then just that got to him. He’s like, really, that’s the sole purpose. So this concept of I want to go into business and I want to make an impact on others really led to what he and I don’t even think he had words for it back in the day, but the way he talked, and here he is, a young whippersnapper who’s got a pizza shop on the south end of Columbus, and he’s got all these older, curmudgeonly businessmen telling him the way you get ahead in life is to cheat the other guy or get the other guy before he gets you, or don’t report all your sales, and he’s saying no. I think what you do is you do more than what people expect, so you give to your associates, or you give the customer more than they would expect, like 100 pieces of pepperoni on a pepperoni pizza to Jim was an expression of love to the customer, customer doesn’t say I want 100 pieces of pepperoni, that would be outrageous, but that’s an expression of care, and if you really look at it in a bigger sense, the whole concept is about love, and so he’s got this concept or phrase that he’s coined called Agape capitalism, and Agape is Greek for the truest form of love, which is unconditional love, and he’s on purpose bringing these clashing ideas together, capitalism and love. He has a coin which has the golden rule, and it says lead with love, and then it says if you do those two things, you’ll do the right thing for me and for many others in this company. Most people that causes me to stop the decisions that we make in the gray are the ones that have the most long lasting impact. It’s when you have to let someone go, do you stop and take the time to do it with respect and care? When you have to make a decision that is a financial decision, are you leaning too much on the financial side? So this idea of what is the right thing to do that causes you to make decisions that build a company culture that’s about something more than just business, it’s more than a transaction. It can sound corny, and the golden rule sounds corny, and all that, but this company has always been built on this concept of love. It really is love. It’s love for the community, it’s love for even competition. Jim’s, he wants all pizza places to do better, you know. It’s not us at the expense of others, it’s an abundant mindset, which is really rooted in the concept of love. So, I mean, it is, it’s special, and it’s different. And I know when I came here 25 years ago from Wendy’s, which had a great culture.

Speaker 2 34:59
I didn’t really understand the culture here, and I mean, I knew the pizza was great, so I fell in love with the pizza. Then I fell in love with the job offer. Then I fell in love with the company and the culture, and then eventually, by the way, I fell in love with the founder’s daughter and married her. Yeah, love is love is a big thing here, and I think it’s a great way for us to talk about a purpose higher than just a transaction, it’s pretty special. And I told Jim, when I got here, I go, this gold rule thing is starting to get more and more popular. You talked about Gen Z, or you talked about young people who I’m going to give you my money, but before I give you my money, what do you stand for? You know, we didn’t sit in a conference room and manufacture some marketing concept that says we care about everybody. It really is real. I said, Jim, this golden rule thing’s getting popular. We better let people know about it. We really, we really believe it. So it’s special. I’m honored to be a part of this company for that reason,

Maureen 36:01
I want to draw the thread back. Then, thank you for sharing the arc of time and where it came from. And as we think about innovation and AI, and the amount of change, I am more willing to make change in a loving environment than I am in a place that if I make a mistake someone’s going to whack me over the head and dub me an alumni that I get tossed out so that sense of conscious capitalism or higher purpose in doing our work if I think about what’s the secret sauce in the culture that really does seem like a crucial underpinning for enabling a company to go forward and be innovative,

Speaker 2 36:45
that’s so true. It’s a challenge. Make no mistake, this thing I talk about, at the same time, you can’t have a perfectionistic culture, and it all comes down to if you have a standard that is high and you don’t hit that standard, number one, you don’t lower the standard, and number two, you don’t be yourself or others up for not hitting it. This book, The Gap versus The Gain, has just really got me energized, because I think as business people we set goals, we get results, and then if we’re short two points, we spend an inordinate amount of time dissecting the two point gap that we missed and not turn around and look at the 78 points of progress, and so I think a culture of love that is safe for innovation combined with a place where you can make mistakes, you’re exactly right, I think that is the secret sauce.

Maureen 37:38
One of the words you said earlier was community knowing you and your commitment to our community, and you express that by Muzik. Can you talk a little bit about why is that so important to you? And also, in the Columbus area, there are a group of CEOs, or former CEOs, for whom Music has been a core part of how you collaborate and connect, and not just play concerts at bars, which is fun, but also how you support kids’ education through music.

Speaker 2 38:13
First and foremost, it’s just a personal part of me, my family, you know. Growing up, we played music in the living room, and our neighbors would come over, and so it was a way to connect, and it was also a way to express yourself, and so I find it personally valuable for those reasons. I’m an extrovert, I love to be with people, and have fun, and enjoy life, and also do some songwriting, so I like the ability to be able to express myself, whether it’s joy or anxiety or fear, or whatever, but I think as an organization, you talked about this other band that I’m in with other CEOs. There are some strong parallels between effective business leadership and music and music composition. There’s so many parallels. There’s how do we all work together? How do we utilize each other’s unique skill set and come together in concert? I know that sounds cliche, but I think music adds this level of energy that draws people in. So we all work together, we all play our parts, we create something beautiful, and we draw people in. How we communicate as an organization, do we tweak the mission statement every three months because we had another idea? Do we change our strategy slightly versus keep it simple and repetitive? I think about a chorus of a song that’s repeated over and over again to the point that you can’t get it out of your head. That’s how we need to communicate as leaders. And then on another level, you know, we talked about humility or being authentic. I think sometimes leaders put themselves behind a veneer, or they create a veneer, or they think it has to be a certain way, and you know, I jump around on stage like a silly man, and the first time I played in front of people. Work for Donatas, their jaws were dropped, because they were like, what, but it says we’re all the same, we’re all doing this together. So I think music is an important part of life. I think it’s therapeutic, I think it’s medicine, and I’m spending more and more time thinking about how do we elevate music. Someday, maybe you and I can brainstorm how we can utilize music more so as a way to elevate our consciousness or peace and safety, because it’s powerful, isn’t

Maureen 40:32
it? When you talk about elevating consciousness, I listen to chanting music a lot. The days I’ve listened to chanting music, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I’ll hear the chanting versus the other stuff that breaks through, that’s

Speaker 2 40:46
your list. Yeah,

Maureen 40:47
it’s the list, and what I did wrong, and all of that, or what I could do better. Hearing music at a time where we have serious issues with mental health and anxiety, I think you’re dead on that. Listening to supportive music, whatever that means, and that could be head banging music for some people. For me, it’s chanting,

Speaker 2 41:09
could be 428 hertz. I started listening to certain frequencies, and there’s music that’s composed around that frequency. I’ve found that it kind of brings me down a little bit, and connects me,

Maureen 41:22
and also the asynchronous beeps embedded in the music that helps adjust our brainwave state. At this point, I’ll do almost anything that will help relaxation. We live in intensity, and the scary part is it’s going to be more intense, not less. So, how do we navigate a physiology that isn’t designed to deal with this level of intensity,

Speaker 2 41:46
and as leaders, the grind mentality is a dangerous mentality, because I think it knocks people off kilter, and when you’re off kilter, you’re not projecting safety to others, and the more you can take care of yourself and be at your best, you’re gonna be a better leader. You just are. You’re gonna attract the right energy, not a fear-based anxious kind of energy that I think the grind mentality promotes. It’s not sexy to me, I think it’s silly. So,

Maureen 42:20
when you say the grind, I think of a couple of words from developmental psychology. Am I thinking about my thinking? So, how often am I saying, am I in a circular trap? Am I even thinking about the right things, right? And then awareness of my awareness, where am I putting my intention? How is my energy? Am I being authentically demonstrating an abundance mindset, or am I just afraid of what’s going to happen?

Speaker 2 42:45
That idea of forgiving yourself, forgiveness, I think, is one of the hardest things, because it keeps you trapped in not being aware of your awareness. My wife does yoga every day, has been doing it for years, and I’ve just started. There’s a real centering part of that, that allows you to kind of get rid of that stuff you were thinking about in the middle of the night.

Maureen 43:05
I love to hear that you are Mike, and I do probably six days a week together.

Speaker 2 43:10
Do you really nice?

Maureen 43:11
Yeah, it’s, you know, as we think about what strengthens our relationships, we happen to share that close to the end of what is a normal workday, we go do yoga, eat a healthy dinner, and then I’m off and back at my computer, but creating the time for health is the only way I can show up and be my best in intense situations,

Speaker 2 43:34
and it’s caring for yourself, that’s talk about love, that’s giving yourself a break and loving yourself,

Maureen 43:40
and fortunate that you and Jane can do this together. Yeah, unless you go to separate yoga class, we do.

Speaker 2 43:45
We go to separate yoga classes. Listen, her office is right there. We have a lot of togetherness. She’s probably listening in right now. Hello.

Maureen 43:55
So, as we wrap up, what do you want our listeners to take away from the conversation,

Speaker 2 44:01
I’m excited about the future, and I think as we are facing a lot of change, if we all can stay focused on taking care of ourselves and being kind to others, that doesn’t mean being soft about what you want to achieve when you’re facing something that’s difficult and you’re able to achieve it, that brings a great amount of satisfaction, but I think slow down long enough to make sure that you’re treating others better. I’m screwed up so many times, and I’ve had to apologize and truly apologize, and I think moving on from that and just trying to take a higher order of leadership where you’re focusing on helping others above yourself, and then ultimately it comes back to you anyway, like Donato says over the years, thanks to Jim and the family have done a great job of caring for others, and it just comes back to you.

Maureen 44:54
I love hearing, because we’ve also interviewed Jim, hearing the story through. Different lenses of how the company has unfolded as the person running it. How you’ve continued this culture, because some organizations, when they go on to the next generation or the next leader, don’t maintain the good or they over maintain the legacy, and they don’t evolve.

Speaker 2 45:18
That’s a great point. There are things that can hold you back if you’re out of balance one way or the other, so balance is important. It

Maureen 45:26
seems like on the whole you’ve balanced maintaining the core and continuing to innovate in important ways.

Speaker 2 45:35
Well, I hope so. I hope so. I think so.

Maureen 45:37
So, how would our listeners learn more about Donato’s arc of time,

Speaker 2 45:42
you can go to donatos.com There’s a lot of information about us. There’s information about franchising, obviously. There’s the ability to order pizza, so you can, you can go to donato.com Jane was on Undercover Boss, it’s a reality TV show, but it did a pretty good job of showing who we are, our warts and all. She also wrote a book called The Missing Piece. I’m on LinkedIn every Wednesday. If you connect to my profile, I do a thing called The Corner Piece, which is just a little leadership moment. And then stop in and see us, that would be the other way.

Maureen 46:19
Thank you so much, Tom.

Speaker 2 46:21
Thanks, Maureen.

Maureen 46:22
And to our listeners, thank you for listening. Please like us, share us, and continue to optimize how you lead during these crucial times. Thank

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