Derek Jones said while being a business owner is hard work, it’s worth it.
“We started in 2009,” he said. “I used to be a franchisee for another local pizzeria. I was able to venture out on my own. I started this quickly after we opened, gained some pretty good success.”
He said the Cleveland Pizza Company, like other restaurants, has been faced with the overwhelming reality of staffing shortages.
“We have to worry about their mental psyche and all that stuff like that, how well they’re doing physically, mentally,” he said.
Jones posted to Facebook addressing the “service issues” he’s heard people complain about.
“We can’t control a lot of things that people think that we can, especially as a small business,” he said.
He said the cost of food, like chicken wings nearly doubled overnight. He said this has caused staff to pay more for supplies.
“Pizza, wings, they just go together,” he said. “We had to pass that along. We waited as long as we could. We thought it would be better and it just actually kept getting higher and higher.”
Jones said the restaurant industry was among the first to really feel the impact of inflation.
“All commodities, paper, dairy, which is our cheese, pork, again gas,” he said. “We run all of our ovens on gas, electric. So, everything we deal with in our industry, and a lot of other restaurants, is all commodities. Those are the things that start to get the most expensive the quickest.”
He said staff are doing what they can to navigate current pressures. He said this includes hopefully implementing a call center, in the near future.
“Phone calls are a large portion of our employee’s time,” he said. “We have it calculated down to somewhere between five and seven man hours a day are used answering the phones. So, if we can push that into our own, a company-run call center where we train everybody, they know their product, they’re held to the same standard. They would be in the store, but they’re not in the store anymore. I think that would help out a lot.”
