She opened her first take and bake pizza restaurant in Beverly Hills in 1988.
Her dedication to pizza was such that she was nominated for the U.S. Small Business Administration Person Of The Year.
These days she’s no longer in the store or restaurant end of the pizza business. She’s now a wholesale manufacturer.
The person we are talking about is Patty Phillips, the Founder and President of Patty’s Pizza.
Patty spoke with us about her background and how she got involved into the pizza business.
Q – Patty, if you were in any other city would your business have been as successful? I don’t know what you charged for pizza, but Beverly Hills has a wealthy clientele you can draw from.
A – You know what? As many times as I’ve been interviewed, I’ve never been asked that question. It’s actually a very good question. I would say my first mistake was opening in Beverly Hills. I had very little restaurant experience, but, I had been in commercial real estate and had done a lot of demographics on the area when I came up with the concept of the gourmet take and bake. I was like ya, Beverly Hills, I thought women will like a gourmet meal. My marketing studies showed that women were working more, wanted healthier meals for their kids and didn’t have time to prepare meals so I would locate myself in shopping centers back then where there was a Blockbuster. So people would come in, pick up a pizza and salad, get a movie, bottle of wine and when the family got home throw the pizza in the oven. You get a fresh baked gourmet pizza. The problem with Beverly Hills, a lot of women have fabulous kitchens that they don’t use. (Laughs). So, it was a tough start back in 1988 and then I open my second location in the Santa Monica beach community and we took off like gangbusters. People like to be home. They liked to cook. We received a lot of acknowledgment for the quality of our product. We started winning awards for our pizzas. We were on TV shows for having the best pizza in LA and then I opened another location in Nevada for my brother outside of Carson City, Nevada. Then I got talked into opening another one in Beverly Hills on Beverly Drive. Fast-forward to today I’m strictly now a wholesale manufacturer. So we sell to hotels, restaurants, casinos, colleges, throughout the U.S. So, the answer to your question I think the concept; you probably heard of Papa Murphy’s, they’re all over. We’re a step above Papa Murphy’s at the time when I had restaurants. I think I could have opened anywhere that demographic, communities where people like to be home, beach communities for it to work really well. There was a time when I was doing those restaurants, I had four restaurants and I was running a wholesale. I had to make a choice, whether I was going to stay with the restaurant or go strictly wholesale. It was too hard wearing so many hats and dealing with different clientele. California like New York is a very a tough place to run a business. I decided my business concept was to create jobs. My first person I hired was a mentally physically challenged young lady. I wanted to give back to the community. It’s just California you get brutalized with the taxes and regulations. So, it just made sense to go into the wholesale business.
Q – You were in advertising and real estate before you went into the pizza business. Advertising for what? Did you sell ads for a newspaper?
A – I moved up to Lake Tahoe when I was in my early 20s. I worked for a commercial advertising agency out there. So we did print media. We did newspapers. Any kind of media. We represented clients depending on what their budget was and then we would go from there. Back then a lot of people did print, magazines. Those type of things. When I left Tahoe I moved back to Los Angeles, which is where I’m from and I got my real estate license and worked for a commercial developer for five years.
Q – You paid someone to teach you the restaurant business. This someone taught you what? How to make and bake a pizza? How to manage and run a pizza business?
A – O.K. a lot of this story is not going to make a lot of sense, but, when I was in commercial real estate I was playing polo and I saved up $50,000 and this was back in 1988 to buy 2 polo ponies. That’s when I had the idea I was working with a man named Brad who is trying to get into one of our shopping centers. I thought if I take that $50,000 and invest it into a business, instead of polo ponies, I’m going to be so successful that I can end up buying a string of polo ponies and I can play polo full-time. Well, I never played polo again. I stayed pretty broke for many, many years. Every dime I made went back into the business. I worked two years without a day off. It was tough. I paid Brad, who has this basic take and bake concept. I thought if I combined that concept with California pizzas concept. Nobody has done something like that. I just thought looking at the demographic, women staying home more, not staying home, working more and needed something that was affordable and that was fresh to take home is how I came up with the idea. So, I paid Brad quite a bit of money at the time to teach me the dough recipes, the sauce, how to make a pizza. I worked so hard up to the day I opened my first restaurant that I hadn’t even made a pizza yet. (Laughs). The first time I made a pizza was when I opened. The whole thing was crazy. I’m a very determined woman. Once I set my mind to something I’m going to make sure I succeed, but the first two years were tough. Once I opened that Santa Monica location is when I started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and started making some money. But, I never had enough time or money to pursue my love of polo. So that was probably the hardest thing I gave up.
Q – There’s still time isn’t there?
A – Well no, I don’t think so. (Laughs).
Q – What’s more important in a pizza, the crust or the cheese? If you see a slice of pizza that is sagging, something is wrong isn’t it? What does that say about the person who made the dough?
A – That’s not necessarily true. To answer the first question I would say the crust is the most important. New York pizza has a lot of thin crust pieces where they would add a lot of cheese and when you put sauce on it it’s very thin. When you pick it up you can fold it, and it drips, but that’s what they’re known for. Chicago is known for deep dish pizza which is complete opposite of New York. California has its own kind of trend, but, I think it’s the quality in the flour that you buy and how you process, how long do you let the dough rise and then you take your time with the dough. You beat it up and process it too fast it’s going to be tough. So, the dough I think is the most important part of a pizza.
Q – What is the concept behind your take and bake pizza? Someone will call and say, “I want this on my pizza and you’ll say” come in and 20 minutes and it will be ready for you.”
A – Remember, I don’t have the restaurant anymore.
Q – I should have said what was the concept behind your take and bake pizza.
A – Right. The concept was people would come in, order the pizza or call ahead. As we got more popular people would call ahead so their order would be waiting for them. Back then we had numerous toppings. We had barbecue chicken. We had broccoli. We had pretty much any kind of vegetable, any type of topping. The only thing we didn’t deal with was fish, because people were taking those pizza’s home and had to be careful how they handled it. Shellfish if it’s not handled correctly can create problems. So, they would order it. We can custom make whatever pizza they wanted. We could make that pizza thin or thick, whatever they wanted. Everything was custom-made. We made our own bread for our sandwiches. Everything was fresh. We made our sauce. We grated our own cheese. A lot of times we would get busy especially in our Santa Monica location people would get to know each other in line. We had several people that ended up falling in love and getting married. People would joke-it’s the tomato sauce.
Q – Is it cheaper for hotels and restaurants to buy from you than it is to make their own pizzas?
A – Well, the people we sell to are commercial clients. So, were not selling to individuals, like the Wynde, M&M and let’s say a university. They’ll buy the pizza and make it and sell it as their own. It’s always going to be cheaper. If an individual wanted to get a dough ball and make their own pizza, it’s going to be less expensive than buying a fully made pizza.
Q – When you had four restaurants going at one time, how do you maintain quality control? You can’t be everywhere all the time.
A – I would say that’s probably the toughest issue for all restaurants. Once you start expanding I especially feel sorry for restaurants in today’s world, getting quality employees, people that want to show up, people that want to work. It’s hard. You have your formulas. You have your guides on how people are to make the dough, how there to make the sauce, how there to do the cheese blend. You try to have very strict training and make sure the people you have are following the protocol. But sometimes you get people that want to get a little more creative or you have to worry about someone stealing your formula and opening a restaurant in competition with you which is what happened.
Q – That happened to you?
A – Yeah. I had a manager who was a friend of mine that I’d given him a job. He didn’t have a job. Eventually he took my employees out, offered them all jobs, stole my formulas and opened up in another location.
Q – And there was nothing you could do about it? You didn’t have him sign some kind of document?
A – It’s really hard to protect. You know what, when you steal something you’re never going to succeed. He ended up going under. He didn’t know what he was doing. He was just telling everybody I want to buy what Patty buys.
Q – Since the name of the website is famousinterview.com, are you able to name any famous people who’ve come into your restaurants or eaten your pizzas? Actors? Actresses? Musicians?
A – I’m so bad with celebrities. Santa Monica used to have a lot of celebrities come in. I’m so bad at naming people. I’m probably not even going to go there. (Laughs). We were in a high-end area on Montana Avenue so there were a lot of celebrities that used to come in there and sports figures.
Q – When you lose a parent at an early age does that give you an extra drive to succeed?
A – I lost both my parents at an early age. My mom was sick when I was 15 and died when I was 16. My dad died when I was 21. I think it depends on the individual. Some people can look at themselves as victims and go “woe is me” or you can look at life and say I’m going to succeed no matter what the challenge. My mom always told me create your own happiness in life Patty. And, I lived by that. Two things make the world a better place, create jobs and I do a lot of work with women and children which is a passion of mine and helping them either get off the streets or off drugs. I think once you succeed it’s important to give back in life. That is something I live by. I think being on my own and knowing I only had myself to depend on and that if I crashed I was only responsible for me. It does get harder when you have a family and a husband and responsibilities. You then think twice about the decisions you make. Back then it didn’t matter. I worked two years without a day off from 8 AM to midnight. It was just me.
Q – Did you have any brothers or sisters?
A – I do. I had a sister that also died young. The restaurant I opened in Nevada was to help my brother which ended up not doing very well, but, that’s another story. Then I have a twin sister and I have an older sister my older sister was so much older, we were never around each other much. When you lose your parents at an early age there isn’t that glue in the family. Everybody kind of goes into survival mode and does their own thing. But, my twin and I have remained close all these years.
Q – You mentioned earlier that people in Beverly Hills had these fabulous kitchens that they never used. Why then, wouldn’t they send down one of their employees to pick up a pizza and later bake it?
A – They would do that, but just not to the extent in Santa Monica. We did okay there it’s just not what you would think. The big thing was these women just don’t use their kitchen because they’re having their housekeepers or their help do full-on meals.
Q – How far can you take your business? You want to expand it to what level?
A – You’re asking very interesting questions.
Q – I’ve been at this very long time Patty.
A – Yeah, you’re asking me questions that no one has asked me. That’s a hard question for me to answer because I’ve been in business since 1988, which is a long time. I think one of my reasons that I was successful was that I make goals. I’m going to change them. I’m willing to look at something. We tried to launch into supermarkets. We got into Whole Foods. We got into Kroger which I thought was paydirt. I’m going to do so well. It just didn’t turn out the way we thought. I had to take a look at that after a few years of doing it. We were even in Trader Joe’s. We weren’t really even making the kind of money that would sustain what we were doing when the first recession hit we had to cut back and I pulled out of the supermarkets focused specifically on the wholesale and we ended up doing better than ever. Sometimes in life you think this is the direction you need to go and maybe it’s not the correct direction. You have to be able to look at what you’re doing and make changes and I think that is why we’ve been successful all these years. Plus I’m very blessed with having loyal employees. We’ve had people with us for over 20 years.
Q – You mentioned Trader Joe’s. Were you in Trader Joe’s nationwide?
A – We were regional in Trader Joe’s we were in California. We weren’t national with them. We were doing fresh pizzas for them. And this is a long time ago. This is going back years and years. So, we found our niche with the wholesale and its Monday through Friday. A better lifestyle. So, it’s not seven days a week. You’re not worrying about employees leaving at night. We ended up really enjoying what we’re doing. My husband and I met back in 1991. He now is running the day-to-day operations. He was a math school teacher and he was coming to the restaurant to see me and work. Eventually we got more and more involved and now he runs the day-to-day operations and does a great job.
Official website: www.pattyspizza.com
© Gary James
