Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door (12 page)

My mother thought I was nuts. “You have two college degrees, and you’re going to make pizzas?” I told her not to worry, I’ll be fine. Years later, she was pretty convinced I had made the right decision.

 

I knew how to make ends meet and to make a bottom line no matter what it takes. I tell kids who consider being entrepreneurs: Go into something you love. That’s the #1 test. If you don’t, you won’t be able to put in the necessary hours to make the venture work.

 

Mick Stenson remains my current active partner. Bob is running his grandfather’s and father’s rubber business. While Bob is an investor, he has never been an active partner. Yet, he has provided great guidance and help getting credit early on. Years later we bought out Pat Woodring and Tony Pontillo, who also had a stake in the business. So it’s just the three of us now—Mick, Bob, and me. We changed the name from Pontillo’s to Davanni’s in 1983.

 

Having entrepreneurial backgrounds helped us be more realistic and disciplined about our expectations. I really like retail, and I really like people. My other two partners are both sales oriented, and they like people, too. We all have good business sense and are fiscally conservative.

 

We have a very strong corporate culture. Anyone in the Twin Cities who has had contact with us—as a supplier or has had a youngster working in the firm—will tell you that Davanni’s has one of the best corporate cultures in the Twin Cities and that it’s a pleasure to do business with us. We have an incredible number of people who have been with us for two or three decades. That kind of loyalty is staggering for our business. Two weeks ago, we had a general managers’ meeting. Our twenty-two managers have over 412 years of experience with Davanni’s—that’s more than nineteen years of service with the firm for the average manager.

 

You have to keep your ego in check and your debt levels down. Don’t overexpand. So often a new restaurant concept will enter the market and right away it’s announcing it will go to six or ten units . . . thirty by the end of this year and two hundred by the end of 2010. It grows itself into a noose. You can’t expand without operations, systems, and controls to absorb that growth effectively. You don’t open a shop and immediately get profitable.

 

My advice would be to open a business with minimal staffing levels. We have between nine hundred and one thousand employees. The government has gotten so deeply involved in this area, it’s discouraging. In the old days, a potential employer could ask you, “What do you think about this kid?” I might once have answered, “I wouldn’t hire him. He shows up late and doesn’t work very hard.” Now, you’re really restricted to, “Yes, we can verify he was employed here once.”

I would keep my employment roster to a minimum—OSHA, government regulations, age discrimination, sex discrimination, pay discrimination. Our nation is harvesting what the politicians have sown. Make it easy to sue everybody. That’s one reason that so many businesses have been driven overseas.

 

If Davanni’s hadn’t worked, I would have tried something else. I was determined to establish and run my own business.

Sally Flaig, a regular reader of my column in the
Hartford Business Journal
, was laid off from her job in March of 2009. She wrote to me that she was looking at different options including starting over in a different industry. I was impressed with the professionalism of Sally’s job search. She attended local networking job search group meetings and does volunteer work with various groups including Habitat for Humanity. She sent out about two hundred résumés since March and has heard the message “you’re overqualified” with “too much sales experience and not enough marketing.” Sally has since accepted a position with the American Red Cross.

Sally also offered a very practical suggestion on a source of help readers of this book may want to consider. Sally writes:

According to a Department of Labor spokesperson, “the Department of Labor began funding states to implement One-Stop Career Centers . . . around 1994.” With nearly “3,000 delivery points nationwide,” the department notes these centers offer help that ranges from: “self service assistance to more intensive staff assisted services to training services. Self service is provided through well equipped resource rooms with computers, copy machines, etc. as well as software to help with résumé creation and lots of Web sites on which to get career information and search for jobs, including the state’s job bank or job matching system.”

These programs also offer help with retention and up-skilling. This includes “training services to incumbent workers” and “supporting employee retention by offering services such as transportation, childcare assistance, and mentoring programs.”

Many people would never have thought of turning to the federal government as a career planning resource. Well, times have changed, and a real effort seems to have been made by Washington to change with them.

Looking for a connection? To find the closest One-Stop using a zip code search, go to
www.servicelocator.org
.

 

 

 

In 1972, University of Minnesota football head coach Cal Stoll asked me to help recruit a promising young quarterback from Parkside High School in Jackson, Michigan. The name of this prize package: Tony Dungy.

Tony was everything. He starred in three sports—baseball, football, and basketball. In his early teen years he even was recognized by
Sports Illustrated
in its “Faces in the Crowd” section. He was a student body president at fourteen, loved and admired by fellow students.

Why was I asked to help land this dream addition to the school and the athletic program? Perhaps because of my perspective as a former varsity athlete and then president of the University of Minnesota Letterwinners Club. From the day I was born, I have always been mesmerized by all sports—from Ping-Pong to football. Then there’s my dedication to my alma mater. Were I to accidentally cut myself, I’m sure I’d bleed our school colors of maroon and gold. Later, I became the national president of the Alumni Association. (The U. of M. Alumni contingent is a legion of formidable size. Today it has more than sixty thousand dues-paying members.)

So, off I flew to Jackson for the first of my two visits to the Dungy home. (In those days, an alumnus, or any interested party for that matter, could make unlimited recruiting visits to a prospect’s home. Today, you can’t have any contact with a prospect whatsoever.)

When I arrived at the Dungy home, I was well prepared. I had done my homework and was geared up to win. As I teach our sales force and always practice myself: There is no such thing as a cold call, and this was as warm a call as you could get. I had CAT-scanned and done an MRI on Tony, as well as his wonderful mother, CleoMae, an English teacher, and his highly respected father, Wilbur, a professor of physiology. I knew that education was the first priority in this deep-valued household.

The Dungys welcomed me with open arms. They were great listeners and equally well organized, asking questions that were both substantive and keenly perceptive. As highly touted as Tony was as an athlete, education was foremost in the family’s mind, not football. The philosophy I maintained: The school does not make the kid; the kid makes the school. In other words, Minnesota could provide everything Tony wished for and dreamed of both on and off the field.

All the schools Tony was considering, I have to admit, had the same assets and advantages as the U. of M. Ultimately, it all came down to trust and chemistry. He was comfortable with Coach Stoll and trusted that Minnesota would deliver on important extras such as summer jobs and staying in touch with his parents to keep them updated on his progress.

When I returned from Jackson, I remember my report on my first face-to-face with Tony consisted of an eight-point description: outstanding student, happy, healthy, challenged, committed, focused, goal oriented, and absolutely loves football.

Tony chose Minnesota over another Big Ten school and started playing for the Gophers at age seventeen. He played in eight games as a freshman, and before his career ended he sparkled as an outstanding quarterback who set a number of school passing records. Following both the 1975 and 1976 seasons he was second team All-Big Ten quarterback. Those same years he was also All-Big Ten academic.

Of course, what Tony achieved on his own was foremost, though many people played key roles in supporting his success, as Tony would be the first to admit. Nonetheless, on countless occasions during Tony’s glorious four years, I would refer to him among friends as a “son.” I was so proud to be in constant touch with him and to watch him grow. Today, I only regret I didn’t save CleoMae Dungy’s letters to me during Tony’s four years. They were inspired writings loaded with lifetime philosophies and goals she had prayed for along with her husband, Wilbur—goals that Tony would embrace and that enhance his belief system as a motivational leader and humanitarian yet today.

Tony graduated after the customary four years. A move to the pros postgraduation seemed a certainty. In 1977, the NFL had twelve rounds of drafting, and there were twenty-eight teams in the league. Tony was realistic enough to know that he wouldn’t be chosen for a quarterback slot, but such an intelligent, accomplished, and diligent athlete was sure to make it on someone’s roster—in all probability, as a defensive back.

In the end, 333 players were selected in the 1980 draft. Tony Dungy wasn’t one of them. The results might have been devastating for Tony. It was beyond comprehension that all the teams passed.

Time for a midcourse correction!

Time for a summit meeting at the number one restaurant in Minneapolis, Charlie’s Café Exceptionale. The luncheon meeting was a long one—two and a half hours. I reassured Tony this was not the end of the world. He would be a surefire success in the business community. “Don’t lose confidence,” I reminded him. Of course, the silver lining was the lull between the end of the college football season and the NFL draft. It gave Tony a window of opportunity and he was smart enough to dig his well before he was thirsty. While Tony had one eye on the big prize of being scooped up by an NFL team, he also had some job interviews in corporate America, just in case the draft didn’t work out.