Business Reflections Podcast Episode #27 - Employee Empowerment with Jack’s Pizza

Episode Transcript

Meredith Matics: Welcome to Business Reflections with your host Meredith Matics, and we are here to reflect on the business topics that are affecting you today and how you can better run your business. Today, I have Kathleen Menegozzi, Director of Jack's Pizza with me. 

Kathleen Menegozzi: Hi Meredith. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.  

Meredith Matics: Well, thanks for coming on. So first Kathleen, can you tell us a little bit what led you to working or becoming a part of Jack's Pizza slash what kind of pizza does Jack make?  

Kathleen Menegozzi: So we make all kinds of pizzas, including a cat head pizza that was requested a couple of years ago. Yep, we made an actual cat head pizza, not made of real kitties. All kitties were left unharmed, but yes, we made pizza and they came in in the shape of a cat head. 

So we do all kinds of the run of the bill pizza. We offer subs, we offer sandwiches, we offer a number of different things. But. A little bit about my own history and how I got linked up with this project is I have about 10 years of career development experience from New York City. Whether it was in the form of mentorship or counseling or being a workshop facilitator, career development, especially in marginalized communities is an active and longterm passion of mine. 

About five years ago, I became really interested in how innovative startups, nonprofits and social enterprise are going about addressing some of the inequity issues that are at the core of the work that I was doing. After working with a series of these various types of projects and initiatives, Jack's kind of came onto the scene as something that was not in any way related at the onset of the project to any of these other directions or interests of mine. 

When I started with Jack's, I took on the projects really to help out a long-term friend of mine, Jason Isabelle, who's the long-term owner of Jack's, to really help him reorganize, restructure, repackage his business and get ready for a sale. It really wasn't until I started talking to the workers and the workers helped me understand more about a wide range of inadequacies that they were facing at the job that they were in a Jack's, in the restaurant industry as a whole, in the education system, at home, and the health care system, mental health, specifically. Just a wide range of challenges. Once I understood more through the worker stories about the challenges that they were facing, it became really apparent to me as a social entrepreneur and a career development advocate and for Jason, as a business owner who successfully made the transition from worker to owner, that not only was this an opportunity for us to lift workers, but it was actually an obligation that I felt that I had once I understood more about their stories. So for the past two and a half years, we've embarked on this really incredible journey of employee ownership. 

And we're not quite there yet. But really understanding more about what the ramp looks like to creating economic mobility like this through business ownership and not everybody's going to want to own Jack's Pizza. But everybody, for the most part, has some goal that they're working on, whether it's college or saving up for their first apartment. 

This is really what we've been working on for the past two and a half years. With the goal of employee ownership or college or whatever, the specific goal the worker has and our goals - we're trying to figure out how do we create this ramp? What does it look like? How do we approach it? So that's been the journey we've been on. 

Meredith Matics: Wow.  

Kathleen Menegozzi: And I'll leave it there and it's just, yeah, it's been quite a journey.  

Meredith Matics: Well, I think you alluded to what we're going to be talking about today, which is, creating transformative opportunities for our workers as business owners. This is something that most of us go into business with hope, dreams. We want to bring a product or a service to the market that's maybe not, we're not seeing enough of, but as we grow, what do we want to look like as a form of leadership and how do we want that to be in our communities? And I think empowering our workers is a really huge part. 

So I'm really excited to have you on to talk about that today. Even before I dive into the questions I had originally thought of, you mentioned something called employee ownership, and I'm just wondering if you could define that for our listeners in case they aren't familiar with the term. 

Kathleen Menegozzi: For sure. There's a number of different forms and structures to employee ownership, but specifically we're interested in a cooperative model and that seems to be the direction that we're going in. We're still researching the various models and figuring out what the right approach is going to be for us. 

But we're really focused on the cooperative model and specifically dynamic governance as a fundamental pillar of our employee ownership track. Meaning our workers not only are the beneficiaries of our profits or some part of the business, but they actually govern, run and operate the business. 

They are a key part and key decision makers at every level of the business, so specifically the form of employee ownership that we're interested in is dynamically govern employee ownership. That's where the secret sauce kind of comes into what we're doing, where they can really develop their voice and a sense of agency through the work that we're doing. 

Meredith Matics: I'm really interested in learning more about how this dynamic works and then we'll go a little bit further, but talk to me a little bit about what that means for them. If you guys want to bring a new sandwich on the menu, does that mean a whole meeting and everybody has to come vote? 

What does it look like in the actual practicality of it? 

Kathleen Menegozzi: So we're specifically using the sociocratic approach to dynamic governance. Essentially what that requires is that you look at the organization as a whole, and then you divide the organization into various sub sectors or circles as they call it in sociocracy. 

Everybody is nominated to a specific role in the circle that they're involved with. We have operational circles that consists of our pizza line, our grill, and our sub-line, our salads, our desserts, and our customer service. Then we have the developmental circles, which include mentorship, advocacy, the community garden project that we have going on. 

In these various areas of our business, specific workers are nominated by all of their fellow workers in that specific sub sector to a specific role that they are accountable to, and that they have a way to meaningfully and very tangibly contribute to the group and they make all decisions, policy, whether it's a refund policy or if it's how to go about making a change to a product that we're receiving constructive criticism about. Our workers drive those decisions. 

The decisions are made by the them in their specific sub-sector and they do not have to wait for any permission coming from another part of the business. Nothing gets run through the owner. When I say nothing, there's some flexibility in that because it's really tough redistributing authority in this way. 

Meredith Matics: Yeah.  

Kathleen Menegozzi: It's really, it's so easy for the workers to kind of slide back into looking for authority to come from either the business owner or from myself as the Director. So what sociocracy and dynamic governance really does is it puts the authority in the hands of the workers and it leans into the trust that that takes that amongst small groups of workers, overall, their decision-making is going to be productive because they have a solid understanding of what the day-to-day challenges, struggles, and problems are that they face. By the nature of them facing those challenges on a day-to-day basis, they are in the best position to make decisions to address that challenge. 

If you open up a realm where they believe that they can make these decisions, come up with innovations, and have their ideas be supported. That's a huge part of the work that we do is really helping our workers understand that they can make those judgment calls. We're going to encourage them to make them and create a team around them that is willing to encourage and support that level of leadership. 

Meredith Matics: That is such an interesting dynamic, because even just thinking in corporate jobs where, you may be work at a grocery store and you know your grocery store needs to sell this one product cause it's super cool in your neighborhood. But then you try to go to your district manager and the chain manager, and then they're like, oh, nationally, that's not a big selling product. Why would we put that in there? There is that disconnect. Having that structure of leadership cause the leaders to really not actually know what's happening on day-to-day, cause they're too separated from it.  

Kathleen Menegozzi: Right. Exactly.  

Meredith Matics: Yeah. And then to make decisions of like, oh, we need to cut this department, not thinking of the real people that are there, but what does that department really do in the scope of things, even though they may not look great on paper. 

Kathleen Menegozzi: Exactly. And I think a lot of what you're pointing to is the underbelly of the toxic practices in the workplace. Whether it's corporations or it's small business, I've seen it in both ends of the spectrum. When authority pools in one area of a business, no matter what size or scale that business is, it creates this toxic environment where workers are disabled from making their own decisions. 

They're completely separated and blind to how the decisions are being made that affect their everyday lives. Over time, what you have and what we see in the American workplace, across the board, across industries, our workers who were deeply, deeply unsatisfied. They don't have a voice and they don't have a sense of agency. 

And I think more and more business owners are realizing that as much as we've tried to circumvent the development of workers, thinking that we could just pay them and that would be enough. It's not enough. Workers are waking up and realizing and demanding more. 

In rural communities, that becomes a real challenge because it's hard to demand more when the opportunities in rural America are so scarce. 

Meredith Matics: This idea of helping engage our employees that they're happier at work, but also growing in themselves and growing for their own careers. Talk to me about how business owners can start kind of implementing this in the day-to-day of businesses? What should we be looking at? 

Kathleen Menegozzi: For us, what we've really been focusing on is two different things that has enabled us to do a number of things. The first is really creating strategic and fundamental partnerships so whether that's with your local universities, community colleges, with a social entrepreneur, like myself. Creating these partnerships that can enable you to bring resources and create training programs, and bringing in grant money for workforce development. Creating these partnerships that can bring these resources into your business, I think is the first step. From there, what that enables us to do and before I state the steps that we're choosing to take, I want to really highlight the fact that these steps that we're choosing to take and how in-depth we go with our workers. It's not going to be the pathway for every business. Every business is not going to want to take on all of these things, but what we're focusing on is removing the health and wellness barriers that exist for our workers. 

So that's step one, you have to remove the barriers. Step two for us is really developing worker voice and authority through dynamic governance and sociocracy like I mentioned. And then the last thing we do is we create development plans, opportunities for our workers to practice the skills and the confidence that they're learning. 

So things like business and leadership management classes, we have our advocacy group. We have different fundraiser initiatives, our community garden project. We have college prep, mentorship, a number of different things. A lot of these programs are worker driven so it's based on the struggles they were presenting and our response by creating a program through either a professional partnership, if it's something like mental health. These programs that we're creating is employee driven. 

These are responses to their struggles that we take seriously. We partner up with them and we help them figure out what they need to move past that barrier and develop that sense of voice and that agency. ' 

From a tangible perspective for small business owners, a really good place to start is to take inventory of the tasks that you regularly take on that probably drive you absolutely insane. Probably take up a ton of your time. Things like invoicing, payroll supplies ordering, maybe you put together signage for your business that involves graphic design. It takes you forever. These super mundane tasks that for most business owners occur is tedious and monotonous. For workers, these are really invaluable skills that they can learn and they can grow from.  

So after you take inventory of the tasks that you maybe don't want to do anymore, and you would love to turn over to somebody else. I think the next step is to take 30 minutes and write down what would make you feel comfortable opening up those parts of your business to somebody on your team. 

In my case, with Jack's Pizza, some things that I know that I would have needed to feel comfortable with this, is a confidentiality agreement, full oversight and transparent through an online project management tool. So in our case, we use Monday.com. I love Monday.com and it creates that 100% transparency that I need to have with the team to feel comfortable with this. 

Then lastly, really thorough training. With all of these various pieces in mind, we next need to think about, can we, and if we can, how much extra would we be willing to pay that team members to take on that task? This is important. I think tons of businesses right now are struggling and can't conceive of paying more in wages at a time when they're making less in revenue. And that makes sense, like we're in that boat for sure.  

But even if it's a commitment for the future to increase wages with another conversation about the value of learning those tasks to a resume. This is where partnerships on that level can really help us understand how to create training programs, how to increase our revenues so we can pay higher wages, and how to figure out how we can make all of this work.  

And then I think the last step to that is really taking a couple of hours, grabbing a cup of coffee or whatever it is that you need to keep yourself going and figure out a training map for yourself. 

And again, if this is one of those areas that as a business owner, you're saying like, forget about a training map, I barely have time to manage the trainings I have in store, let alone some future hypothetical training. I can completely relate. What we need to do in that case again, is move into partnerships, whether it's a social entrepreneur or the SBA, the SBA is present in every state, across the United States. Work with free services that can provide to you counseling and all kinds of training to be able to put together a really solid and robust training. Another really great resource that we've turned to is the Department of Labor. 

The Department of Labor is a massive source of just awesome. They just have so many different things that they can offer. We're specifically thinking about apprenticeships for the future. They've helped us develop a couple of different apprenticeships. So there's just so many free resources that are out there and able to support businesses. 

Now more than ever, we need to be turning to these resources. We need to understand that they're out there. And if you don't have the time to research them, partner up with a social entrepreneur who would love to help a small business figure out and find these resources.  

Meredith Matics: Yeah. We've been recently trying to explore of how we can give back to our employees in the non-traditional ways. I want my employees to have opportunities to learn more, to do more, and to maybe take classes and things like that. 

I've been finding that this is something that they really want as employees. And it was really interesting cause I came to them and I said, I'm trying to look at a couple of different options. We could look at life insurance, or we could look at some different continuing education options. They much rathered the continuing education options, because especially if they're younger and more entry-level. That part was really interesting to just see.  

It's nice to reach out to them and let them have a say in it because as much as we started our businesses or maybe, even as pain in the butt, employees can be sometimes, without them, we wouldn't be growing. 

Kathleen Menegozzi: Exactly.  

Meredith Matics: I know you already gave a lot of really great free resources, but let's say I want to just tackle one of these things to start. Is there one that you found is more important to employees or is generally more prevalent in what they favor? 

Kathleen Menegozzi: I think creating opportunities that increase their wages, whether it's at your company or at another company. I know often times we don't look at it as a win to think of an employee of ours going and working for another company. If we can shift our focus to being development of workers, and if we can count the progress of workers as a win. 

Then really we should be proud when a worker is able to increase and broaden their skills and apply it in any number of companies. And if, really, if you're worth your weight in salt there, you should be able to continue to inspire and motivate that worker to potentially continue working with you in some capacity, even if they do go start working for, for another position or another company. 

Skills that can increase wages at your company ideally would be probably the best outcome, but really giving them the ability to increase their wages at any company. Look at it like as a society, we need to realize that workers are not being given what they need to survive and to thrive. And we, as a whole society need to feel accountable for that and to do what we can to, to make up the difference.  

Meredith Matics: Yeah, I think that's huge. 

Kathleen Menegozzi: One of the other suggestions that I would have based on what I've experienced here with Jack's is to create a space that is free of mental health stigma, because one of the biggest barriers and one of the most pervasive barriers, not even just here with Jack's in rural New Hampshire, but in New York City as well, is mental health. 

Having a space where it's safe to talk about those issues. It's safe to receive resources for those issues and where mental health is really prioritized in the workplace. This is so unusual because I think it's a really, it's a sticky area that makes business owners particularly feel really nervous. 

Don't take on the work yourself. I tell all of my team members as tempting as it might be because you've experienced a similar issue to give your own personal advice. 

We have to outsource that we have to give it to the professionals, but really just finding a single resource in your neighborhood that you can recommend that you would call yourself and develop a relationship with that counselor, that therapist can make all the difference for workers who are facing unprecedented mental health challenges in the workplace.  

Meredith Matics: Especially now.  

Kathleen Menegozzi: Especially now. That's another part of, of what I would recommend for small business owners who are really in the struggle right now, where even if they, they have it within them to want to help their workers, they might not have the bandwidth for it, is to really look closely at the American Rescue Plan. 

There's so much in the rescue plan that's been put out there that if we really comb through it, if we really look at what's there, there is something in that package for everyone. There's a really great resource that I turned to for just really easy to understand digestible information on the rescue plan and what's in the package and that's Matthew Lesko. Are you familiar with Matthew Lesko?  

Meredith Matics: I am not.  

Kathleen Menegozzi: So I love this guy. He's so extraordinary. If you look him up. He was around and like, I think it was like the seventies and the eighties where he used to wear suits made of question marks.  

Meredith Matics: What?! All I can think of is when, Oh, what is the Batman movie where Jim Carey's wearing question marks??  

Kathleen Menegozzi: Yes. Yes. I think it might've been the joker or something like this, but this was like the real life joker, but really like on the right side of things. He would wear this question mark suit, because what he felt was in order to get all the help that you needed, it was just about asking the right questions of the right organizations or the right government bureaucracy. Matthew Lesko has been working for 40 years, trying to help people connect with various sources of funding through the federal and state governments. 

What he's doing now is really dissecting the American Rescue Plan, really putting out YouTube videos, like documents that you can download, information that helps you understand how to apply, what's of value to you. There's a lot of other really great resources. 2-1-1 in a lot of States, 3-1-1 in other States, but there's so many resources right now that can help us as small business owners understand more about what's being made available to us so that we can take full advantage of it. And if you feel bad, if any of us feel bad, I promise you, the corporations don't feel bad. We all need to be taking what we feel is ours from the pot.  

Now is the time to really look at the American Rescue Plan and see what it offers for all of us. Personally, there's 175 million that has been earmarked specifically for what's called a community navigator program where through the SBA, they're going to be training small entities on local levels to help other small businesses and entities be able to apply and successfully receive funding through the Rescue Plan. 

Meredith Matics: Oh, wow.  

Kathleen Menegozzi: This is something that I would encourage. We're going to be looking into it. We're looking into it right now as a small business. There's certain like preparatory actions that you have to take to really be able to maximize these opportunities.  

I really want to put myself out there. If anybody needs help, I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me through the jackspizzanh.com website. 

I have my own website at menegozzi.com. There's a number of different ways that you can find me or reach out to me. I've been able to secure quite a bit of funding for Jack's in particular. I'm really eager and willing and anxious to help other small business owners be able to get something from the American Rescue Plan as well. 

I'm an asset and an ally here, and there's a number of different allies. The SBA is probably one of the most accessible and best allies across the country to turn to. Free advisors, you don't have to spend a dime. They're willing to help you in any number of facets, including understanding more about how you can qualify for the American Rescue Plan package in some way. 

Now more than ever, there's more money floating around that can help small business owners make this possible.  

Meredith Matics: Yeah, and really help our employees feel like we care about their futures.  Just to throw out another resource for mental health, if anybody is looking for mental health resources or wants to get in touch with one, one really great company that we work with is NAMI, N-A-M-I, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. 

We have a really good chapter here in Orange County, California. Any business owner can reach out to them and find out what's in their community and they're going to have really tailored resources to your area. 

Kathleen Menegozzi: That's great, our local chapter of NAMI has been incredibly helpful and ended up getting us connected with a mobile crisis unit.  

Meredith Matics: Oh, perfect.  

Kathleen Menegozzi: That was able to come out to our establishment when somebody was really having a hard time and was able to help them on the spot. So NAMI is absolutely great. So really great suggestion.  

Meredith Matics: Well, Kathleen, before we head out, we always ask everybody at the end of our podcast, what is one piece of advice that you personally have received that you want to share with our listeners about business? 

Kathleen Menegozzi: I would say that through the workers, what I've been able to learn is that the capabilities of your business rarely exceeds the capabilities of your workers. The more capable, supported, and competent your workers are, the more your business will be capable, confident, and able to thrive. That's the biggest takeaway that I've had.  

Meredith Matics: With that, I think there's so many business owners that try to pick people who are, who's not as good as them, but if you can make your employees as good as you, or better than your company's only going to grow. 

Kathleen Menegozzi: Exactly.  

Meredith Matics: It's not a bad thing. I know you mentioned a little bit about where we could find you on Jack's and your personal website, but you mind throwing that out there again for our listeners? 

Kathleen Menegozzi: Definitely. We are on LinkedIn, both as an organization and myself. You can also find Jason Isabelle, who's the owner of Jack's on LinkedIn. We have our website, which is www.jackspizzanh.com. My personal website, as a social entrepreneur and activist, which is menegozzi.com.  

Meredith Matics: Well, thank you so much, Kathleen, for coming on. You've told us some really critical stuff and I really hope our listeners take it to heart.  

Kathleen Menegozzi: Awesome. Well, thank you for having me Meredith. This has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much. 

Business Reflections Closing: Please note that these are thoughts and opinions alone. For tax advice, please see your CPA or tax advisor, tax professional for business advice and legal entities. Please see your local business, lawyer, or attorney for advice. And if you'd like to reach out to us for any topics or questions about. Any subject, any episode you can reach us podcast@maticsbilling.com. That's podcast@maticsbilling.com.    

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