On Not 'Waiting to Get Picked'

Reflections on three weeks of working and owning two restaurants

Oct 10, 2025

“Most newsletter suck. This one doesn’t” - an anonymous real reader of this newsletter

First, thank you! Thank you for checking out our new pizzeria in Oakley. Thank you for continuing to order takeout from our original location in Hyde Park. It has meant to much to me when one of our longtime Hyde Park regulars comes in and makes a point to congratulate us and wish us well. Thank you, thank you, thank you, from the bottom of my heart!

So, what you really want to know: how’s it going so far?

It’s going well! It’s been very challenging! And most of all, it’s hard to summarize in a sentence or two!

Planning a full scale pizzeria barely a mile from our existing takeout shop had its risks. So far, we have only seen Hyde Park SFA’s business slow on Mondays, our longstanding ‘Tavern Nite’ there, which I attribute to us offering tavern pizzas at our Oakley spot every day we’re open. Over here at Oakley, we’ve been absolutely slammed on Fridays, and have gone on a wait most other days during dinner.

While the start here at Oakley has been good business-wise, we’ve also sold less food throughout the week than I projected, so that has been challenging and to be honest, at first, a little alarming. Our overhead here is substantially higher than at our original location. Staff and benefits, rent, electrical, etc. Our Hyde Park shop is, for a restaurant anyway, a model of efficiency. Running our Oakley pizzeria, which is primarily dine-in, is like captaining one of those cargo ships that looks like it couldn’t possibly float. You can’t jerk the steering wheel too hard to make a quick adjustment. Our staff here is twice as big, and the business is —especially just one month in—much more unpredictable.

I made the decision to staff as though we’d be busy from day one, knowing that with this opening in Oakley, we were a known entity in the area and we would be busy off the bat. That has proven to be true. But there has been more variability than I anticipated here at Oakley. The way I planned our original takeout spot in Hyde Park, I staffed minimally with myself as the main prep and pizza maker. I knew we’d be slow to start and that I could hire people one at a time as the business gradually generated more revenue. This scaffolded approach meant that we were financially stable from the first day, albeit with a very modest income.

While I’m so glad I set up the first business so prudently, I didn’t see it as a viable option to do that this time around. Besides that, it is no longer realistic for me to schedule myself as the main pizza maker on a shift. Even though we have highly skilled and experienced staff at both restaurants (thank you), someone else needs to be baking the pizzas most of the time so I can give our staff and managers quality support at both restaurants.

So, making and selling less pizzas than I thought we would at Oakley, the worry started to creep in. It knocked me back on my heels, wondering what the future would hold and if somewhere in the years of planning my plans had veered from reality.

It took me about two weeks to set myself straight. Working the hours I am and not sleeping as much probably didn’t help.

Finally, this week, I committed to stop worrying, and start working. I stopped waiting on what would happen, and starting thinking proactively. Fortunately, I’ve done this before.

On Wednesday, Ari Weinzweig, co-founder of Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, sent out his weekly newsletter, beautifully apropos to the internal state I was for the first few weeks.

In his Beyond the Brand podcast, Bryan Elliott thanked author and marketing maven Seth Godin for giving some great advice along these lines. Anxious and frustrated that his work was not taking off, Bryan reached out to Seth. Though Seth could have smiled and nodded and simply encouraged Bryan to keep going, he responded with surprising directness. As Bryan recalls, Seth said:

“Bryan, there’s no Prince Charming in this story. There’s no rescue boats. No one’s coming. Stop waiting to get picked.”

On air and with tears in his eyes, Bryan shared how much Seth’s simple statement meant to him: “That just pierced my heart like no other, and in that moment, my whole point of view changed.”

What Seth said to Bryan is a good reminder for me, and maybe for you. Whether it’s about the state of our companies, the quality of the energy on a shift we’re working, or the state of the country around us, no one is coming to save us. It’s up to us. Take a chance. Lean in. Speak up. Big things might well come of it.

I sent Ari an email thanking him for what I know to my core, but lose touch with from time to time: this takes time. There are no shortcuts.

When we opened our Hyde Park location, I had almost no idea what I was doing, or where the whole project was going. Most of all, I had low expectations for myself and the business. Not so, this time. But having higher expectations doesn’t change reality, doesn’t change the future. “There’s no rescue boats. No one’s coming. Stop waiting to get picked.”

If you’re not an entrepreneur, and you’re thinking, ‘Of course this isn’t going to be easy! Restaurants are a tough business. It takes time to be busy!’…think about it this way. Yes, that is logical. And yet…

Maybe you’re a runner like me, or you go to the gym a few days a week. You can run three miles, no problem. For weeks, it’s gotten easier and easier. You can now run five or more. You’ve worked your way up to that level of fitness.

But then you lace up your shoes and head out, same time as usual. The first mile is just plain harder than it’s been for weeks. ‘Am I just tired?’ you ask yourself. ‘Am I not as fit as I thought? But I’ve been so consistent! Too consistent to feel like this!’ We start to feel, dare I say, entitled. Or to assume that effort will equal results.

Even in small ways, as we get used to the way things are, we get hung up on the idea that they will continue to be that way. Of course, putting in the effort to running a few times a week, even for years, does not guarantee you will always feel good when running. You will have unpleasant runs, exasperating runs. You might even get injured.

Running, like working, is a practice. It’s never truly finished, until we give it up entirely. As I mentioned before here, I don’t want to be a workaholic, per say, but I do think the word ‘toil’ has some positive connotation. Positive in the sense that working on something hard, day after day, assuming you enjoy that work, which I do, is sort of…the whole point of and reward for doing it.

And as my business/leadership coached reminded me the other day: “Remember that you started a second restaurant because you wanted a challenge and the adventure that comes with it.” Damn, I did say that, didn’t I. Ha.

So, I’m being patient while still pushing forward. And most of all, just like with the first pizzeria, I’m not waiting to get picked.

There was a Saturday night a week or two ago at SFA Oakley when every seat was full and we had a long waitlist of guests waiting to dine in. All 15 or so of us working the shift were running around in the semi-controlled chaos, trying to keep tables set, turning, and guests happy. I crossed paths with Eric, aka Lilly, our longtime Front of House Lead over at Hyde Park, at the bussing station. We were both scrambling to sort salad bowls from plates and forks to get that next table cleared. What he said stopped me in my tracks.

“Whoa.” He looked down from where we were standing in the upper dining area of the restaurant. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I worried that he’d seen something go terribly wrong in the rush of staff and guests bustling about below. I saw that he was just looking out at the crowd, taking it all in.

“This is kind of the dream, isn’t it?” he said. In that moment both us were flooded with memories of the shared highs and lows of our time working shoulder to shoulder at the original Saint Francis, and the conversations we had dreaming of what could be. My heart surged with gratitude.

As I finished scraping romaine leaves out of a salad bowl and into the trash can, I managed to hold back the tears in my eyes. All I could muster was, “Yeah, I guess it is. Thanks, dude.”

I was overwhelmed with emotion not because ‘I’d made it.’ I haven’t. We haven’t. I was overwhelmed because I knew that our shared work has meant so much to Eric, the way it has to me.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for trusting us with your pizza needs!

There is no charge for this newsletter, but if you’re hungry, we’ll make you a pizza tonight, tomorrow, or any night…

- Alex Plattner, Saint Francis Apizza

alex@saintfrancisapizza.com