#187: Aaron Hoffman & John Zinno (DeliverThat) — The Future of Catering Delivery

--AI-generated--

Aaron Hoffman [00:00:00]:
It's crazy. I mean, you know, to go from 0 to, you know, 25,000,000 in sales, and, I mean, that's just that's what you see. I there's publicly traded companies that don't do that much revenue. It's not possible John and I aren't ying and yang in the last 11 years. If we're not on the road building this thing, building the culture, building the teams, right, having the tough discussions, right, having the no ego, like, you know, it might be tough for us to swallow when things have to change, but at the end of the day, like, it's the best thing for our company.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:34]:
Let's discover what people are building in the greater Cleveland community. We are telling the stories of

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:39]:
northeast Ohio's entrepreneurs, builders, and those supporting them. Welcome to the lay of the land podcast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland and throughout northeast Ohio. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern, and today, I had the real pleasure of speaking with Aaron Hoffman and John Zeno, cofounders of Deliver That based in Canton, Ohio. Friends For Life, the 2 of them started this business out of Ohio University in 2016 off the bat of a viral tweet and have since proceeded to revolutionize the catering delivery industry with over $300,000,000 of catering delivery under their belt, a network of over 25,000 active drivers on their platform, operational in all major cities in all 50 states, helping over 500 brands elevate their catering experience. This is an awesome story of entrepreneurship, constant learnings, and overcoming adversity along the way. We cover the evolution of DeliveryDAT's business model to set the standard for catering delivery and setup, profitable growth and cash flow positivity, recapitalizations, personally developing as leaders, mistakes made, building with friends, and a whole lot more. So please enjoy my conversation with Aaron Hoffman and John Zeno after a brief message from our sponsor. Lay of the Land is brought to you by John Carroll University's Boulder College of Business, widely recognized as one of the top business schools in the region.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:12]:
As we've heard time and time again from entrepreneurs here on Lay of the Land, many of whom are proud alumni of John Carroll University, success in this ever changing world of business requires a dynamic and innovative mindset, deep understanding of emerging technologies and systems, strong ethics, leadership prowess, acute business acumen, all qualities nurtured through the Bowler College of Business. With 4 different MBA programs of study spanning professional, online, hybrid, and 1 year flexible, the Bohler College of Business provides flexible timelines in various class structures for each MBA track, including online, in person, hybrid, and asynchronous. All to offer the most effective options for you, including the ability to participate in an elective international study tour providing unparalleled opportunities to expand your global business knowledge by networking with local companies overseas and experiencing a new culture. The career impact of a bowler MBA is formative and will help prepare you for this future of business and get more out of your career. To learn more about John Carroll University's bowler MBA programs, please go to business.jcu.edu. The Buller College of Business is fully accredited by AACSB International, the highest accreditation a college of business can have.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:32]:
So when we first connected, I had the opportunity to hear an abridged version of of your guys' collective stories, which was awesome in and of itself. But ever since, I've just been very excited to sit down with both of you to hear the more unabridged version of of said story and be able to share it with a lot more folks because, you know, leading the witness, I kind of know the story is a lot of fun already. So I'm very much looking forward to it here. So thank you both for for joining

John Zinno [00:04:00]:
us. Absolutely. Thank you for having us.

Aaron Hoffman [00:04:03]:
Yeah, Jeffrey. Appreciate it, man.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:05]:
Absolutely. So to kick us off, let's do a a a brief stage setting. If you wanna just each, you know, briefly introduce yourselves, and we'll we'll dive into your lifelong friend's journey.

John Zinno [00:04:17]:
Yeah. My name is John Zeno, cofounder of Deliver That. Not as much, involved in the day to day management operations as much as I used to be. But, but, yeah, we live in Cleveland, Ohio now and just enjoying.

Aaron Hoffman [00:04:31]:
Living on the west side, the best side.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:33]:
That's right.

Aaron Hoffman [00:04:34]:
We're, Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm Aaron Hostin. I'm I'm one of the other founders of Deliver That. It's been an incredible, I'd say almost 11 years now, John, since we've missed this idea was born out of the dorm room, but our relationship, obviously friendship, I should put it that way, you know, is, is, yeah, I lack a little bit, But, you know, our our friendship spawns back, I mean, basically to 3rd grade when we first met each other at Straus elementary. So it's been we've we've known each other for a long time, and it's been, it's been such a privilege to build a company, not only with John, but a bunch of our other friends that we grew up with.

Jeffrey Stern [00:05:08]:
Well, that that is a as good a place as any to to kick it off. You know, take us back to this this 3rd grade friendship. You know, were you both always with this entrepreneurial inclination? You know, how is it that, that relationship evolved over time and and you found yourself in a position where where you were even thinking about, you know, startups and and businesses and and these kinds of things?

John Zinno [00:05:31]:
Yeah. I mean, for me, him and I, we were really friends for a while, maybe until, like, college, but we went to elementary school, middle school, high school, and then college together. And then we played baseball together in high school. And Yeah.

Aaron Hoffman [00:05:44]:
It's like, John John, we we were definitely we were definitely friends. Like, we but we weren't, like, to hang out every weekend. You know what I'm saying? Like, you know, back in the day, you'd have, like, summer parties and stuff with your friends. Like, John and I weren't doing that.

John Zinno [00:05:55]:
Yes. Yeah. So so I think, you know, our relationship really started in, in high school, playing baseball together and, you know, hanging out outside of that, but, you know, the entrepreneurial spirit. My mom was always an entrepreneur. My dad used to own pretzel stores in Philadelphia, you know, so I watched him do that. And I think it's always kind of been in my blood, and I would always sell things on eBay. And we would do different, you know, different things to make money because I never wanted a good normal job. So I think it was always in me, but it didn't really show until until college truly.

Aaron Hoffman [00:06:29]:
Yeah. I would say that, you know, I I have definitely been entrepreneurial, like my entire life.

John Zinno [00:06:35]:
I mean, I remember shoveling driveways when I've beat out 4th, 5th grade and,

Aaron Hoffman [00:06:39]:
you know, the lemonade stands garage sales. Like I was always hustling to make a buck. I think I think my my mom gave me I think

John Zinno [00:06:46]:
I have it

Aaron Hoffman [00:06:46]:
in my wallet still. I I I've made business cards with my brother David when

John Zinno [00:06:50]:
I was, like, 5th grade.

Aaron Hoffman [00:06:52]:
We would go pass him around the neighborhood, you know, mowing yards and yard work and mulching. And so it's like I've I've always had, like, the entrepreneurial bug. But when I, when I went to college, I wanted to be a doctor. Not this is gonna sound terrible, but, like, typically, people wanna be doctors because they wanna help people. I just wanted to make a lot of money. And, you know, when it it became pretty pretty clear to me that if you wanna make a lot of money, one of the best ways to do it was to, you know, to to own a company. So when we started with this idea about delivering food to to college students or just anything really to college students at OU, quickly changed my major because this was the this was the path that was meant for me. And like John, you know, he's got his parents are entrepreneurs, same with mine.

Aaron Hoffman [00:07:34]:
You know, my dad, he owns 2 daycares. He's owned other companies. Mom and stepdad have been very entrepreneurial as well. They've been involved in other opportunities. So I I'd say I'm well rounded from an entrepreneurial perspective.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:49]:
So I I was reflecting on our, you know, the the parts of the story that I remembered, and I thought a a fun place to kind of introduce, deliver that would be you know, when I think about most companies' first big breaks, I I think it is quite rare that it's from a viral moment. And it it's kind of rare still that, you know, that exaggerated elevation of status from virality has, like, any kind of durable staying power for a business. And so I love that, you know, many years later, it it is really at the heart of your origin story. So I'd love if you could just tell us, you know, about what was happening there at the inception of this idea and and going viral.

Aaron Hoffman [00:08:34]:
So, you know, the real story here behind why the start was John and I were rushing to fraternity. I had recently transferred to Ohio University, and, you know, we I wanted to get involved in the campus, and, you know, Greek life was a great way. We had friends that were

John Zinno [00:08:48]:
in a fraternity and, like, okay,

Aaron Hoffman [00:08:49]:
you know, why why not join a fraternity? So we were rushing a fraternity, and, you know, we were getting people food one day. Yeah. It's like the first cold day of the year in in November. And I just remember having the idea, like, man, I was literally, like, tase someone to go get this food for us. And I'm over, like, I'm, like, talking to John about this as we're walking to it's anyone's, you know, listening from Ohio University. We're going to Shively Dining Hall.

John Zinno [00:09:14]:
And and,

Aaron Hoffman [00:09:15]:
really, I I've keep talking. Like, John, seriously, like, why wouldn't we should start a business, man. We should we should start delivering kids anything, really. And, John, what would and what'd you tell me again? What did you say?

John Zinno [00:09:27]:
But yeah. I definitely said no because we didn't have a car, so I don't know how we're gonna do this.

Aaron Hoffman [00:09:34]:
The job yeah. So yeah. So the immediate inception of the item there was completely, you know, combated by John. Doesn't wanna do it. Didn't wanna do it. And, you know, so we I think we get our food. We we we take it to somebody. We go you know, we end up well, no.

Aaron Hoffman [00:09:47]:
We went to the library where everyone was at. All the libraries.

John Zinno [00:09:51]:
And I Yeah.

Aaron Hoffman [00:09:51]:
No. We're all back.

John Zinno [00:09:52]:
You know, 4 4 boxes of food in each hand, you know, for all the brothers. Right? It's, like, just terrible.

Aaron Hoffman [00:09:59]:
It was all voluntary, though. We did it by choice. Yep. No. We we, we, we we we go to this in the library, and I'm like, John, like, dude, like, look at how many students are in here. Like, we should be delivering everyone in this library soon. Courts shoots right up the road. You've got the dining halls.

Aaron Hoffman [00:10:17]:
Like, I'm sure people wanna, like, get books to you know, like, we shouldn't do this. And, again, I think John at this time was like, okay. You know, like, whatever, Aaron. It's one of your one of your ideas. Like, you know, I'll go along with it. And we literally that night at the library and then that light yeah. Like, that night, we went to the library, you know, and we we created our Twitter account. We created a Twitter account.

Aaron Hoffman [00:10:37]:
No business, by the way. No idea. No thesis. No business plan. No way to do anything. No car. No bike. We created this account on Twitter.

Aaron Hoffman [00:10:48]:
And, you know, I think we ended up getting a couple of, like, the large college accounts like OU Crushions and whatever campus accounts. Like, they were retweeting one of our treat our tweets. And, eventually, the the vice president of the university at the time, vice president Lombardi, he, like, retweeted us and, like, quoted it and was, like, basically I'm gonna say, you know, promoting us, but, like, almost like saying, hey, students. Like, check this out. This is awesome. Like, everyone should use this. And I remember, you know, like, a day later, we had 4,000 followers, and it was crazy. And we'd look at

John Zinno [00:11:19]:
each other, and we're like, dude, we have a business. Like, what are

Aaron Hoffman [00:11:22]:
we like, what now? And it was it was so cool because, you know, getting this company started with an idea like that and, like, that just kinda shows, like, the power of social media now. Like Yeah. We literally had no business model. Nothing. We couldn't like, I mean, we had, like, $60 cash to start with. And, yeah, it was it was awesome.

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:43]:
I mean, it is awesome. But it it, you know, if if you go back in time, it was $60 and and far more demand, you know, than you can supply at that at that point in time. Like, you know, what what do you do? How do you try and meet the demand?

John Zinno [00:12:00]:
Well, I mean, no one placed an order all weekend. I don't know when the first order was. Maybe it was, like, on a Tuesday or maybe the I remember exactly the first order. It was I'm giving

Aaron Hoffman [00:12:10]:
a shout out. It was Pat Lowe. It was Pat Logan from Chipotle. Alright? Pat Logan from Chipotle. He's one of

John Zinno [00:12:16]:
our fraternity brothers. Brothers who? I just do remember when.

Aaron Hoffman [00:12:18]:
Yes. I'm pretty sure you took the delivery, John. I'm almost positive you did it, didn't you? I was at Chipotle. It was a yeah. It was at Chipotle. And they you know, Oyu's campus is, like, where the the dorms are at. It's probably about a 15, 20 minute walk to, like, where all, like, the core street is where all the food's at. But you and you have to go up a big hill.

Aaron Hoffman [00:12:36]:
So I can just imagine John biking up this massive hill for

John Zinno [00:12:39]:
his delivery, you know, and

Aaron Hoffman [00:12:40]:
just delivered a baggage of folate, but that was it. And, because he's still in the time, like

John Zinno [00:12:45]:
It's not.

Aaron Hoffman [00:12:48]:
You know? I think, you you know, that the bowl cost, what, like, 7.50 and, like, we could you know, we don't take credit cards. We don't have change on us. Like, so how do we even get people, like, how do we tender cash correctly? And just it was it was bizarre. You know? I'll tell you what never to do when starting a company is, like, there was no way for us to accept orders besides, like, using my cell phone. So, like, my personal cell phone was the way that we first initially started receiving orders, and we would receive, like, texts saying, like,

John Zinno [00:13:16]:
hey.

Aaron Hoffman [00:13:16]:
I want a burrito. Not, like, the contact information of the person ordering, where they wanted the burrito from, where it's being delivered to, at what time. Like, it was it was it was hilarious.

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:29]:
So how do you begin to take this idea seriously? And at what point through this journey in college do you realize it's something you could commit yourself to beyond?

John Zinno [00:13:42]:
That's a good question. I mean, it evolved from cash and just us and friends doing deliveries. And then we started getting friends' cars, so we would, I don't know, fill up their tank at the end of the day or something. And then we had some students reach out to us to drive for us. And we were like, oh, yeah. I guess we should have, you know,

Aaron Hoffman [00:14:04]:
employees or people work for us.

John Zinno [00:14:06]:
I guess that makes sense. And a lot of them to begin with, were the it was the basketball team because they weren't allowed to have they weren't actually allowed to make money because they were on scholarship. Mhmm. So we were just paying, you know, out cash every night. And so we just have these guys, you know, 68, 610 just bringing money back to us at the end of the night at 2 AM. It was ridiculous. Right? All nice guys. So All great guys.

John Zinno [00:14:29]:
So we did that, and I think eventually we, you know, we understood some technology, you know, or at least, you know, college kids learning, and so we started using Square. And these little Square readers were free. We just made an account. You'd ask them for them, and they would just send them to us. So then we just started accepting, credit cards via Square. So that was kind of the next evolution. And then some students reached out to us. They wanted to build us a, a web app.

John Zinno [00:14:57]:
So we ended up building a web app where we would be able to dispatch orders to drivers. Customers could order online. So we evolved from the cell phone to a web app, which is beautiful. It's fair. And then we started launching some other campuses. We launched Miami. We launched OSU, Kent, you know, Akron a little bit. And we just learned it was really tough to get people excited because you can only pay a manager of a campus not even $500 a week.

John Zinno [00:15:27]:
So we would say, hey, we we expect you to take this really seriously, but they're in school. And they're like, well, school is gonna come first, always. And we're like, well Yeah. We want you to take this serious, but we're only gonna pay you Yeah. A couple $100. So we learned it was tough to manage when you couldn't pay. That's for sure. It became a challenge to manage these other campuses and and the viral you know, I thought we were marketing experts because we went viral, so we figured we could just do that at every other campus.

John Zinno [00:15:56]:
Then we found out we couldn't do that at every other campus and that we're not marketing experts, so that was a nice nice slap in the face. And then 2016, we were about to graduate. We started pitching OU to they had money from the state, grant money for tech companies. So we learned about this and one of our professors helped us kinda curate a pitch and taught us how to pitch. And we pitched OU to invest in us even though we really didn't have any technology. Aaron came up with an algorithm that would say the campus was worth launching at, and that was our tech. And they weren't they weren't really having it, so they turned us down. But even before that, we actually tried to get we were really close to getting on Shark Tank.

John Zinno [00:16:36]:
We were we threw, like, 30,000 applicants, and we were in the top 100. Sent a big video to them and almost got on and found out the producer. He invested in another campus delivery something. So then they we didn't get accepted. And then we pitched O. U, so we had some practice pitching. And then we were turned down. And then by then, it was we were basically graduating.

John Zinno [00:16:57]:
So we had the choice to to continue. And I didn't wanna get a job. I didn't do any, any of the mock interviews or anything that most of the students were doing. We were just focused on building this business. And graduation rolled around. We graduated. He went out to LA, did some programming stuff out there for the summer. I stayed at home, did some painting and contracting work, and Okay.

John Zinno [00:17:19]:
Then I told my father Yeah.

Aaron Hoffman [00:17:20]:
Jeffrey. Jeffrey. Let me tell you how, let me tell you. Let me just put this in work and this this is funny. Let me tell you why we were never ever gonna get like a regular job. So at Ohio university, right? You can, you can create your own degree. So, like, I don't have like a BA in finance or whatever. B I have a BSS in finance, a bachelor's in specialized studies in finance from Ohio University.

Aaron Hoffman [00:17:46]:
I made it myself. Didn't do it to the business school. And I think John did something similar, but it was even a more ridiculous degree. What is it called, John?

John Zinno [00:17:56]:
What's it called? Real estate entrepreneurship principles. Yeah. Real estate entrepreneurship principles. Sounds great.

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:02]:
Sounds great. Putting them both to great use here.

Aaron Hoffman [00:18:06]:
Yeah. No. And that's and, you know, I I think why we we went down that route was because we're going and we're building. So, like, we were I mean, we were so invested in this business. Right? And, like, we would you know, like I said, we switched our majors for it. It was actually a legitimate business degree at the time, but I remember being a a junior and, like, I'm learning my entrepreneurship, whatever, 300 level class. We're literally in the same class listening to somebody talk to us about running a company and starting a company. And afterwards, we go up to him.

Aaron Hoffman [00:18:33]:
Well, hey. You know, like, we have it sound we have our delivery service on, you know, business on campus. And the guy basically told us, he's like, you know, I can't help you guys

John Zinno [00:18:40]:
at all.

Aaron Hoffman [00:18:40]:
I've never run a business, but he's teaching us about entrepreneurship. At that point, it's like I couldn't take it serious anymore. Right? I couldn't take what I was doing at Ohio University serious. Granted, I loved my four and a half years there. Surprised it wasn't 5, but, you know, I I wouldn't regret anything that we did.

John Zinno [00:18:57]:
Mhmm. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:58]:
I always found that it's easier to learn and practice than in theory. And it's it's helpful from a teacher's perspective too. Absolutely.

John Zinno [00:19:07]:
Yeah. I know I mean, without OU, we wouldn't have this business, but, you know, to say you can you'll be ready to build a business by being in class, I think that's, like, a little naive. You can get some principles for sure, but you just you learn by doing and by trusting in yourself. You're not gonna get that by not doing.

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:24]:
So if that bookends, you know, the the university chapter, I I love, you know, kinda 2 ideas there. 1 is, I mean, what what is the state of delivery services at that time? You know, obviously, today, I think all these names are are are quite commonplace. The the DoorDash is the Instacarts, you know, the the Uber Eats of the world, but, you know, what what was what was it like at that point in time? And, you know, from there, you know, take us through the the inception of of the next chapter, you know, come come into Canton. And, I I recall the the Ruby Tuesday light bulb moment.

John Zinno [00:20:02]:
Oh, yeah. Ruby Tuesday.

Aaron Hoffman [00:20:04]:
Yeah. I think, hey, John. Go ahead, take us one off.

John Zinno [00:20:07]:
Yeah. I mean, with with DoorDash, DoorDash was no one was doing college campuses. There might have been a company called OrderUp, which I believe was acquired by Grubhub, that they were kinda on some campuses, but no one was really on any of the campuses that we were on. DoorDash, they were just doing big cities, mostly like, in 2013, I think they might have launched in the same year or same area. But over the next few years, they just went big cities, and they raised a ton of money. Right? So they had good tech. But they still were not touching the canons, the tier 2 cities, college campuses. And we thought if we just expanded throughout college campuses, we could become a big big enough thorn in their side that they would need to acquire us.

John Zinno [00:20:46]:
Okay. You know? Outside of that, Uber Eats wasn't a thing. Uber, I think, was just really getting going. So, yes, there really wasn't a ton of competition, at least where we were at. If we wanted to get bigger, there definitely would have been, for sure.

Aaron Hoffman [00:21:01]:
Yeah. You know, but, you know, we we tried. So after that summer in Los Angeles and, you know, we we both came back to Canton, Ohio where we're from. Yeah. It's a suburb of Massillon, Jackson Township, and we we still tried to get, you know, get our on demand model to work in our hometown. He said, you know, there's a lot of restaurants around.

John Zinno [00:21:18]:
There's a

Aaron Hoffman [00:21:18]:
lot of people. There's disposable money. Like, why wouldn't someone pay us 6, $7 to go eat their food in Jackson? So we still tried to get this model to work in our hometown. It's something completely novel to us at the time where it's like we were off college campuses and, like, in a suburban setting. Like, we're from a very suburban area, Jackson Township, Ohio, and it didn't work. We were going up against the time, like I said, the Grubhub, Zuubers, the DoorDash. And they, at that point, were starting to get into more of, like, the tier 2 suburb areas. And at that point, you know, they're driving demand to restaurants, something we never did.

Aaron Hoffman [00:21:53]:
Right? We never really had hooks into a POS or, like, we didn't have any software, really. Like, we weren't driving demand. Mhmm. And I remember this would have been instead of in later late 2016, in 2017, we're going early 2017, we go into Ruby Tuesday. Actually, late 2016. We go into Ruby Tuesday, a local Ruby Tuesday, and, like, we're pitching them on the on demand model. Like, hey. Like, we'll take all of your on demand deliveries.

Aaron Hoffman [00:22:21]:
Like, we'll do the best job ever. You know, cheaper, better, faster, whatever. And they're like, No, dude. We don't need that. We're good there. But he's like, You know, I got and he had catering orders. Right? These are large orders. These are like a couple $100 a piece, maybe $1,000, right? He had 9 or 10 of them lined up in booths.

Aaron Hoffman [00:22:37]:
He's like, You know what? I need help with these deliveries right here. These deliveries can go with a DoorDash or Uber. He quickly educated us on, You got to look good. You got to be polite. You got to be you're presenting you're a part of our brand at this moment when you go take a catering order. You gotta set the food up. And we took one of the catering orders, I'll never forget, to a, you know, a close, like, doctor's office. It's like a hospital slash slash doctor's office.

Aaron Hoffman [00:23:03]:
Went in there. Everyone was happy to see us, set the food up real nice, took us 5 minutes, said please and thank you. We were wearing, you know, slacks and a polo. We weren't wearing, like, shorts and a t shirt. And, like, I remember, you know, handing someone a receipt and them signing a nice, like, $34 gratuity on it. And, like, at that moment, we look at each other. We're like, dude, we can do this. We know our drivers will wanna take these deliveries because look at the tip.

Aaron Hoffman [00:23:29]:
We'd you'd have to work 4 or 5 hours on our platform to make the same amount of money. And at that moment, that's the light bulb, right, where it's like, hey, let's stop trying to compete with the $1,000,000,000, the funded, the companies that have already established that have, like I said, way better technology, way, you know, way more funded than we are. Let's try to carve out a specific area in this market, which ended up being catering delivery where we can dominate. And it was that was the moment. From then on, I think a couple months later, we shut down our entire by the way, the the, you know, the college delivery services, OU delivery, Kent State, you know, all these campuses, they were still making money. We were like, you know what? We're shutting them down. We're going all in on this. And we did.

Aaron Hoffman [00:24:13]:
And, you know, that was probably that was the the big pivot for us was getting away from trying to compete for the smaller orders and just specialize in a specific type of delivery. And we took that and we expanded, man. Like, we went from Jackson Township, Ohio to Northeast Ohio, which would be Cleveland, Akron, Canton. And then we just literally expanded it like that probably until John I mean, John has opened. He probably been to, like, 90 of the states here, you know, like, he's been to every state pretty much where it's like I mean, seriously, the man's, like, a road warrior. I mean, we did. We have to go into markets. We would literally just replicate what we did a Ruby Tuesday.

Aaron Hoffman [00:24:49]:
We would find 4 or 5 drivers. We'd find a couple of restaurants.

John Zinno [00:24:52]:
We were like, okay.

Aaron Hoffman [00:24:53]:
Let's do catering deliveries, and that was it. Mhmm. It was awesome. I I I still look back at that time and think that was what has kept this business alive or was we weren't funded. We had no capital. It was John and I John and I were spending all the you know, it's our money we're making, spending on keeping this business afloat. And, like, I feel like that was the that really instilled, like, we're not gonna fail

John Zinno [00:25:16]:
if we can make this work.

Aaron Hoffman [00:25:17]:
You know?

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:17]:
Yeah. Well, one point of contrast, you know, relative to the delivery service competitors at that time that that you had mentioned, you know, beyond the niche of of catering is, I think, pulling on this this thread that you just started to introduce there was, you know, your guys' whole operating philosophy about growing profitably and and with cash flow positivity, which is, you know, in complete opposition to the philosophy of the, you know, Uber venture backed organizations, you know, growing at the literal expense of cost?

John Zinno [00:25:53]:
Present trade. I mean, it's I think it I think it shows that there are there's not just one path. You don't have to just raise and get diluted into oblivion, you know? I think there are many ways that you could that you can build a business. Right? But we just wanted to do it the right way that we thought was right, which was just always making money, not overspending, being frugal. And, yeah, like Aaron said, I think that that kept us in it. I think if we were given, you know, $20,000,000, you might have looked at it this quite a bit quite a bit differently. Starting to get a salary, and you're a couple years out of college. You know, I don't know how I would have looked at it, but I just knew that we had to do it, and that was the only option.

John Zinno [00:26:38]:
And I always felt, you know, we could always go get a job if this doesn't work. So why not just let's go all in and let's just let's do it. So, yeah, I don't I don't think there's one way to build a business, but I think, maybe now it's a little different. Funding's definitely quite a bit tougher to, you know, to have access to. So, you know, I think going profitably for the next few years might be a good, good way to build a business.

Aaron Hoffman [00:27:01]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just what John was saying, like, I you you know, we both lived I lived in my in my dad's basement for 2 or 3 years. Like, we paid ourselves a $100 per week. We didn't pocket any of the money we took when we took deliveries. Like, we literally invested every bit of money back in this business. And to me, that's what has created this resiliency. It's why which we'll get into later about when our business when COVID hit and we were delivering to corporate clients, our business essentially evaporated overnight, 95% gone, in which I'll get into that here obviously later.

Aaron Hoffman [00:27:31]:
But, Yeah. I mean, we've we we still to this day, we, I mean, we've had, man, I wanna say over 40 straight months of cash flow pot like, profitability straight every single month, and it's been it's been an incredible way to operate a business. And if I look back on doing it again, I don't think I would change a thing with how we run it. Honestly, I've seen too many businesses raise capital on an idea and not a real business. And we had a legitimate business that was generating cash, that was generating revenue, that were paying people, paying drivers, that was delivering true value to consumers. I don't think that that would have been possible if we were if we raised capital.

John Zinno [00:28:09]:
Yeah. I mean, one thing we always said was we just if we bring value, we'll get paid. And we were doing the on demand delivery, weren't we were we just weren't bringing enough value, whether it was to our customers through, you know, an app that wasn't well done, whether it's through the restaurants that we're not bringing them enough revenue. And then finally, someone said, hey, I will pay you to solve my problem. And the light bulb went off, like, okay. Someone's actually saying they have a problem now. You know? It wasn't really that big of a problem back then that you had to get you were too lazy to go get Chipotle yourself. Right? But it is definitely a problem if a restaurant that makes $3 a day can't deliver, you know, 5, $300 catering orders.

John Zinno [00:28:48]:
That's 50% of their revenue for the day. That's a real problem. Right? And they will pay to have that problem fixed. So that's, that's having been all the difference. If we would have had money, maybe we wouldn't have been searching, you know, as hard to bring value to to our customers and drivers and things like that. So, yeah, I would never change anything.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:09]:
Mhmm. I mean, well, there's this, you know, old adage of, you know, scarcity as as the mother of of invention. Well, and I am curious, you know, as as part of the journey, you know, with that theme in mind, you know, at what point and and maybe, you know, this is kind of the crucible moment with COVID and the 95% drop, Erin, that you mentioned. But at what point did you guys begin to think longer term about this business rather than, you know, here's the opportunity immediately in front of us? And, like, where where did a a longer term vision come into play? And what what is that what was that vision originally?

Aaron Hoffman [00:29:46]:
Yeah. I'll you know, I'll back up again to where we pivoted to catering. Right? At that time, you know, we're starting to really see that catering is a is a legit mess, like, it's a necessity to, you know, catering fulfillment, like, delivery fulfillment. Like, it was a problem, not just for one restaurant, Ruby Tuesday, for every single one of them, besides the Panera Bread at the time, who, you know, had hundreds of orders per day per location. They had their own fleet, had their own they had the infrastructure to deliver themselves. No one else really did. And, you know, so we over the next, you know, 18 months, right, this should have been 2017 going into 2018, going into the half 2018. We built some really strong relationships with some restaurant brands.

Aaron Hoffman [00:30:24]:
1, I'll shout them out right now. They're they're local to Northeast Ohio. Old Carolina Barbecue, they were, you know, really, I think, our second client ever, and they were I mean, they're really again, also on Brian Bailey too. You know, his guidance and mentorship through those years helped us again understand that catering was significantly different than a takeout or a mealtime order and that there needed to be a different level of service, a different tech stack, different tooling. Just this. It was a different business. Right? And what happened to that was he they they obviously relied on us to do these, you know, these catering deliveries. We were kicking ass.

Aaron Hoffman [00:31:01]:
And, you know, there was a a small PE, family PE, in Canton, Ohio that had invested in them that he introduced us to. I think at that point, we were starting to get more serious. Like, hey. You know, we're actually we're actually doing something cool here. We've got maybe 3 or 4 different employees. At that moment, we had my brother, Dan. We had our now CEO, who was a driver to start, Darian Terrell. And we also had Jimmy Danke, who was our brand manager at the time.

Aaron Hoffman [00:31:30]:
And we were I might be forgetting somebody else, but I'm you know, so long ago. But these you know, we had a couple major employees, and we're like, okay. Like, we can run this thing. We could keep building this, but we need more. Like, first off, John and I gotta get paid. We gotta get out of the basement. Right? You gotta get out of my dad's basement. Yeah.

Aaron Hoffman [00:31:46]:
I can't live in that house anymore.

John Zinno [00:31:47]:
We're in there.

Aaron Hoffman [00:31:48]:
With that man. Sure. Can't do that anymore. And then I was like, at the same time, like, we need an injection of capital to grow this thing. But we weren't doing, like we the the business still wasn't legitimate. Like, we weren't we weren't doing financial statements. We didn't have, like, any idea, like, if we were really making money or not besides looking at our bank account. And so, you know, the p that got involved, they're still involved today.

Aaron Hoffman [00:32:11]:
Like I said, their the CEO of that of that company is now RCXO, Darrell Miller. And, man, they have been he's been, you know, a godsend to our business. He came in and immediately legitimized the business. I think they pumped in on maybe a little over a $100,000 half of that. So John and I each took 25,000 a piece off the table. It's really just back pay for all the time that we spent the last 3 or 4 years, not getting paid. And that in 25 ks at the time, that man, that was so much money to me. That was in and

John Zinno [00:32:40]:
a crazy amount of money. I remember we were in we were launching Phoenix when we, closed the deal, and I got money. I got hit my bank account first. It's just because you work in the basement. Oh, that's great. Yeah. But, like, $20.25, it was so much. I couldn't believe it.

John Zinno [00:32:57]:
I was like, wow, this is actually we are bringing value. We're finally, you know, getting paid on

Aaron Hoffman [00:33:03]:
that. Someone's recognized on And, yeah. And, like, you know, we we we did have an office. We were literally working out of my dad's basement. I'm not that's not an exaggeration. So, like Yeah. You know, the PE came in. He he immediately started doing financial statements, something that was really, you know, it was just it was core to what he does.

Aaron Hoffman [00:33:21]:
He's a CPA as well. But, like, you know, he got us in office space. He helped us legitimize the business forecasting. And from that moment, we literally started growing like crazy. I think we launched from basically, that was May of 2018 or June of 2018 when we closed this this fund. Basically, then all the way up until COVID, right, March of 2020. We were nonstop growth mode, sending people left and right to markets. That's why I say John spent basically the greater part of a year and a half on the road, same with Darien, same with me, same with Jimmy.

Aaron Hoffman [00:33:55]:
I mean, we were I mean, there's another guy, Christian, who's our VP of Partnerships now. Like, he launched Seattle. He launched so many more like, we were literally on the ground in these markets, meet and greet drivers, talking to the restaurants, launching these places just like we did at Ruby Tuesday in Canton you know, in Jackson Township. It was the exact same the exact same playbook.

John Zinno [00:34:17]:
I think, the one thing that we always did, especially with the bootstrap model Yeah. We knew we couldn't do this ourself ourselves, so we needed teammates and people to work with us. But, we always just paid everyone else first. It was the only way. You know, I think it it would have been different if we would have raised a lot of money. Everyone's making money. Everyone's comfortable. None of us are comfortable.

John Zinno [00:34:41]:
Right? So we're all just trying to become comfortable and actually own, you know, anything. That's just something that we always did, and it worked out so well where if everyone else was paid, they would stick around and we didn't have to do literally everything. We could just do 80% of what we were doing instead of a 100%. That was something I think we did really well.

Jeffrey Stern [00:35:06]:
Lay of the Land is brought to you by Impact Architects and by 90. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio, Impact Architects has helped 100 of those leaders, many of whom we have heard from as guests on this very podcast, realize their own visions and build these great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love. If you 2 are trying to build great, Impact Architects is offering to sit down with you for a free consultation or provide a free trial through 90, the software platform that helps teams build great companies. If you are interested in learning more about partnering with Impact Architects or by leveraging 90 to power your own business, please go to ia.layoftheland.fm. The link will also be in our show notes.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:05]:
So not to, you know, jump the gun because we'll, you know, we'll get there, but understanding, you know, that where you are today as a, you know, multi tens of millions top line business, tens of thousands of drivers on the platform, you know, a a sizable organization, on the team itself. You know, I have to ask about the the COVID moment and a 95% drop. That sounds like, I mean, truly existential moments for the business. What did you guys learn through the process and implement in the business that allowed you, you know, to get from this existential place of, you know, is the business going to survive to to the place where where you are today?

John Zinno [00:36:48]:
Alright. Well, I know we can take

Aaron Hoffman [00:36:49]:
this one job. Yeah. That's fine. Can you okay. He might have cut out there. But, no. I mean, for me, Jeffrey, it was I mean, Jill, g February of 2020 was our first profitable month ever as a company. Okay? Like like like when we pivoted to catering.

Aaron Hoffman [00:37:05]:
So February 2020, I think it was, like, a couple $1,000 profit. We were going crazy about it. John and I are in Vancouver visiting one of our advisors in, like, the the week, I think, like, March 8th or March 9th, and, like, when the rugby

John Zinno [00:37:18]:
ready to close the borders, essentially.

Aaron Hoffman [00:37:20]:
And, like, when we go back to our hometown and, you know, fly back here and it's, like, the whole world shuts down, our business goes down 95% overnight because at the time, think about it, we're we're the the majority of catering, you guys, the people listening out there, it's it's the corporate clients. It's not to, like, a grad party. There there are a lot of orders like that that go to, you know, residential places. But, you know, the the vast majority of catering business it's it's business catering. It's going to offices, hospitals, skyscrapers. So you have to think at that time when COVID hits, no one's really at those places besides, you know, the hospital, right? And like, at the same time, like, you're not going to have group large buffet style orders in all in one area at a hospital. It's like so it moved to like individually packaged orders. And you know, COVID was such a disaster on so many levels, but I will say I will credit it as being the one of the most defining moments for our business.

Aaron Hoffman [00:38:18]:
It helped us fix every single hole in the business. When I talk about our market launches, for example, we had to spend tens of 1,000 of dollars on hotels, flights, you know, cars, sending people in there. We introduced some technology where we could do that all virtually. We could launch markets with no human, you know, in that market. It's because we develop software to onboard drivers virtually, qualify them, you know, make sure that they they, they have the right equipment, test their knowledge around delivery. So, you know, our driver acquisition process before, you know, pre COVID, you had to have a driver go on a delivery with another driver, call them the ride along. And, like, I mean, COVID hit. You can't have people, you know, that are in the

John Zinno [00:39:04]:
same car together. You don't know what's going on.

Aaron Hoffman [00:39:07]:
So we that was all that was all you know, we we basically brought that all. We did it digitally. And by doing those two things, we damn near tripled our coverage within 6 months. At this point, we covered basically every major market in the country. There was no, like, outlier cities. We were everywhere. And what that allowed us to do is before, we were able to you know, one of the biggest pain points of of of scaling a business, like a delivery business, is when you wanna service a large client. Let's take, like, a Panera Bread.

Aaron Hoffman [00:39:38]:
We don't work with Panera, by the way. Okay? But a Panera Bread, you know, they're they want one throat to choke. Right? They wanna use one service. Well, if you don't cover 90 plus percent of their stores, they're never gonna use you. So, like, that was one of the biggest barriers to entry for us is that we didn't have coverage everywhere like DoorDash did. But when COVID hit, we did. So that was, like, our immediate end with restaurants, enterprise restaurants that wanted to offer catering delivery at scale, you know, through our services. So COVID sucked.

Aaron Hoffman [00:40:08]:
I mean, it's terrible, but, you know, when when we it helped it's helped our business significantly, and I credit that as another pivotal moment where we got into more of, like, the software business. Right? COVID is the reason why, you know, at the time, I was CEO of the company, a CEO for 8 years. And, you know, when at the tail end of COVID, this would have been, like, November of 21, you know, we made a decision, like, as a board. Like, I'm stepping down as the CEO, and I'm embarking on learning the software side of, you know, of our industry. And my job was to immerse myself for 4 to 6 months in this, learn how to develop software so I could hire someone that could come in, a CTO, that could come in and build our technical team. Like, I'm so proud of that, and I had to rewire my brain. I mean, John could tell you about that those stories. Like, it was crazy.

Aaron Hoffman [00:41:01]:
Like, something out of a movie, like, every day, constantly watching videos, taking classes. Like, I you know, we just actually like, our first application we ever used that we self, like, self posted. I I wrote the script. Like, I wrote the program, and I was so proud of that. But, we, you know, hired a CTO, and that was, like, sort of like the COVID pivot. Right? It's like, hey. Let's stop. You know, we're a services business, but, like, it needs to be tech enabled now because nothing we use off the shelf, a third party service, ever met 100% of our needs.

Aaron Hoffman [00:41:32]:
We had to start building custom stuff.

John Zinno [00:41:35]:
Yeah. There were there were really a few things. You know, the software never met our needs because it was always built for on demand delivery, or it was built for the small orders, or it was built for a restaurant to run their own delivery drivers out of their, their own restaurant. So there's never a third party catering delivery service software out there. But we lost so many clients. You know, Zoey's Kitchen, which now means Kava, you know, Qdoba, Moe's, we lost all these clients because we would tell them we could do, you know, all their deliveries, and then we would only show up 75% of the time. Well, that doesn't exactly cut it with catering. And, you know, when we were only making money on deliveries that we actually delivered, we could only make so much money.

John Zinno [00:42:20]:
And we knew Right. The only way you could get higher coverage or a better success rate or a better fill rate is if you receive more deliveries. So you could batch deliveries together, but you couldn't get more deliveries if you were messing up. So it was really difficult to get more. And then we introduced software, and, you know, now we take 99, 98% of every delivery that's submitted to us. Quality is through the roof because we now are able to receive more deliveries. And, yeah, the software has been and even before, we were advised to not build software. So it was who's gonna fit who's gonna who's gonna be the one that we can trust that would actually be able to manage a CTO or a developer? Yeah.

John Zinno [00:43:01]:
How am I gonna manage a developer? I don't even know how to speak that language. How do I know if they're even doing a good job? And Aaron just went all in and figured it out, and, yeah, it was incredible. Right. Changed the the course of the company. Wow.

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:14]:
I I feel like it's it's one of these perennial and it it's it's interesting because it can swing both ways on the pendulum. But, like, this recognition of the importance of vertical integration and in house development as, like, a core competency of a growing company.

John Zinno [00:43:30]:
Yeah. It was the only option because we wanted to just lease the software and we would we would have just paid someone if they had it. And Yeah.

Aaron Hoffman [00:43:37]:
I mean, because when you think about it, like, our, like, our software team, like, man, these guys are I mean, they're they're they're so smart. Right? And intelligent people that cost a lot of money. But at the time, the reason why we've shied away from ever building software, it wasn't because we didn't know what to build. We didn't know what to build. It's always been the same. Like, we've always had these ideas of, like, the correct way to, you know, manage deliveries at scale. But, like, it was expensive. It goes back to our philosophy of, like, hey, we don't wanna shell out a bunch of cash going red or have to raise capital just to hire somebody to build software.

Aaron Hoffman [00:44:10]:
That might work. Right? We have something that's producing cash right now. Let's prove that out first. And if it makes sense, right, then, you know, we'll we'll take this in house, which we did. It got to a point when I wanna say we got to maybe 8, 9,000,000 in revenue where it's like, listen. If we don't start, this would have been, like I said, you know, November 21. The tail end of COVID is like, if we don't start building software and adapting and building things that are curated specifically to our business and our use case and our what we're bringing to the market, like, we're gonna we're gonna cap here cap out here pretty soon. So we recognized that before it hit, and the software we have built over the last 2 years is one of a kind.

Aaron Hoffman [00:44:51]:
It's revolutionary. There's nothing like that. There's nothing like it that exists currently. So, yeah, I'm gonna just tip my hats to Matt Benzel, Matt Pavkove, and our entire development team that had they're they're ridiculously they're they're ridiculously smart. It's crazy,

John Zinno [00:45:07]:
like, what those guys can do. And they definitely took a, a gamble on us. That's for sure. So never forget that. And even if we weren't gonna go down building a software route, I mean, we were our whole business was tied through Zapier. So, I mean, how many Zaps were we doing a month? 5 to 5000000? I mean, 10,000,000.

Aaron Hoffman [00:45:25]:
That was ridiculous. That was it. Like yeah. I was the tech guy, and it was at everything was stitched together basically through Zapier or g scripts or whatever. It was just Yeah.

John Zinno [00:45:34]:
But, oh, it's a lot of lost. Time. Daylight savings time. Everything's broken. But now you gotta

Aaron Hoffman [00:45:40]:
read it. Yeah. You know?

John Zinno [00:45:41]:
It's like

Aaron Hoffman [00:45:41]:
Every delivery is on fire.

John Zinno [00:45:44]:
Yeah. It was expensive, and it didn't it wasn't that it wasn't stable, and we had no choice. It just get riskier and riskier and refunding orders. And yeah. So we were really forced. It was just it was difficult.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:57]:
So so what is this future of of catering and delivery that you guys are are forging here? And what is, you know, what is the role that Deliver That plays in that future? And and what is, you know, really, what is what is your vision for for this space going forward?

Aaron Hoffman [00:46:12]:
Yeah. So, like, you know, one of the reasons why we're we like we said earlier, got getting into the software is because, you know, something we've noticed is being, like, operators of a delivery business. It's like, you know, the software that's being built is not being built by operators, and it's clear as day. It's it's being developed by, you know, a theory or a thought around what to build, you know, sort of like a broad stroke around, hey, how do I service the most amount of people through this product, which is, you know, we've we've used other delivery manager products before. I'm not gonna name them, obviously. But, again, like, they've serviced companies like a Walmart, like a cannabis delivery company, an alcohol delivery company, but nothing was really ever built for catering. Catering is, I would call it, the most difficult delivery use case because, you know, you only you have such small windows to hit from a delivery perspective, and you're actually relying on restaurants to produce such a significant quantity of food all at the same time. It's very difficult to line up correctly.

Aaron Hoffman [00:47:15]:
Okay? So, you

John Zinno [00:47:17]:
know, you have to you have

Aaron Hoffman [00:47:18]:
to arrive at a specific time. You have to drop off at a specific time. If you drop off late, you're gonna ruin a sales meeting. You're never gonna get that customer error again. So talk about, you know, when we did on demand delivery, right, you could show up 20, 30 minutes late to the restaurant, show up an hour late to the customer, and the customer is not gonna be happy, but it's like they're still gonna eat their food. Right? Like, they're not gonna you know, they might not order as frequently as well, but they, you know, they will try you again. I mean, I think the proof there is DoorDash, Uber Eats right now. Like, I mean, I use DoorDash, and, like, there are there are times in foods late.

Aaron Hoffman [00:47:49]:
It's okay. It's not a big deal. I I understand. But when you're talking about a, hey. I'm selling to a group of medical, you know, doctors, and I'm I'm bringing a $1,000 order in. It's gotta look good, and it's gotta be it's gotta wow them, or else I'm not gonna get my $50,000, $100,000 sale here. That's life or death for these sales rep reps. So I wanted to say that because that's why we started building the software because no one was truly solving that problem of doing catering delivery or managing catering delivery.

Aaron Hoffman [00:48:19]:
And another big part why we're doing catering delivery management is because the restaurants themselves are treating catering a lot of them are treating catering like it's a burrito going to a college kid. They don't understand that the production, the staffing, the inventory check. So I would tell you what we're building right now is a full end to end solution for managing catering delivery. It's a full catering solution from the time a customer places an order to the time it, you know, it's dropped off and set up, and there's a picture of the delivery,

John Zinno [00:48:53]:
you

Aaron Hoffman [00:48:53]:
know, in the restaurant's back office. Like, we're we're building the first end to end solution for that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:59]:
What does success look like then in this context, and how have you, you know, both kinda thought about it? And, Aaron, I'll prompt, you know, if you go back to your desires to have been a doctor originally, you know, like, what what do you find is motivating you guys at this point?

Aaron Hoffman [00:49:14]:
I would say for me, it was always about money. Right? And then, you know, I'll be honest. Like, we've been making really good money for, you know, 33 years now, John. Right? I'd say, right, you know, we started profiting heavily in July of 2020. Okay? That was when we first really started turning. We haven't we have not had a month since we have not profited. And so, like, I always thought the end game for me, like, what what meant the most to me was getting, you know, my bank account getting bigger. And it's starting to get it got bigger, right, and I still wasn't fulfilled.

Aaron Hoffman [00:49:46]:
So I think, for me, what I have learned is that I really want to make an impact and bring value to society, and the money that comes along with

John Zinno [00:49:56]:
it is just

Aaron Hoffman [00:49:56]:
a byproduct. So for me, it's less about money now, and it's more about, I wanna create something cool that people find useful. It doesn't need to be, like, I don't need to cure cancer. I don't need to do something, like, that's gonna revolutionize mankind, but I wanna bring value to the market and whatever I do. So I think for me, that's what I look at as success. You know, the people, the the drivers that drive on our platform, are they happy? Are they getting well compensated? Do they like driving for us? You know, do our employees like waking up and, you know, are they energized coming into work? You know, do do the customers and restaurants, like, use our services?

John Zinno [00:50:30]:
Do they love it? Like, do

Aaron Hoffman [00:50:30]:
they have you know, do they wanna use it again and again and again? That's what keeps me going now.

John Zinno [00:50:36]:
I love that. Yeah. I think, when you say you wanna help people, it's kinda cliche, but if you break it down a little bit more, it makes a little more sense. You know, when or is it saying anything? Right? I was like, I wanted to make money and get stuff and be able to do things and not have to worry and god's eat, not have to, you know, worry about how much it costs and all those things. And then and not to say that we're absolutely wealthy, but, you know, now you don't have to worry about as much as what you used to worry about. Right? So, like, when you have money, it's different. But when you don't have money, that's the only thing that matters. But now it's, you know, I wanna spend time doing things that I enjoy, which is bring bring value to people, which ultimately is helping people.

John Zinno [00:51:12]:
Right. You know, when you see people in our business that are happy to come to work, like Aaron said, and we have this great culture and people actually care, It's so cool to see other people get excited about, you know, what we initially came up with. And now watching them put their own ideas and them build it themselves and put their name, you know, their stamp on our company, that's incredibly fulfilling. But now, I mean, at least for me, not being in the business every single day, you know, I've kinda taken that into the real estate world and helping other businesses here in Cleveland. And I'm still getting that same fulfillment where it's like, yeah, I wanna work with people that want to do something. Right? There's tons of people that say they wanna do things and but then they don't. You know, I always wanna be around people that actually do wanna do things and that wanna work hard and wanna build something and make an impact and ultimately help people. And that to me is what success is.

John Zinno [00:52:08]:
There's really no there's no, like, money or value or, you know, size of the business or, you know, I want a 100 buildings or it's just, you know, I wanna feel good about myself every day that I'm actually bringing value. That's I think that's what I got addicted to doing Deliver to App, and that's the thing that keeps me going now.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:29]:
Wow. Both well said. I appreciate those sentiments very much. Yeah. I think one of the the fun things about recounting your collective stories chronologically is, you know, you get to pick up on some of those mistakes made along the way at that moment in time and how you guys have both thought about them and and grown respectively as as leaders and and operators. I I am curious from, you know, this vantage point when you reflect on it, mistakes made that we haven't talked about and, you know, some of the the more powerful lessons learned along the way that, still inform and are, like, kinda, like, top of mind in your decision making processes.

John Zinno [00:53:11]:
Yeah. I think, getting emotional when things could go wrong or things would be too good or you know, so many times we talked about, oh, kill that meeting. We're gonna get that contract. And then if you said you got it, you never ended up getting it. So definitely getting too emotional and starting a business as a roller coaster, so acknowledging that. It's something Jim and I have always said to each other. We're like, when it's really bad, we're like, so the roller coaster is what we signed up for. So we would say that back and forth.

John Zinno [00:53:39]:
I think, you know, one of my big mistakes was probably, you know, biting off more than I could chew and, you know, not doing what I said I was gonna do. So being more intentional about, you know, what is actually possible and that I will actually get done. I think that definitely made it tougher. I just always said yes to everything because that's what I thought needed to be done, and then that ended up biting me in the ass and biting other employees and teammates in the ass. Yeah. I think those 2 are the main things I think about the most.

Aaron Hoffman [00:54:10]:
Well, I would say for me, there there's 2 things that come to mind. One is I could tell you how to lose a contract within 30 seconds if you ever wanted to come. Shit. I was, like, I was the king of was the king of that when we were first getting going. Yeah. I could tell you so many stories from telling, you know, I didn't realize that there were this this

John Zinno [00:54:27]:
just sounds so immature, but, like,

Aaron Hoffman [00:54:29]:
I didn't understand what payment terms. Like, there was, like, nets, you know, net 71430. So I thought when you issued an invoice, essentially, they need to be paid in full right then and there. And, man, I would go at restaurants, like, pay your bills. Like, we talk like, we like, you collected the money. We pay us. Like, so, like, there there's those those things, but just I would say, like, just being immature with my knowledge of how to operate a business or to be, like, you know, customer facing. And I've had to learn the hard way.

Aaron Hoffman [00:54:58]:
You know, I would say that that this would have been, you know, back in like 2017, 2018. So it's like, this is so long ago, but I would say one thing that stands out to me right now that I still struggle with today. Well, you know, that it's a problem that I think will never go away is understanding when you're getting into business, k, of any kind, it doesn't matter what business you're going into, the most difficult part of it is gonna be managing and leading people. Okay? And this is gonna be the most difficult thing you're ever gonna face ever with running an organization, especially one at scale. Until there is until there are robots everywhere doing our jobs for us,

John Zinno [00:55:36]:
which

Aaron Hoffman [00:55:36]:
I don't believe is gonna happen for a long time, you're gonna have to deal with the human element. So when I talk about mistakes I made with with like, in that aspect, you know, hiring people that shouldn't have been hired and letting them stick around for too long, you know, not developing people or being a good resource to them like they like they like they deserved. Letting people stick around too long were for you know, it's simple and simple as that. What about when you need to fill a role, like, in a company? You know, it the what we used to do, just put the the most senior person in that role, in that manager role, when that does not work at scale. Like so, like, I would say the biggest problems and biggest hurdles I would say is, like, realizing that when you're in business, you need to be especially when you're running a business, like, you need to be so in tune with your people, managing, developing, getting the right people on the right seat on the bus, getting the wrong people off the bus as fast as possible. That is the biggest thing, I would say.

John Zinno [00:56:34]:
Yeah. Yeah. The speed of those decisions is critical, for sure.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:39]:
How have you both managed the change in your relationship to the company that you've you've founded together? You know, as you both have very different roles, both as company has grown since when you started, where it is today, degrees of involvement. How have you just thought about the evolution of your relationship to your own company?

John Zinno [00:56:59]:
I would say last summer was probably the hardest summer with this business for sure. As I was starting to phase out of the day to day, I was probably the most unhappy I've been in ever. Just trying to figure out where I would bring value. That's definitely been challenging. But I think, you know, early on, we were really good with, letting other people make decisions. So I think getting used to that has helped the transition of, you know, owning every decision to owning some to not having to make virtually any besides, you know, super long term, you know, things that we're building. So I think it's I think we've done a really good job of managing our kind of expectations, but it's still tough when someone makes a wrong decision and you knew you had the answer. It's always gonna be difficult, but that's what a business is, unless you wanna unless you wanna do every single job.

Aaron Hoffman [00:57:52]:
We often get told, like, don't ever go on we were told constantly coming up when we were coming you know, putting this business together. It's like, I don't know if you can do business with friends. Like, you're not gonna be friends with them much longer. And I'll tell you right now that if John and I are the the like, we're the edge case then because our friendship has never ever been impacted at all between our business, whether it's been a decision we didn't disagree on or that that we disagreed on, which have been countless, by the way. Mhmm. We don't see eye

John Zinno [00:58:24]:
to eye on everything.

Aaron Hoffman [00:58:25]:
Hopefully not. You know, having to have tough conversations with each other. You know, me with, like, hey, Aaron. You're not the best CEO. You're a good strategist. You should be in a role that better suits you. And me to John, be like, hey, man.

John Zinno [00:58:36]:
Like, it's time to pass the baton

Aaron Hoffman [00:58:37]:
to somebody else, and you and you take a lesser role. Those are tough pills to swallow as an individual, but when your best friend John's my he's my best friend. Right? My best man at my wedding. So, like, I can't speak highly enough about him. And, like, I would say right now, like, our friendship has never once and to my knowledge, at least, has never once been impacted. We golf every single week together. We hang we're hanging out tonight. Like, it's definitely there is this business side to this.

Aaron Hoffman [00:59:05]:
Right? When it's like, hey. We put the business hat on. It's business. You can have tough conversation, but it has never once impacted our friendship ever.

John Zinno [00:59:14]:
For me, I always knew it wasn't in our best interest to, you know, just leave it at bad business. It's like, okay. Whatever decision we're making, it's for the better of both of us anyway. So, you know, I I was able to kinda conceptualize that. But, yeah, we've had, you know, crazy arguments and, you know, it helped them. It didn't I used to say it it was it worked because we never lived together. But then during COVID, I lived in his attic for, you know, 6 months, so that kinda changed. But, you know, us being able to, you know, go our separate ways for the night and then reconvene and get back after it, that's been that was always helpful.

John Zinno [00:59:52]:
But, yeah, I agree. I think, and

Aaron Hoffman [00:59:55]:
I think if, you know, if I

John Zinno [00:59:58]:
did this with someone who wasn't my friend, I don't know if it would if I would have enjoyed it as much because we can celebrate and enjoy and we can laugh about all the stupid stuff we had to do. And, you know, this driver, this restaurant, or what they would say to us and, you know, or the you'd go to, you know, Cleveland Clinic, and they would say, you know, drop it off here, but they wouldn't give you a suite number and there's no phone number. Like, all those things that you can't you just can't, I don't know, relive with someone who might not be, one of your best friends. It's it's been awesome. That's for sure. And it seems like we're just getting started too, which is just absolutely wild. Every new evolution of the business, it just it just keeps going. You know? Our roles are just changing.

Aaron Hoffman [01:00:41]:
That's crazy. I mean, you know, to to go from 0 to, you know, 25,000,000 in sales and, you know, I mean, that's just, that's some CA. There's publicly traded companies that don't do that much revenue.

John Zinno [01:00:53]:
It's like it's it's crazy to kind

Aaron Hoffman [01:00:55]:
of scale we're hitting now and and the fact that we're getting into software, which will, you know, I'll just take a a quick hot take here. It's like, yeah, I think we're gonna be a 100,000,000 top line business in 3 years.

John Zinno [01:01:06]:
I really do. I think if

Aaron Hoffman [01:01:07]:
you look at what we're building, the software and the addressable market, I mean, there's no reason why we can't get there. I mean, we're positioned well right now. And, you know, again, I that's not possible. In my opinion, it's not possible. John and I aren't ying ying yang in the last 11 years. If we're not on the road building this thing, building the culture, building the teams, right, having the tough discussions, Right? Having the no ego, like, you know, it might be tough for us to swallow when things have to change, but at the end of the day, like, it's the best thing for our company, like John said. So

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:44]:
Wow. Yeah. It's amazing. Very cool. What do you feel is is left unsaid? If anything, you know, particularly important parts, reflections that, you would like to bring up that that we haven't talked about?

Aaron Hoffman [01:01:59]:
Yeah. I mean, just this isn't like this has been so much, like, about my story. Right? Just, you know, we John and I are both, you know, in our separate lanes outside of Deliver That. Like, well, you know, he works in real estate and advises other companies in that area. I advise some startups and other types of businesses. And one thing that if if if you're thinking about starting a business of any kind, right, you know, you gotta realize that this success, these things you see on social media or, like, these success stories, 99.999% do not happen overnight. You might have one viral moment, like, where something happens or you develop, you know, a product that just gets crazy scale really quick. But I'm telling you, man, if you're gonna start a business of any kind, develop a product, like, you need to go in with that mentality.

Aaron Hoffman [01:02:43]:
It's gonna take you at minimum 10 years, minimum. Minimum. You're you're gonna have to and you're gonna have to work. You're not I I think Elon Musk says this. Like, no one accomplishes anything on a 40 hour workweek. I can't tell you how many weeks and the 100 hour weeks I have spent on this business. It's like we're constantly working, to be honest. So at least we were.

Aaron Hoffman [01:03:04]:
You know, we have to we have time to ourselves now, but, like, I mean, you have to it's such a commitment to run a company and to start a company. People understand that. That's number 1. Number 2, another critical air I see that young entrepreneurs, the ones that come out of college, typically. Right? They have a great idea, great phenomenal idea for a product or service. I'm advising one right now that is that's around a pickleball concept, but there's no thought whatsoever about how to generate money on your business. So if you're going to start a company, you can't just have the mindset of, like, I'm going to raise capital because I've got a cool idea. No.

Aaron Hoffman [01:03:40]:
No. No. No. No. No. You've gotta be able to show an investor or someone that you're gonna raise that money from that you you have to prove the concept that you can generate revenue. There is a market. There's a legitimate strategy, and there's a legitimate way to get scale.

Aaron Hoffman [01:03:54]:
I see too many founders that I that I advise that do not have a thorough idea on how to generate money with their idea. So those are the only 2 things that I wanted to point out. If you're listening and you're thinking about getting into a business, just think about making money and

John Zinno [01:04:08]:
think about you're gonna have to

Aaron Hoffman [01:04:09]:
invest a lot of time.

John Zinno [01:04:11]:
Yeah. I love that. Yeah. I mean, if you're a, you know, business owner or a founder or whatever and, you know, always willing to chat with anyone that actually wants to do anything. But I think, you know, with us, we just listened to our customers. And, you know, you might not be right, but the only way you fail is if you give up. Right? We could have just given up when people weren't ordering from us in Canton, Ohio because we had an app made that wasn't that great. And we could have said, you know, yeah, the on demand model just it's not gonna work.

John Zinno [01:04:45]:
Right? But what we did for those, you know, 3, 4 years before going into catering, we just learned how to interact with drivers and interact with restaurants and customers and learned customer service. We learned all this stuff. We learned all these things that we needed, told them we'd do, you know, what ended up working. So definitely be be willing to pivot and be flexible and roll with the punches, and customers will literally just tell you what they will pay what they will pay you for. You might you might state they want you they want this, but they're just gonna say, no. I actually want this. And sometimes you just you should listen. Uh-huh.

John Zinno [01:05:19]:
You don't need to listen to every single customer, but, you know, there are some that might just tell you exactly what to do if you're listening. Matthew and I have seen with some of the businesses that I've been working with is they're bringing a lot of value, but it might not be to the right customer just yet. It might not be to solve the right problem just yet, but they're close. You can feel it. But, yeah, I think, you only fail if you give up. And it took us 8 years to finally make, you know, something. So, yeah, I think when I I've heard that 10 year claim before, and I hated it, and then I thought about it. I was like, shit.

John Zinno [01:05:52]:
It's actually probably right. So that's the problem.

Jeffrey Stern [01:05:55]:
Yeah. Like, a lot of those things, those sayings, they are they are grounded and and someone's experience most of the time.

John Zinno [01:06:02]:
Yes. Like, I don't want it to take a decade, but anything good takes a while. It's like the time's gonna pass anyway, so might as well work on something to enjoy.

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:11]:
Well, that certainly resonates. Well, amazing. I'll, I'll close it out then with our our traditional closing question, which is for hidden gems in the in the area, something that other folks should know about that maybe they do not.

John Zinno [01:06:28]:
Well, you know, the Fairmount, you know, back patio is always Come on. Always a great

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:32]:
No. You're gonna take your size.

Aaron Hoffman [01:06:34]:
You're gonna take my spot. Really? Are you

John Zinno [01:06:36]:
kidding me? I knew you only I knew you only had one, so I might as well take

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:39]:
that. But,

John Zinno [01:06:43]:
the west side, Xinji, x I n j I j I.

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:46]:
Oh, yeah. The noodle the noodle shop.

John Zinno [01:06:48]:
Incredible. So good. I think a lot of you a lot of the other ones are pretty pretty well known, but, yeah, I love those guys. Two blocks from my place.

Aaron Hoffman [01:06:56]:
Unbelievable. You pick my spot.

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:02]:
That's hilarious. We'll give us something, Aaron.

Aaron Hoffman [01:07:07]:
Yeah. I'm gonna have to say that because I I got nothing else besides my basement,

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:12]:
right? Where I

Aaron Hoffman [01:07:13]:
where I where I'll where I'll drink or have a beer or something, or like, I'll go to the Fairmount, which is it's by case Western. They have an incredible happy hour. They have the bartender. The bartenders are great. The the music is phenomenal. They have 2 things on the menu, their happy hour menu that are phenomenal. It's, they have these pot stickers that are really good, and they have their buffalo tempura cauliflower. I think I'm promoting them right now.

Aaron Hoffman [01:07:38]:
But, I'm glad I got

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:39]:
that. Not spent a lot of time there.

Aaron Hoffman [01:07:43]:
No. Like, I think we were like, that's where we're going right after this right after this call. We're going to Fairmount. So, yeah, it's been, they have a great patio too.

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:52]:
Well, I'll give a I'll I'll prompt 1 because I'm just curious. What what would you call out in in Canton?

Aaron Hoffman [01:07:58]:
Oh, yes. Okay.

John Zinno [01:08:00]:
There's I

Aaron Hoffman [01:08:00]:
mean, there's if you've ever been to, like like, that like, Belden Village, there's some solid spots. There's so many chain restaurants.

John Zinno [01:08:08]:
You have to say it. Yeah. It's chain. Let me just chain the chain down there.

Aaron Hoffman [01:08:12]:
You got any you got any else thing to say? Yeah. Anything else? No. There's, I'll give everyone. I'll give everyone an in Canton Jam. Okay? Tim's Tavern. Alright. They got the best fish sandwich you'll ever have in your life. They got cold beers.

Aaron Hoffman [01:08:27]:
There you go. There you go. It's phenomenal. And there's there's a place I'm there's a bar in North Tins, Puckers. That's pretty pretty darn good as well.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:37]:
Perfect. Well, we we could we could wrap it there. I, I really appreciate both of you coming on to share your story and and reflections. Really fun to to hear.

John Zinno [01:08:49]:
Likewise. Thank you so much. This is awesome.

Aaron Hoffman [01:08:51]:
Yeah, Jeffrey. Appreciate it, Matt. Thank you.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:53]:
Absolutely. If, folks had anything they wanted to follow-up about, where would be the best place for them to do so?

John Zinno [01:09:00]:
For me, LinkedIn.

Jeffrey Stern [01:09:01]:
For sure. LinkedIn?

Aaron Hoffman [01:09:03]:
Yeah. LinkedIn. Yeah. I'm very happy about LinkedIn. Perfect.

Jeffrey Stern [01:09:07]:
Well, yeah. John and Aaron, thank you.

Jeffrey Stern [01:09:09]:
Thank you again. Thank you, Jeffrey. Thanks.

John Zinno [01:09:12]:
Talk to you soon.

Jeffrey Stern [01:09:14]:
That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show. So if you have any feedback, please send over an email to jeffrey@layoftheland.fm, or find us on Twitter at podlayoftheland or @sternjefe, j e f e. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land.