Pizza Today - December 2020 - 12

M I K E 'S M O N T H LY T I P

MIKE BAUSCH

fection, the pain of the process leads to
no process at all, and no progress.
Whatever crazy harebrained, off-kilter
idea you have, it's time to get it out of
your head and put it into practice. Turn
it from a dream into a goal, because a
goal has a definable path to success. A
dream stays as only that until it becomes
a goal. Dreams live in your brain, not in
your hand - because a dream alone isn't
reality.
If you still have yet to open your
second store or are just reading this
magazine as you are planning out how
you'll one day open your first pizzeria,
just go out and get it wrong already. It's
not going to be perfect. That's okay.
Prepare financially for pitfalls, but your
time is precious and is worth more than
money. Time wasted can't come back;
money can. Perfection is super overrated,
but progress and incremental gains are
heavily undervalued because they don't
give you an immediate joy reaction. Go
off and get it wrong. Try new menu ideas,
jump into a new social media approach,
take your alcohol menu in a completely
thinking and just test it. They made a
different direction. Yes, you will screw
U-turn and went back into the town
up. It's an absolute fact that this will not
of Santa Cruz, where they lived. They
go perfectly, but through that, and only
bought an envelope and a DVD and
through that, you will progress to places
went to the Santa Cruz post office to
you would have never reached otherwise.
send it in the mail to their own adIf you're comfortable now, that's great;
dress. When the DVD arrived the next know your comfort gives you no progress.
day unscathed, they realized they had
Every time you get comfortable, you
something.
become stagnant. Every time we have
The lesson I take from this is theory steered off and tried something wildly
should be a short-term relationship.
different, that is when we got to someIt should be followed up by action
thing better than anything we could have
with new theories and new revisions.
ever dreamed otherwise. We've had more
You just need to go out and do it. If it
failures than hits, but the hits have always
sucks, fix it. If you fix it somewhat, but more than made up for the failures.
it still needs work, then it's progressing.
Netflix would reinvent their brand and
So often, a great idea remains just that, fail countless times along the way. But by
an idea. Practically nothing comes out always betting on themselves, they surfully formed. Everything needs devel- passed Blockbuster, paid cable and now
opment, but the fear of having imper- the movie studios. â

Just Get It Wrong Already

etflix was started by Marc
Randolph and Reed Hastings while they were in
job limbo. Not too dissimilar from a
COVID limbo of wondering where
life would land. They worked for a
company that got acquired, and they
were getting paid to go to work and do
nothing.
They talked about their harebrained
idea during each morning drive. The
crazy dream of sending DVDs in the
mail for rent ... and would it even
work? They kept arguing and theorizing if it were feasible. Would the
DVDs scratch, break, and would the
post office send it? What other things
might not work?
After going round and round talking
about it, it dawned on them to stop

MIKE BAUSCH is the owner of Andolini's Pizzeria in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Instagram: @andopizza
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Pizza Today - December 2020

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