Making dough as an award-winning pizza chef

My podcast guest Johnny Di Francesco and I found out we had something in common during our chat: we both started a degree in electronic engineering at La Trobe University but we both dropped out.  

For Johnny, world champion pizza-maker, it took him just one day to realise uni life wasn’t for him (a lesson I took six months to learn). His mum asked him why he wasn’t in class and he said, ‘I don't want to do this. I want to open up a restaurant.’

“And she looked at me and said, ‘you're crazy. Go back to school.’ And I said, ‘I'm not going back to school.’ You need to understand whether you're doing something because you think you want to do it or [whether you] really have passion for [it]. It wasn't a passion for me,” says Johnny.

Instead, he took his savings from seven years of working in restaurants and, at 19, bought his first venue.

Third time ‘lucky’

He was just about to open his first place when a lady came by to say welcome to the neighbourhood. “And she says, ‘well, just remember my words, it'll take you 10 years to make money.’ Let me tell you, it took 10 years,” Johnny confirms.

The first business lasted nine months and he sold it for a loss. The second business lasted 10 months and he sold it for a small profit. Then he found a man who’d been running a business for more than 30 years who wanted to retire. He saw potential in it but didn’t quite have the finances, so struck a deal: Johnny agreed to the first price the man named, but organised to take it over the next day and pay him in six months.

“Probably a week before the six months, I cut him a cheque. I didn't have the money before, I made the money from that place. I did 10 times the turnover that it was doing,” he says. “It's not because I'm a genius or because I knew the business better – he knew the business better than I did. It’s because fresh eyes see different opportunities.”

But Johnny says it was the first two failed businesses that made the third one successful. “For me, those 18 months that I had those two businesses was my apprenticeship in the business world. I made all the mistakes that I could, but then it took literally 10 years to recover the losses that I did,” he explains.

Flash forward a few years and he had six pizza parlours around Melbourne, but what he really wanted was a restaurant. He sold the businesses and opened 400 Gradi, which now has 13 venues around the world.

The secret ingredient? Practice. “When people say it takes 10,000 hours for an athlete to become a professional, that rule is anything you want to implement. You want to be a good business person? You gotta to put 10,000 hard hours in,” he says.

It wasn’t just that. Johnny also saw what could happen if he didn’t make it, which served as motivation.

“My wife and I, we literally used to count the 10-cent pieces that we were getting from our float to buy my daughter milk. I had a business that was failing, but I had to feed my daughter… I did what I had to do to never be that poor again.”

Today, he sees his journey as passion plus practice leading to profit. “Don't get into business for the sake of wanting to make money. The money will come if you do the right things, so whatever industry you love, you’ve got to have passion for it,” he advises. “Don't let anyone tell you it can't be done. People tell you it can’t be done because they don't want to see you succeed."

The true test is what you are prepared to sacrifice to see your dream achieved. “Are you really willing to go through the heartache. the headache, the mistakes, the failures, and get out on the other side to become successful?” he asks.

And the weird thing is, early success can actually be a bad thing. Johnny credits his failures with giving him the resilience to succeed. “I believe if you have a successful career from the first day and then in your journey you hit a brick wall, you'll never recover, whereas if you have problems from day one, what that is teaching you is how to overcome all these issues at a small level. Not being successful from day one is probably the best thing.”

Find out how my special guest Johnny Di Francesco became a world champion pizza-maker, why he loves to teach and when he told himself he’d never be ordinary in Episode 15 of the From Thousands to Millions podcast.

Listen via Apple https://apple.co/3aPdB6z / Spotify https://spoti.fi/2RemJcX and all great podcast apps.