Hengam Stanfield and her husband purchased a failing restaurant and turned it into the number one pizza place in San Antonio. Today, Matengas Pizzeria serves up pies at seven locations. So how did two career engineers with zero food service experience transform a small restaurant that was buried in debt into the most popular and fastest growing pizza place in the region?
Hengam dropped by to tell Claudia Saric and Spencer Michiel all about it on our most recent episode of So You Want To Run a Restaurant.
Engineering a New Path
Of the many owners and operators we’ve been lucky enough to chat with, Hengam’s path into restaurant ownership is certainly among the most unique. She explained that she and her husband were both engineers for many years before they decided on a major career move.
“My father-in-law jokes about it,” Hengam mused. “Most folks work at a restaurant, and then they get their degree. But we got our degrees, and then we went into restaurants!”
So why the dramatic lane change? Hengam explained that she and her husband were driven by a passion for people. Her husband worked as a civil engineer in a small New Mexico town and Hengam worked at a nearby college.
“At the time,” said Hengam, “we led a college ministry where we just had college students over at the house a lot. We loved feeding people. We realized we just love hospitality. There's something very special about bringing people together over food.”
Learning On the Job
Of course, feeding people in your home is one thing. Investing in a food-based business is another thing altogether.
“We had no experience whatsoever,” said Hengam, “And we thought, ‘How difficult can it be? It’s not going to be more difficult than facing differential equations. We'll figure it out.’”
Hengam reflected that “figuring it out” proved both costly and necessary. She and her husband absorbed a lot of hard lessons in those early years.
“In our industry, we do make a lot of money, but we also end up spending a majority of it,” said Hengam. “We bought our first store 11 years ago and we still have it. At that time, it was about $200,000 per year below break-even. So we had to pay for our education, and we continue to do so and to learn on this journey.”
Five Takeaways From Our Chat With Hengam
That journey has taken Matengas to the top spot on San Antonio’s ranking of best pizza shops for three straight years. Today, Hengam and her husband run a pretty big operation, both at work and at home.
“We have seven restaurants,” said Hengam. “The size of our team fluctuates here and there, but it’s about 140 people. And we have four children, so it's a full life, and we love it this way.”
So how exactly did Hengam and her husband build this very full life?
1. Creating Something From Nothing
In those first few years, when Matengas was operating out of a single location and still struggling to break even, Hengam was fixated on sales. And she did everything imaginable to make those sales happen. She now advises other startup restaurants, “You have to get out of the restaurant and go find customers.”
Hengam calls obscurity “the enemy of small business,” and observed, “You can be selling meatballs made out of gold for $1, but if no one knows that you're there, it doesn't matter what promotions you come up with.”
So Hengam dedicated every spare moment to improving her restaurant’s visibility. And she was creative about it too. Hengam told us, “We did parades. We would go to schools. I would even wear a pizza costume outside the store to get exposure.”
2. Choosing Your Battles
As the sales started to grow, Hengam and her husband turned their attention to operational matters. This, says Hengam, is where their shared engineering background really came into play. As engineers, she explained, “we look for problems and we try to solve them systematically.”
In fact, she and her husband would go on what you might describe as an annual business retreat with the exact aim of finding and prioritizing pain points. Hengam told us, “We’ll go to a hotel for two days at the end of the year. We write our frustration list. And we isolate our top three frustrations that either take most of our time, energy, or cost.”
The goal, Hengam explained, is to avoid spending time on “solving unprofitable problems.” She warned that a fledgling business could waste a lot of valuable resources solving problems with limited impact. She advised “it's important to really allocate your time and focus on solving the right problems in your business. That has been our obsession for the last decade, and I think that has led to a lot of our success.”
3. Putting Systems In Place
Once you’ve identified your biggest problems, you need to approach them with structured solutions. Once again, Hengam and her husband applied their engineering experience to the challenges of running a restaurant. It proved a perfect fit, especially as they expanded into a multi-location operation.
“You need management systems. You need auditing to make sure people are following the systems; auditing to make sure people are actually following the dough recipe,” said Hengam. “That’s why we have a person that goes to every restaurant once a week and checks a series of things, and it's always the same things.”
Those things include everything from food safety procedures to dress code. This attention to detail and consistency is vital, Hengam told us, “Because If you do not have an accountability system in place, and you just talk about systems and checklists without the accountability, it'll go nowhere.”
4. Doing It by the Book
If you expect that level of accountability from your people, Hengam explained, you have to provide them with clear direction and clear expectations. That’s why Matengas does everything by the book…quite literally. Every member of the team works from an extensive ops handbook, one that is updated and reprinted once a month.
Hengam told us that the handbook “has been very helpful, because you need to make sure whatever you expect of your management team, it is clear.”
“The reason this relationship with accountability works is because we're open about it upfront,” Hengam explained. “We train according to it. We walk people through the process step by step. So expectation is managed from the very beginning.”
5. Knowing When to Cut Your Losses
Clearly, Matengas offers a great model for scalability. The analytical approach and management systems that Hengam and her husband have put in place are a perfect recipe for expansion into multiple locations. But there is another side to the coin that may be just as important. Today, Matengas may have seven locations, but at one time, the chain included nine stores.
“We closed two, so we're at seven,” said Hengam. “And I'm happy to talk about that and about normalizing some of that.”
In fact, Hengam explained, sometimes scaling back is simply a part of the growing experience. As she told us, “if something is not working, it's just better to cut it off. And there's no shame in that either.”
Creating Growth in Your Own Restaurant
Hengam’s story is a perfect demonstration of just how important it is to have systems in place for achieving efficiency and accountability. Of course, we can’t all be engineers. Fortunately, this is where the technology comes into play. There are all kinds of advanced solutions designed to help you put those systems in place without having an advanced degree in the hard sciences.
Not sure where to start? Reach out for a free, personalized consultation with one of our in-house restaurant tech experts and we’ll figure it out together.
