Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jeffrey Roberts. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Jeffrey, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Crazy stuff happening is almost as certain as death and taxes – it’s technically “unexpected” but something unexpected happening is to be expected and so can you share a crazy story with our readers

In 2021, my Uncle, wife and I decided to form a restaurant group ahead of purchasing the family restaurant business from my parents, Robar Restaurant Group LLC. Robar is a combination of our last names, Roberts and Barton. Darryl, Kasey and I had been running the business for sometime together. We took control of the business with one small whole in the wall location and one full size, full service location. We worked hard and decided to purchase another restaurant, close them down and remodel the interior. After remodeling, we moved the small whole in the wall location to a great big full service location equipped with a full bar/lounge area, a much needed upgrade. We then moved on to location number three, a midsize full service location that is set up to encourage more to-go orders. After finishing that and opening, we finally finalized the purchase of the restaurants from our family in June of 2023. It was approximately 14 months later when tragedy hit.

In the beginning, it was easy to manage the company with only approximately 35 employees and now, after scaling to three locations and owning them all, we struggled to keep a handle on things. Now, with around 80 employees, we had to figure out a completely new model of running the business. Working in the business was no longer working out, we had to figure out how to work on the business and let our employees work in the business. We had way to much money coming in and going out to stand in a kitchen making food all day. Of course, there are a lot of cons we experienced when stepping away and focusing on the business end of the business.

As we were stumbling our way trying to figure out whose who and what’s what, one thing was clear, I am the hands on operations guy. Kasey is great at organization and took over the role of catering and events director, and Darryl, from his HR days at CNN, took over our much needed HR roll. He undertook a major aspect of our business dealing with all the employee onboarding, payroll, taxes, P&L’s and more. It was a daunting task that was starting to finally get somewhat under control until the totally tragic and unexpected happened. Just typing about it, seems like it could only be a story for a movie, or someone else, anything but us!

Darryl was out walking his neighborhood with his amazing partner Wendy, getting in some good relaxing exercise. As they were walking across the street in a cross walk in front of a school, an impaired driver who was fleeing an accident he just caused came around the corner at such a high rate of speed, Darryl, who was one step in front of Wendy, had no time to react. Darryl was killed inches in front of Wendy who was fortunate to be one step behind.

Darryl is gone and we had to figure out how to mourn the loss of a family member and continue on with our business. Kasey and I had no understanding of the major workload Darryl had in managing the business aspect of our 3+ million dollar revenue generating businesses and 80+ employee payroll. To say we struggled, is to say the least. We took a huge hit and were close to breaking. We pushed on.

Nearly 8 months later, putting the pieces together one by one, healing both within our family and our business, we are finally getting to the point where things are manageable. We have an amazing team of employees, family and customer base that rallied behind us, stepped up and pushed us through a very rough time.

It was time to make some changes, dig in and figure things out to keep Darryl alive in our hearts and our business. We decided we had to keep pushing in honor of Darryl and continue to grow, Darryl would have wanted that. We did just that.

I am so very blessed to say that we have finally got a handle on all the employees, payroll, taxes and financials and just entered into a partnership with Clemson athletics and Aramark to be an official sponsor of the Clemson Tigers football, baseball, basketball and gymnastics team. We will also be serving pizza slices at all the events starting this 2025 season. A major task to undertake which we are proud and excited to be a part of, but more importantly, Darryl would have been proud of. We know he’s smiling about this deal as much as we are!

We are truly grateful to all of our employees who stepped up to help us get where we are. We are also incredibly grateful for our amazing community who rallied around us in Clemson, Seneca and the Town of Central. A special and heartfelt thank you goes out to them from Kasey and myself!

Jeffrey, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My wife Kasey and I were living in Arizona when covid hit. I was a Police Officer for the city of Phoenix and Kasey had just retired as a school teacher specialized in special education and went to work as a youth pastor at the church we helped start up.

After covid hit, my parents who owned one small pizzeria and one large full service pizzeria/italian restaurant reached out to me and expressed their interest in retiring. That’s when the conversation of me taking an early retirement from the police department came up. Kasey and I decided to move our family from Arizona to South Carolina and join my Uncle Darryl in purchasing the family business.

We arrived in May of 2020 and went straight to work learning, growing, building and scaling.

Through the midst of tragedy and, I’ll admit, nativity, we met a lot of obstacles. One thing we knew though, we were all-in and had to push through the adversity. One major thing we focused on was hiring and molding our employees into individual leaders who were self motivated and had pride and buy-in with our vision for the business. We were not prepared to learn just how important that would turn out to be in the wake of our tragedy. Another focal point for us was to build relationships with not just our patrons but city officials and other local businesses and community members. We did this by being relevant in our community through community events, charitable events, outreach and marketing. This was another thing we wouldn’t realize was so important until tragedy hit! After our tragic family and business event, it was amazing to see the community and our employees get behind us.

Our motto is simple, provide an excellent product with excellent service. That entailed us getting involved in the community and being supported by employees who truly cared for us and the business.

We lost our Uncle and business partner and during our mourning, our employees carried us along with our amazing community members, friends and family and helped us continue to deliver an excellent product with excellent service. We learned that business is about relationships.

Joe’s NY Pizza now has three full-service locations, one in Clemson, one in Seneca and one in the Town of Central. Joe’s is now entering into a partnership with Clemson athletics to be an official sponsor of the Clemson Tigers along with serving pizza slices in the stadiums at the games.

We are truly blessed and excited about the future!

Any advice for managing a team?

One specific thing I teach all of my management is to train your replacement so they can move up and grow with the company. If they train the employees to be as good as they are, their job will be easier and give the employee an opportunity to move up in the ranks when we call on the manager to grow on in the company and take on higher rolls. Another point of managing we hit hard is to inspect what you expect. You can’t assume everyone is doing their job unless you inspect the work they are doing. Be active and present. No one yells at anyone and everyone gets respect. If someone needs to be yelled at, then odds are they are either not managing properly or that employee is not a good fit for our company. Praise in public, correct in private helps with morale. Start off a correction with a compliment or a praise about what that person is doing well. My managers are trained to recognize good work and verbalize that to the employee.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

After covid decimated this country and hit small business owners hard, we were no exception. Some of my strategies during that time was to advertise more. Get our name in the community. While most other business were holding back and worried about what was coming, the cost of advertising got less because no one was doing it. I capitalized on that. I also had a white van we used for catering. I got the van wrapped with our logo and sold some advertising space on it to help afford the wrap. I then would drive it into the communities slowly all around homes and businesses for brand recognition. It was a mobile billboard, I would just drive and drive around the same area that had a lot of eyes around. Another thing I did was randomly picked bigger businesses who had a bigger social media footprint and told them they one a free lunch for all the employees. All they had to do was shout us out on their social media account, that worked well.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.joesnypizzaupstate.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joethepizzaman

Image Credits

The picture with the man wearing glasses is Darryl.