We caught up with the brilliant and insightful John Hart a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, John thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Well it all started when I was out to the gun range and I kept looking at this old guy who was also shooting and he kept looking back at me and finally he goes what’s wrong and I said I think I know you but I’m not sure, and he turned around and he had a Red Angel hat on and I said Red is that you and he said yeah he took his hat off he said I used to have really long red hair now it’s all gone I go well this is funny I said why don’t you bring a pizza shop back to Hicksville he said John we’re tired why don’t you do it I said I don’t know anything about making pizzas and he goes I’ll teach you so that’s kind of how Red Angel in Hicksville started back up again. I knew Red as he stopped in once in a while at a place I worked about once a week when he was out checking on his pizza places so that’s how I knew him from years gone by.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Where do I begin Covid’s been a very interesting scenario to deal with running a business, we did a lots and lots of extra cleaning, paid people extra amounts of money to come to work, we had a hard time getting food sometimes we actually bought a new outdoor freezer so that we could do power buys so we wouldn’t run out of stuff as quick because sometimes the delays were weeks and sometimes not months before you could get certain things I don’t think we ran out of products very often and if we did it wasn’t for very long by doing what we did, how do I say this preparing to be able to not get stuff. But we do carry out very well so it worked out for the best I guess we did the best we could with what we had and I think we make a very good product. Our pizza is a little different than most we make our own dough we make our own sauce and we slice our mozzarella cheese from blocks so when we make a pizza it’s covered with cheese on top of slices all the toppings are underneath and it’s a very unique sourdough type dough and very very good we’re told!

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Red Angel pizza started in 1974 by two guys named Jim Allen (his nickname was Red because he had very long red hair) second person his name was Angel then they put the two together and they called it red Angel pizza and it’s been around since 1974 and and still going strong today. We have just continued the brand reputation and just exactly how they taught us to do it and it’s still prosperous today by following what they taught us in a few short weeks how this Pizza needs to be made. We have also added many many things to our menu that most people don’t have so even people in a small town like ours can order different things for each person in the family which I believe today’s makes us very diverse helps a survive in this weird economy today.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

I worked in a brass and steel mills for 43 years that allowed me to pretty much be self-sufficient as far as capital we didn’t have to borrow much money to get started so we were fortunate you know, we had to borrow a little bit at the bank to buy some certain equipment because some of it’s pretty expensive and we also bought the building we’re in which I had to do a second mortgage on my house to buy the building but realizing not a big risk because I would own the building I could always sell it if things didn’t work out, also because I think renting a building is dumb just because you’re you’re giving money to someone else when if you’re gonna Vienna building you should just buy it pay the the the mortgage and then at the end it’s yours instead of just giving it to somebody else but that’s just my opinion!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://redangelonline.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/redangelhicksville/