GANABANChelsea, Victoria · c. 2000–2001
The Pizza Shop
Years before carsales.com.au or any corporate job, four of us bought a pizza shop. It lasted eight months, and I learned more from losing it than I could have from a decade of winning.
From delivery driver to co-owner
I was still university-age when I started delivering pizzas around Chelsea, in Melbourne's south-east. It was a normal, unglamorous student job, until it wasn't. I moved from delivery driving into the kitchen, learned to make the pizzas myself, and got close enough to the business to see an opportunity when the chance came up to buy in. My girlfriend at the time's family had come into some money and wanted to invest it, and that's what financed my share. I went from driver to one of four co-owners of the shop.
Making it ours
Once we owned it, we set about making it feel like ours rather than something we'd simply inherited. My cousin, a graphic designer, helped us rebrand it with a new name and a new look. We added my mum's Filipino spaghetti to the menu, which was as much a personal touch as it was a point of difference from every other pizza shop on the strip. And in 2001, well before "livestreaming" was a word anyone used casually, we built a website with a pizza-cam: a live feed of the kitchen making your order, with the web address printed on our delivery flyers so customers could watch their pizza being made in real time.
Why it closed
None of that novelty solved the actual problem. We closed the shop after about eight or nine months. The business was bringing in revenue, but revenue isn't profit, and profit split four ways isn't much of a wage, especially once you account for the capital four people had put in just to get the doors open. It's a distinction that's easy to say and much harder to feel until you're the one trying to live off it. That gap between revenue, profit and capital is the lesson I actually took away, and it's shaped how I've thought about every business I've been part of since.
At a glance
- Location
- Chelsea, Victoria
- Timeline
- c. 2000–2001, open roughly eight to nine months
- My path
- Pizza delivery driver → kitchen/pizza-maker → co-owner, one of four
- Financing
- Personal investment, via my then-girlfriend's family
- Signature addition
- My mum's Filipino spaghetti, added to the menu
- Standout idea
- A "pizza-cam" website livestreaming the kitchen, printed on our delivery flyers, in 2001
- Outcome
- Closed after eight to nine months
- The lesson
- Revenue, profit and capital are three different numbers, and the gap between them is what actually decides whether a small business survives
Why it's the first chapter
Everything that came after (carsales.com.au, sports and entertainment media, running the Ladies Gridiron League, my work today at Entertainment Management Services) happened after this. It's the reason I'm not precious about the idea of "just" being a delivery driver or "just" working in a kitchen; that's exactly where this one started. It's also the opening chapter in What Work Taught Me, a series about what each of my jobs actually taught me, for better or worse.