The part of my success story I don’t put on LinkedIn

The trouble is, the highlights are never the whole story. It’s a bit like holiday photos: everyone shares the picture on the beach, and nobody shares the one of the family stuck in an airport queue at four in the morning.

I didn’t start out planning to build a restaurant franchise. I’ve been a driving instructor and, before that, a motorcycle instructor. I spent eight years selling photocopiers for Rank Xerox, and I ran my own Apple dealership after that. Then came the nightclubs – three of them at one point, over the best part of fifteen years, and an enormous amount of fun. And then one of them started to fail.

The sensible thing, the thing most people would have done, was to hand back the keys and put it down to experience. I’m too stubborn for that, so instead I looked at this struggling club in Douglas and thought: what if one floor of it became a restaurant? I’d never run a restaurant in my life, and I had little more than a simple, quality, rustic Italian menu to go on, but it caught on, and it kept catching on, until within a few years we’d outgrown the place entirely and moved to bigger premises on North Quay – right as Covid struck, with no delivery, no takeaway, and the gas and power not even commissioned yet.

That’s the reality of running a business. None of that usually makes the highlight reel, but all of it is where Just Pizza & Pasta actually comes from. How did I get through it? The same way I get through most things: I keep my eyes on the end result, because obstacles are there to be overcome, and the right attitude makes a far bigger difference than most people realise.

People assume it was the money that kept me going. It wasn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, the money matters, and Just Pizza & Pasta does very well these days – in fact, we’ve just had our busiest summer ever with figures up 20% on last year. However, if a decent income had been the only goal, I’d have spared myself an enormous amount of grief and simply gone to work for someone else. There were stretches where I genuinely wondered whether to jack it in, and more than one point where things got so tight I couldn’t see how much longer we’d last.

What kept me in it was wanting something of my own, something that belonged to me and to this town, that meant something and felt worth the effort, and that’s exactly what it became. These days the restaurant isn’t just a business I run, it’s a place people choose to spend their evenings: families, groups of friends, the lot. Some of the children who first came in with their parents are grown up now and walking back through the door as adults. You can’t put a figure on that, and it matters to me every bit as much as the profit does.

That’s the part I hadn’t really appreciated when I started, and it’s the part I most wanted to capture when we turned Just Pizza & Pasta into a franchise. Running a restaurant like this one is a genuinely good life, not only a good living.

Here’s the thing, though: someone has already made the hard mistakes for you.

That someone is me. Everything I got wrong, I eventually learned how to get right, and then I wrote it all down. The recipes, the systems, the staffing, the numbers – every hard lesson from those years is now documented and built into the model, so that when you open a Just Pizza & Pasta of your own, you don’t start where I started. You start on the far side of all that trial and error, with the map already drawn.

That isn’t to say it suddenly becomes easy, because it doesn’t. It’s still a business, and it still needs someone willing to put the work in. What changes is that you’re not staring at a blank page trying to work everything out for yourself.

That, to my mind, is the real value of franchising. You still get the responsibility and the reward of building something that’s properly your own: the satisfaction of a busy restaurant, of customers who come back, of a team doing a great job and numbers that stack up. You just don’t have to learn every lesson the expensive way first, or live through the part that nearly broke me, because I’ve already done that on your behalf.

I’ll be straight with you, though: this isn’t for everyone, and I’d rather say so than sell you a fantasy. There will be difficult days and things that go wrong, the same as in any business. The difference is that you won’t be facing them alone, or working out every answer from scratch.

So, if the “what-ifs” have been holding you back, maybe that’s rather the point.

The what-ifs are exactly what a proven model exists to answer. What if it actually works? What if you could build something that’s genuinely yours, the kind of business that gives you a good living and a good life both? Those are the questions I’d like you to come and explore for yourself.

Get in touch by emailing me at mitch@justpizzaandpasta.com or WhatsApp me on 07973 493787.