Project Equity interviews Ren, an employee-owner at A Slice of New York

and now i'm going to invite my friend ren boheren to join me on the screen um i've had the pleasure of working with ren for about four years uh we helped his company a slice of new york transition to become a worker cooperative in 2017. but it's a time where we all have to learn to adapt so even before shelter in place had gone through uh my colleagues kurt joseph and i all proactively met like a band to make a decision to prepare for a shutdown so once the shutdown actually hit the key moves that we made were to stop selling slices to reconfigure the layouts of our shops as well as stop dining the main goal of this was to keep everyone safe now this was a definite hit in our profit and loss statements and to add to damage we lost our lunch rush due to shelter in place and had to eliminate items such as uh salads and tap the beer from our sunnyvale shop but what we found was that people were ordering anywhere between two to four whole pizzas at a time between four to nine o'clock with at least four to five lines and hold at the same time would wait times up to almost two hours so we had to collectively rewire the way both our shops functioned in terms to find a recipe for success and a streamlined process and one of the coolest things that actually happened was one of our owners as well as our non-owners collaborated together and proposed that we should make a personal tenants pizza that could be taken out fresh or taken home frozen so that we could minimize that loss between not being able to sling slices out to our actual guests wow and your name is a slice of new york and i think the tagline is new york pizza in the bay area so i know that slices are a big deal for you guys so that really shows a significant adjustment and a lot of innovation it really does and you know coming back to the prof and loss statement you know we were learning a lot through our uh data analysis angela is our cfo and she was collaborating with us to help us take a look at the key performance indicators kpis that were generating profits for us so anywhere between how many pizzas we were actually selling what kind were they uh what should we be prepping on and focusing on in order to have a more streamlined refined process and to actually prepare for one big massive dinner rush rather than uh just waiting for the time to pass by we had to reallocate all of our hours what i think that was one of the coolest moves we're trying to provide in terms of live data analytics for both shops is to get the key data points that our crew would like to know by simply using an ipad or a tablet in order to understand what is making us profitable and um you know what we found is when people are seeing what we're losing in profit they want to find out how we can drive the profit back up by actually seeing you know where where are we actually making the sales at and where can we compensate wow yeah that's really i think one of the greatest promises of employee ownership is that it engages everybody across the company and it makes everyone more successful but then we had another dialogue after that to really see if we wanted the profits to go back into our pockets personally or if people felt that the money should go back into the business and that dialogue ended up being emotional and heartfelt because everybody wanted the profits to go back into the business because that's what was keeping them afloat yeah and you you have been a quite profitable company overall and i i know that you and and kirk your general manager and the original owner of the company have shared that in 2018 and 2019 your first two years after being employee owned you distributed something like three hundred thousand dollars each year in profit yeah which is quite remarkable you know a company of 30 some employees that's that's really really meaningful um so we'd just love to recognize that and say that we're all looking forward to the day when you guys will be doing that again and i'm glad that that you know former strong state has helped you get through helping you get through this crisis um but i'd love to just end by asking you in your own words what has being an employee owner meant to you taking a lot of thought into this during such a rough time i think what it means to me is that becoming an owner has allowed me to have purposeful adapted transformative growth and enrichment which i'm truly thankful for because through all these challenges my team and i can actually collaborate and support each other and all the issues that we're going through in order to build a community enriches each other for the long run and that i feel is one of the truest and biggest blessings to be able to work together and not butt heads and to actually find common ground to help each other succeed