Creating & maintaining positive company culture at scale.
An interview with James Elliot, co-founder of Pizza Pilgrims.
“Everyone enjoys working for a company that’s stupid enough to build a pizza vespa and drive it around Naples for 10 days.”
When Pizza Pilgrims celebrated 10 years this past August, they did so by designing the world’s smallest pizzeria – on a vespa. Equipped with a sidecar kitted out with a Gozney oven, a countertop that flips over for pizza-making at a moment’s notice and a parasol to shield them from the blazing Italian sun, the team took the vespa to Naples for 10 days, driving around the pizza mecca collecting recipe inspiration and stories to bring home to London in preparation for the next ten years in the brand’s journey.
It takes a lot of guts to bring Neapolitan pizza back to the Neapolitans – the kind of guts that has driven their meteoric rise over the last decade. They now have 24 sites across London and even more in the pipeline, employing around 500 team members. Company growth can all too often mean a distancing from the founding values, a widening gap between the staff on the ground and upper level management and the resulting breakdown in communication and staff wellbeing. But this is a business which throws that trope out of the window – although it has taken some determination to get there.
“When I look at anyone in our space who started in street food, I think they always tend to have a pretty good, intuitive company culture, because that’s just what the movement was based off of”.
Brothers James and Thom started Pizza Pilgrims in an Ape van, pioneers of the developing street food movement of the time. As the only employees of the company they were keen to maintain a positive company culture because, well, they just wanted to enjoy their work. The team eventually grew but maintaining work-life balance and staff happiness remained essential, “because if people weren’t having a good time making pizza at Street Feast in 2012, they just wouldn’t turn up.”
Although coming from advertising and TV backgrounds, the brothers grew up in a pub and eventually wanted to go back to their roots. The pizza van evolved into their first bricks-and-mortar in Soho, an operation very much run “by hook and by crook” where the learning was happening hard, and it was happening fast. They didn’t plan to open a second site – and certainly not 23 more – but a space came up in Kingly Court, and the opportunity looked too good to pass.
An emphasis on workplace culture may have been a focal point from the inception, but a few years in there was a moment of realisation. With some serious growth under their belt, they ran some numbers and realised that they were running at a 70% staff turnover rate. That number left room for improvement, and a deeper dive found that the most significant impact occurred within the ranks of recent hires on junior levels. That dive showed something important – that the onboarding process needed a rehaul.
“It’s like when you start school, if your first week of school is bad it’ll make a lasting impression on you. So we’re making sure that initial interaction with the company is great, which will play a huge role in how people see the business going forward.”
Fast growth may have been a factor in that retention deterioration, but it was also the thing that enabled them to put in place a seriously ambitious fix. Enter the Pizza Academy, opened four years ago in Camden. Two-thirds academy and one-third restaurant, it’s where all training and development happens. Every single salaried new hire has a one-month induction at the school that includes a “big warm welcome” from James and Thom where the Pizza Pilgrims inception story gets told. One week of that induction month is spent solely making pizza so that everyone understands the process, ingredients, and technique. “We’ve had instances in the past where people join us in one role, and then they do the one week pizza training and they’re asking to switch to kitchen”.
The objective is two-pronged: train new hires so they’re confident enough to start, and transmit the spirit of Naples and its pizza – the very values that Pizza Pilgrims stands for. That means the team has a much more diverse pool of applicants and staff, extending beyond the Neapolitan contingency it saw in its earlier years.
Besides the onboarding, the Pizza Academy is host to food safety training, mental health programmes, and various events – they recently had Fred Sirieix give a talk on hospitality. And while the majority of the programmes up until a couple of years ago were targeted at training BOH there are now more options for upskilling FOH, from courses on managing GP and stock taking, to how to develop a team. “The goal is to make sure everyone in the business gets some sort of interaction with the academy.”
By putting a huge effort on onboarding and training, creating job roles designed to monitor staff happiness levels, and implementing multiple avenues of communication, Pizza Pilgrims is now in a place where they’re able to address issues happening on every level, across all divisions, and within each one of their pizzerias. To call this feat exemplary is an understatement.
“You either spend more time in recruitment or more time in retention. Way we see it, by focusing on retention you’re getting to the problem before the problem comes to you.”
A pizza company specialising in Neapolitan pizza, as James and Thom quickly found out, would attract Neapolitan pizza chefs who are insanely proud of their city and its glorious culinary heritage, and who would do their utmost to do it justice. Having the best ingredients and the most top-notch equipment is imperative, but consistent quality lies in the hands of the staff making and delivering the food. That talent needs nurturing. “And that’s when you start to get into the nuts and bolts of how to build a company culture, how to train people, retain people, develop people, and how to provide them with the right working environment.”
Davide has been with Pizza Pilgrims for 10 years. He’s from Naples, and started off as one of the first head chefs at Kingly Court. After a few years in that position he began to yearn for a development-focused role, and the team collectively decided that they needed a “Chef Happiness Ambassador”; Davide was to step into those shoes. His main task is to ensure that all chefs across all sites are happy and have their needs addressed, whether it has to do with equipment, uniform, or personal matters.
Davide also works on a personal development plan with each head chef to make sure their teams have goals to hit, and organises motivational events like the biannual pizza chef competitions complete with fireworks, awards, and speeches. But most of all, Davide talks to people, spending 4-5 hours on the phone each day. “He helped introduce a vehicle for communication which we hadn’t realised we were missing”.
“I remember sitting at a board meeting announcing we were introducing a Chef Happiness Ambassador and being laughed at because it sounded too soft. But it’s been transformative.”
All these ‘soft’ efforts emphasise what Pizza Pilgrims now know to be a fact: that retention has to be the priority. “You definitely have to get the recruitment right too,” James says. “But you can recruit and retrain someone into a role, and you’ll also know that the quality of the pizza and the overall happiness of the team probably isn’t going to be there for another 3-6 months as they settle in – to no fault of their own of course, that’s just how it works. The impact of constant recruitment and retraining might not show up in the numbers, but I think you can just tell the difference in the team and quality of product”.
“Trying to knit as many streams of communication together so that everyone is heard in the company is huge.”
Maintaining workplace culture goes beyond the Pizza Academy and the Chef Happiness Ambassador, with carefully tailored processes across the board to help inspire, develop, and keep their staff. Within BOH there is always one, if not two, ‘chefs on the bench’ to cover sicknesses, holidays, and to help out in whichever pizzeria is busy that week. In the head office, numbers tend to run slightly higher than other companies of similar size because “we’re of the opinion that we should have the team now for what we need in a year rather than trying to run an expansion barebones.”
They’ve recently moved away from WhatsApp to an internal social media platform for the company to better separate work from personal life (a “huge move” says James). There’s even an internal board, with one rep from each pizzeria, to discuss issues and voice solutions. “We get to address issues that we wouldn’t have gotten to unless we had that board of reps to bring them up”. Even the music selection is carefully curated to avoid what could be a mind-numbing repeating cycle of tunes; Thom and six FOH members put time into building a 6,000 song playlist that takes weeks before it goes on repeat.
It’s those small details that make a difference in both the day-to-day and in the long run and, most significantly, that make everyone feel that they’ll be heard.
“There’s nothing particularly crazy or clever that we’re doing. You’ve got to get the money right in the first instance, but then it’s just about making sure your staff have development opportunities, that they’re happy day-to-day and that they’re enjoying coming into work. Those are the three things.”
As for the future? James sees potential in growing the Academy and eventually opening it out. They’ll be closing for a refurbishment at the end of the year to expand the space, which would set the stage to make that happen. “Originally we had big ideas – Covid got in the way – to implement a Pizza Academy Stamp, whereby we hold open days to train people up, and if there isn’t a role for them at Pizza Pilgrims to offer them out to the rest of the industry.” They’re also considering opening to the public next year, providing an extra source of revenue which would roll right back into the school. “Open sharing what you’re learning and doing is a great way of going about it.”
Besides the academy, there are a few pizzerias in the works and the company is applying for B Corp to eventually become carbon net zero. “We’re now trying to balance growth, the right amount of growth, with where we can double down our efforts. Everything we do, including the company culture efforts, have to be sustainable. Otherwise it’s short lived.”