Dan Morrell: Hi, this is Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck. In 2018, Bill Crawford (MBA 2006) founded Righteous Slice, a pizza restaurant in Rexburg, Idaho that has been steadily earning critical acclaim. It has been named the State's Best Pizza for two straight years, won regional awards in the International Pizza Challenge, and earlier this year was deemed by the New York Times to serve a world-class slice of New York Style Pizza.

Crawford is a former Air Force fighter pilot, and he credits his penchant for precision with helping him create an in-demand product. But finding that passion took years. Most of them spent working jobs that while rewarding in their own way, just didn't give him a spark. That all changed on a fateful business trip to Strasbourg, France. And in this episode of Skydeck, Crawford and I talk about how a trip to a French pizza spot ignited his obsession, how he turned that fervor into a business in the hard, but highly necessary work of finding your passion.

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Dan Morrell: I love the origin story of your business and the fact that it was so gradually and strategically built, but I want to also hear that story of this fortuitous trip that you took to France. Tell us that and how that played a role in the origin story of Righteous Slice.

Bill Crawford: I'd been making pizza in my home kitchen for quite a while. A friend of mine, who's a professor in the Harvard Medical School, so he geeks out on the chemistry of food, and he introduced me to some techniques to make a great home pizza. So I would have people over, entertain, and really felt great pleasure in doing that, but I didn't think it was different or special enough to ever invest my heart into making it a business. And then one day I was traveling.

We were in Strasbourg, France, and the chauffeur that had picked us up for our meeting, we told him we were hungry and he said, "I know this pizza place." And he took us to a pizza place in a mall. It was called Fratelli La Bufala. That's a Neapolitan place. They had the most beautiful oven right there in the dining room. And then the guy stretched and topped the pizza, baked it in just a few seconds, and it came out light and delicate and balanced and flavorful.

And I thought, oh my gosh, this is next level. And I became very curious in that moment, like how did he do that? So I was with a colleague and I said, "Hey, do me a favor. I can see the bag of flour here. Get a picture of me with this flour so I can figure out how to make this pizza." And as she's doing that, the manager comes up and he says, "Are you trying to get my recipe?"

And I said, "Yes." And he said, "I'll tell you what, come back tonight after we're closed. I will teach you how to make this pizza." And we made the trip back. We sat down with him. He spent a lot of time with me. His name is Gaetano Vespoli. And we're still friends. We in touch. He's the one who recommended a school in the United States for me to go to and really set me on that path.

With Neapolitan pizza, you can have the recipe, but the recipe doesn't even get you halfway there. It's really about how do you put all the elements together with the right skill and the right process to produce the results. So the ingredients are only the starting point. You really have to build the skill. It took me about two years after learning that recipe before I had made my first pizza that I thought, yeah, I'm pretty happy with this one.

DM: You were doing this in backyard parties, that eventually became farmer's markets, mobile cooking, and all that sort of stuff. Tell me about when you felt confident enough to make that jump to brick and mortar.

BC: Yeah, my first move was I got home from Italy. I immediately ordered this bag of flour. It turns out now if you go into any Neapolitan pizzeria in the United States, they have that flour. It's the most prolific and common flour. It's a high quality flour. But it's funny that I thought at the time this is my secret ingredient. Everybody has it. I ordered a wood-fired oven from a supplier. I knew nothing about the industry when I got started. Zero.

And when I ordered that oven and that flour, the guy that sold me the oven happened to be also an ingredient supplier. So I made friends with him, and then he would sell me his restaurant ingredients. His truck would drive from Phoenix to Tucson once a week. And they'd make the rounds to all the high-end restaurants in Tucson and then stop by my house in my cul-de-sac and drop off two boxes of ingredients and drive back to Phoenix.

And I started these backyard parties with that wood-fired oven to build my skill, but I also began to meet people. And it was really the people I met who started opening doors for me. So Gaetano told me to go to a place in New York City called Kesté. I went to Kesté. While I was there, I walked back and talked to the pizza makers. They said, "Hey, we have a school. Here's the phone number for the guy."

It turns out the guy, his name's Roberto Caporuscio, he's one of the most famous pizza makers in the world. Now I'm friends with him. I learn about this thing called the International Pizza Expo. It's the trade show, it's Pizza Con for the pizza world. I go to that. I meet a couple of people. It was through the people I met who would teach me and open doors for me that really helped me build that confidence. I also started making pizzas at home. People liked it.

And then I got a bigger oven. I put it on a trailer. When we moved to Idaho, I moved to Idaho in 2013 to become a college professor here. We brought the trailer with us, opened up in the farmer's market. And I was trying to apply all of those things you learn in business school about we're going to experiment, we're going to take a low cost model, and we're going to try to see if it works before we start investing big time in it.

And so I knew I could make a good product, and I had a lot of people who were loyal fans at the farmer's market. We would have an hour long wait for somebody to get an 11-inch pizza out of my wood-fired oven. And it wasn't uncommon after they got their pizza, an hour later, I would see them again at the front of the line. That's not really what I would consider validation.

Because while I knew some people liked the product, was it enough to create the demand I needed to cover my fixed costs and still make the money I needed to, but I had a lot of confidence that we'd figure it out. And whether you call it lean startup or discovery-driven planning, there's lots of different terms for it, they all boil down to start small, figure out the business model, and make sure you nail the value proposition.

I also got associated with a burger joint here in town. I was just advising them. But through that advising process, I was able to help recruit people, train, develop the menu, have insight into their financial performance, and realized I thought the market could support a higher end product with the right operating model. And that's when I felt confident I could move into it.

DM: You're doing all this stuff. You're building this business. You're planning the strategy. You're understanding the market. At the same time, it really feels like you have found your passion, and this thing is being fueled by your passion. Righteous Slice opened in 2018. You released this trailer. Remember?

BC: Oh yeah, the movie trailer. Yeah.

DM: And it's big, it's dramatic, and you end it by saying, "A lot of people wonder what their purpose in life is. Mine is to make pizza." How did you discover that?

BC: Oh my gosh, that's so funny. When people ask me how had I got into pizza, I tell them the wand chooses the wizard, which is a line from Harry Potter, right? People who get into pizza, they come from all walks of life. You'll have people from the tech industry who go, "I just got to make pizza." You'll have people who started in high school and grow up in the business and become renowned for it.

There's no predicting where a pizza person's going to come from, but we all have in common this deep passion, and some of us are driven by different things. For me, it's all about trying to perfect the dough and the feel of the pizza as it comes out of the oven and into your mouth and that first bite, to me it's magical. And there's this never ending quest. I compare it to flying my F-16 days.

Because no matter how good an F-16 pilot you are, and you can be in it for 20 years, you're going to fly one hour mission, you're going to come back, you're going to sit down, and for four hours, you're going to debrief what was every mistake I made, so that next time I go up I'm even better. And I find great satisfaction in pushing myself to make something perfect knowing that I'm probably never going to make a pizza that I'm perfectly satisfied with, but the joy is in that journey.

DM: You are a business professor. You teach at BYU-Idaho. As you're developing this business, as you're growing it, did you test market ideas or product launch ideas from the classroom and then bring them into Righteous Slice?

BC: It's kind of interesting, it flows the other way actually. So I've got my academic training. I go into the business and realize, not that it doesn't work, you need it, but that it's insufficient. That not until you get into the trenches and you start getting hit in the face do you realize, oh, I've got to apply this thing, or I've got to change this part of my business. We've made lots and lots of changes based on what I learned.

And then I take that stuff back into the classroom and say, "Here's a couple of really important things, skills that aren't normal for people that I thought would be. For example, managing conflict." We talk about it in school, but it's very different when you realize that most people really want to avoid conflict. And there's this certain amount of discomfort that most people have.

I just go in assuming everyone wants to be the best in the world at what they do, and I'm going to help them get there. And so when I have newer employees that don't come with that mindset, it can be unsettling for them because there's a high bar and we've got a great culture there. But I've got to be mindful of those kinds of things.

That having a world-class organization means having a way of onboarding and helping people understand the culture and understanding where they're coming from. And those are things that I bring into the classroom. So I learned that in the lab and then bring it back and teach my students those things.

DM: Talk to me about how you decided how to place Righteous Slice in the market. So what's your market differentiator?

BC: My goal is to serve world-class pizza. And so that's the real focus. The other thing is my manager told everybody, he says, "Hey, people will come back because of the food, but they leave a review because of how you make them feel." And so we spend most of our company training on how do we make people feel when they come in. And so the differentiator, I would say, is the full experience.

It's the pizza, which is surprisingly good, but also the way we make people feel. This is a town where I heard recently that we have the number three busiest Little Caesars in America. It's highly price-sensitive. Our university is it's on the list of best value because it's such a low-cost university, it attracts a lot of price-sensitive people. And my estimate is we only get one out of five students in this town to come even visit us.

We rely also on the town because of its growth recently of the university. A lot of people have moved here from out of this town. And so there's a lot here dining-wise that compares to what they used to have. And so you might say, we offer something you might find in a city, but it's here accessible in this rural town.

DM: Bill, earlier you discussed very eloquently why pizza made sense for you in particular, and you drew this parallel, this beautiful parallel between making pizza and your time as a fighter pilot. And what I heard there is that you have a real interest in excellence in execution, doing things at the highest level possible and getting almost perfect. Where do you think that comes from?

BC: Oh wow! I don't know. Part of it's innate. I was telling my daughter the other day, I said, "I'm beginning to think I'm not normal." And I think what happens is there's this drive that's been in me since as long as I can remember, a little kid. I was the eight-year-old kid who would go up and down the street knocking on doors to get all the boys to come out and play football in the street.

I was the kid that wanted to be the state champion football player, even though I weighed 145 pounds. So always would invest myself in something. I think one of the elements for me that drives me is this back-of-my-mind question if I can really do it or not. And so if I look at the themes in my life, I feel like I'm drawn to things that are hard enough that I don't really know if I can do it when I start out.

And I feel like that once I've mastered it, it gets boring for me. My flying once I was in the stealth bomber, stealth bomber's a great airplane, but you're flying for four hours at night and there's about five minutes of intense action and the rest of it, you're driving around in a big airplane at night. It no longer gave me the spark. So I felt like that's part of why I left. Going to Harvard Business School was the same thing.

It's like most of the people who go there... Well, I don't know most, but I'm guessing a large percentage of people who go to Harvard Business School in the back of their mind believe, "I don't really know if I can do this." And pizza has provided me that endless source of intellectual challenge and relationship challenge that I don't see it ever getting boring because there's always something new to learn.

DM: You have this incredible passion, and that passion drives you to do exemplary work. Is that passion, that real dedication, a differentiator for you? And what can other entrepreneurs learn from this?

BC: Let's talk about the passion part first. I got a lot of discouragement from people in my inner circle. "Bill, you do not want to start a higher end pizzeria in this town." The market would say, "Hey, look, we don't need another pizzeria here." And I used to say, "You know what? I agree with you. Which one should we get rid of?" Because I was like, "We're not getting rid of mine."

But the passion for me was something that for a long time led to discouragement because I did want to do this thing and I felt like it was a bad idea financially. And I knew it was going to be a lot more work to make a lot less money than I could do other things. But the passion was the only reason that kept me going. That was the thing that got me up every day. That was the thing that kept me from getting down on myself or getting discouraged or giving up because it felt like something worth doing and worth getting better at.

And not just the part of the making great pizza, but to be able to find a way to take my passion to make something as perfect as I can, and then train people and break it down into a process and a system where people can come off the street and in a few weeks be able to do that. And one of the great compliments I get is, "Hey, Bill, I come in here and I see all new people. I think they're all new. And then I get the pizza and it's every bit as good as it always is. How do you do that?"

Continuous improvement, that drive that comes from I don't know where, but it's something that provides great satisfaction and keeps me going. I would just give any entrepreneur this advice, and this is just me, there are people who are driven by different things, but I could have never done this if I didn't have this burning desire to share this passion with the world.

DM: Yeah, and it seems also just objectively from looking at your story here is someone who is in search of a business early on as a young man, didn't find it, but eventually later in life, finds the thing he is passionate about. And then that's where the match happens, right? That's when the match gets struck and the fire gets lit. And that's what set you off on a real course. And maybe that lesson is you have to find something that you're passionate about. That is a good lesson for entrepreneurs.

BC: I would say, if you don't have that passion, it's okay to be patient. It's okay to go through your life and experiment and take steps in a direction. And that direction may not be perfect, but there's going to be something in there that you learn that moves you in another direction. And it's okay to let that emerge. One of my biggest frustrations was coming into business school, we had a basement in the apartment we lived in.

I would go down there and think, this is where my big startup is going to happen. This is where the inspiration is going to happen. This place is going to be booming with computers and whatever else down here to make this really cool startup. And then when we moved away, it was still just an empty basement. And I went to this other company thinking, I'm going to meet people.

I'm going to be inspired to go and start my own company. And none of that ever happened because I wasn't ready yet. And I hadn't really found something that I thought this is worth pouring my heart into. In fact, my wife and I, I remember sitting down right before I signed the loan for the business, and I looked at her and said, "Are you willing to lose our house if this doesn't work out?"

And she said, "Yes." And I said, "Well, then let's do it." Because once we're willing to make the sacrifices for the things we want, then those things become more possible. And it was that mental barrier that I had to overcome and also finding the thing that gave me the most joy, and I think I'm there now.

Skydeck is the Harvard Business School alumni podcast featuring interviews and insights from across the world of business. It’s produced by the External Relations Department at HBS. Our audio engineer is Craig McDonald.

It is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And if you could take a moment to rate and review us, we’d be grateful.

For more information, or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

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