Andrew Dana Of Call Your Mother Deli On 5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand
An Interview With Martita Mestey
Put blinders on. It is so easy to get caught up in what others are doing, and what trends are popping up, but block all that out. Focus on your craft, make it great, and run your race.
As a part of our series called “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew Dana.
Andrew Dana is co-owner of two award-winning restaurants, Timber Pizza Co. and Call Your Mother, (a Jew-ish deli) in Washington, D.C. A native Washingtonian, Dana built the foundation of his burgeoning restaurant group in Park View, the uptown neighborhood he grew up in. Since starting both Timber and Call Your Mother in Park View, the restaurateur has set up eateries across the Washington D.C.-area with shops in Georgetown, Capitol Hill, a mobile trolley currently posted in Bethesda, various farmer’s markets locations as well as two new locations in Denver in 2023. Dana, who attended business school at Fordham University, was on track to take corporate America by storm but always knew he wanted to fulfill his dad’s dream of opening a Jewish deli. He decided to take the first step towards entrepreneurship by purchasing a wood-fired oven and began spending nights and weekends recipe testing before slinging pizza pies part-time out of his 1967 Chevy truck at local farmers markets and eventually opening Timber’s brick-and-mortar location. Two years later, Call Your Mother Deli, his dad’s dream realized and a nod to the diversity of his Jew-ish faith, was born. At Call Your Mother Dana and Executive Chef and Co-Owner Daniela Moreira infuse Jewish influence while flipping traditional deli staples on their head, featuring signature bagels, tasty and creative sandwiches, nostalgic sweets, seasonal favorites, and beyond. The twosome lead a company with seven locations and more than 200 employees approaching business ownership from a stance of innovation and inclusion by implementing initiatives such as providing free English lessons for their immigrant staff members. Dana’s work and thought leadership have been featured in Washington Business Journal, Fast Company’s Innovation Festival, The Washington Post, Thrillist, Eater, Modern Restaurant Management, and Bon Appétit.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
I loved two things when I was growing up, sports and food. Weekends were spent eating bagels for breakfast, pizza for dinner, with sports jam packed in between. I told everybody I was going to be a professional baseball player until I was about 16, until I realized I was not that good! It took me another decade to try to go “pro” in food, while I tried other professions, all roads pointed back to food. All of my best childhood memories involve food and family. Eating my grandmother Elizabeth’s blueberry pie with my whole family during our summer vacations or visiting 3 G’s Deli in Boca Raton with my grandfather Mal and eating Deli Sandwiches piled high, times were always the best eating good food and spending time with my family.
Can you share with us the story of the “ah ha” moment that led to the creation of the food or beverage brand you are leading?
I think Dani and I have had a lot of “ah ha” moments. While working on the menu, designing the space, or working on the bagels we had a lot of “Ah ha, this is what it is supposed to be like” moments, but the main vision “ah ha” moment was always there. Dani and I love eating out the same way. We love authentic, casual, and FUN restaurants. We telepathically knew what we wanted the overall vision was supposed to be before we had all these other smaller “ah ha” moments. Call Your Mother existed inside us before we even started to map it out, I know sounds crazy!
Let’s imagine that someone reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to produce. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
Just start. I know this sounds intuitive, but I see lots of people waiting for the “perfect” moment. If you are waiting to have the perfect business plan, or perfect financing, or the perfect time, it will be hard to ever start. But once you start, a ball in motion stays in motion, and that is when good things start to happen. So, work on your product, test it with friends, start to work on a logo, whatever you need to do to just get moving.
Many people have good ideas all the time. But some people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. How would you encourage someone to overcome this hurdle?
Talk less, do more. It is easy to get caught up talking about the project, and how the future is going to shape up. The times I have been in the “talk more” phase in our businesses are the times we have progressed the least. When we have our heads down and are simply “doing,” is when good things happen. So just remember, be about that action!
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
SOLO! The problem with these consultants is that they are always playing from the same playbook. They are telling all of their clients a version of the same thing from the same playbook. Play from your own original playbook. I believe that is the best way to figure out how to get rolling! Trust your instincts and create your own path.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
So much of this depends on the concept. But that being said, I always think it is best to bootstrap for as long as possible. This gives you more time to figure things out and to be able to quickly pivot without being beholden to any investors. Also, the bigger you can get before taking on institutional capital means the higher valuation you can have, which means protecting more of your equity.
Can you share thoughts from your experience about how to file a patent, how to source good raw ingredients, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer or distributor?
Word of mouth! Googling and the internet will only get you so far. The best partners and purveyors that we have are all from word of mouth. The best partners usually are not masters in SEO, but masters in their craft. Only way to get them a lot of the time is via word of mouth, so pound the pavement!
Here is the main question of our discussion. What are your “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand” and why?
- Be an employee before you are an owner. Work and learn every single station. The only way you will know how to run your business will be if you know exactly how it is supposed to be run. Also, who at the beginning is going to do a better job than you? Early on, Dani and I worked every station in the restaurant. I was baking bagels, cleaning bathrooms, and bussing tables. Dani was doing EVERYTHING. Now, years later we know the ins and outs of the business and are able to understand where we are winning and where we need work.
- Hire great people and treat them how you would want somebody to treat your family. Staff is going to make or break your business. It is no longer enough to just pay people an hourly salary. Employees have choices and are only going to work for you if they enjoy it and know you care about them. This also leads to employees who deeply care and run the business as their own. We have employees who have been with us since day one, which is almost five years. Without them we would be nothing.
- Work really really really hard. Like really hard. Candidly the only “skill” that Dani and I really had at the beginning is that we worked delusionally hard. We showed up every single day from before open to close, we took no off days, and treated our business like a newborn baby. It needed constant attention to survive!
- Put blinders on. It is so easy to get caught up in what others are doing, and what trends are popping up, but block all that out. Focus on your craft, make it great, and run your race.
- Know when to switch from employee to owner. At some point, you will need to stop being a day to day employee and turn into the owner. Do not do this too soon! Make sure the business is stable and healthy before stepping away from employee status. But also, do not wait too long! At some point you must steer the ship and be able to chart the future and growth of the company. After working every day in the shop for two years Dani and I had to step into a different role, which allowed us to open more stores, build a world-class team, and continue to be able to grow in a sustainable way.
Can you share your ideas about how to create a product that people really love and are ‘crazy about’?
Authenticity. That’s it. Do something that is true to you, and do not stop until it is perfect. Certainly, do not stop at good enough. The products/companies that I see fail come out trying to be to Instagramable. That stuff has to happen organically. IF you are starting by creating an Instagramable product or corner, I am sorry, but that is not authenticity, and chances are people will not be crazy about it. People want real.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
I like to think so! Simply, Call Your Mother exists to create special moments every day. I think we do that through great food, and great service. If we can create special moments for people, that helps create a happier world.
We do a lot of work in our community and with local charities, but the most important thing that we do is create opportunity for our team. Early on we told our team, “do not look at this as a restaurant but as a start-up where you can build a career.” In order to fulfill that promise we had to grow to create opportunity. We always try to promote from within as much as possible and create opportunities for our team.
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Practice what you preach. That is it. So many companies and restaurants talk about “being a family” and “treating people right,” but when the tough gets going do not always do that. When the pandemic hit, you saw a lot of companies let go of a lot of people for self-preservation. We decided early on in the pandemic, if we were going down, we were going down together. We said we would not let a single person go unless the bank account was at zero. We practiced what we had preached. If everybody would do that and follow through on their promises, this world would be a better place.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We appreciate the time you spent on this.
Andrew Dana Of Call Your Mother Deli On 5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.