Episode 205: Jerry Robinson Jr.
On this episode of The Brad and Taylor Show, we sat down with Jerry Robinson Jr. of Mr. M’s Grinders!
To watch the full episode, check it out on YouTube below. In the meantime, here’s a transcript of the conversation…
Here’s what you missed from Jerry Robinson Jr…
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Taylor: Welcome to The Brad and Taylor Show. Today, we have Jerry Robinson Jr.
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Brad: You’re listening to The Brad and Taylor Show, a podcast that inspires entrepreneurs to pursue their passions. We’re sitting down with some of the best to learn how they got started and some lessons they learned along the way.
Taylor: Hey Jerry, how are you doing?
Jerry: Good. How are you?
Taylor: I’m well, thank you.
Brad: Awesome. Well, first off, let’s get this show started. Tell us a little bit about you. What do you guys do?
Jerry: So my family and I, we own Mr. M’s Pizza and Grinders. It’s right here in Eaton Rapids. It’s been a business in this town for 26 years now. Coming up on 27th this next year, we just did a big celebration for our 25th anniversary, had a new logo put in, and did a lot of renovations inside and outside. So yeah, we’ve been really blessed to have this business in this town.
00:00:49:06 –> 00:01:42:17
Brad: That’s awesome. Do you know how it got started?
Jerry: Yeah, so around 1990, 1991, a gentleman named John Merton was working at Mann Sonos. He was managing the whole thing and he looked at it, and he was like, I can do this better. But he didn’t have the money. So he got with his buddy and his buddy had the money, but his friend didn’t have the building and his other friend had a building. And so all three work together and one had the money when I had the building when I had the business expertise and all their last names started with M. So they decided let’s call it Mr. M’s. And so they put that in and they ran it from ‘95. They had two locations at one point, the second one was in Jackson, in the business district there. Then they shut that down after the business district moved from where they were to another location, but still with one location here in Grand Rapids.
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Taylor: Nice. So when did your family then take that over?
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Jerry: My family bought it in 2015 or 16. I believe it was 15. John wanted to move on with his life and go do something else. And we love Mr. M’s. We ate there every Saturday. It was our pizza Saturday and we just didn’t want to go to the other places. We really liked the pizza that they were making. And my dad was like, why don’t we just buy it and do it ourselves? And so we all pitched in.
Brad: That’s awesome.
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Taylor: How old were you when your dad bought the business?
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Jerry: I would have been 16 years old. So I’ve been working there since I was 16, getting to know how to make the bread and the dough. And now, I run the operation with him. So yeah.
00:02:31:19 –> 00:02:33:06
Taylor: The original menu is the same?
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Jerry: Yup. Yup. We haven’t changed any of the recipes. We haven’t changed any other grinders. We’ve added one grinder since star Hawaiian grinder. It’s one of our biggest sellers. But other than that, we don’t change what’s not broken.
Brad: That’s awesome. That’s awesome.
00:02:50:11 –> 00:02:52:12
Taylor: Nice. So what are your guys’ hours right now?
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Jerry: So with COVID, we’re just four to eight, Monday through Saturday, we’re closed all Sundays. We used to be open for lunch but with nobody being able to work, we don’t have enough staff to be open in the morning, so we limit ourselves to the evening. Our customers really understand it. We try to offer them free delivery to help keep them coming to Mr. M’s, online ordering door dash, anything like that to help them keep coming to our place.
00:03:19:00 –> 00:03:23:27
Taylor: Yeah. Speaking of online ordering, that’s something you guys just implemented this last year, right?
00:03:24:19 –> 00:04:11:18
When that started, Jordache came in last year, we’ve been working with Slice, our online ordering company since 2018. I went with our manager to the international pizza expo in Vegas and we spent the whole week there and we got to meet the founder of Slice and had dinner with him. And it was a good time. And he was like, we’d love to be in your restaurant. So we put together a menu with them and he’s been having our online ordering menu since then. And it’s brought us a lot of revenue. It keeps our phones from ringing constantly, you know, cause we only have two lines. So you can only have two people call at once. And so it’s a nice press release, you know, for orders to come in through to another source.
00:04:11:21 –> 00:04:18:20
Taylor: How does that kind of work on the back end for that? So you guys are getting phone calls and online ordering and you guys just have it set up by your phone. So you get a notification?
00:04:19:29 –> 00:04:58:06
Jerry: Yeah. So we’ll get a notification when a new online order comes through, we’ve got a speaker in the back and they let the lady, oh, and new slice hoarder. So now there’s a new one. We’ll go tap the screen. It’ll auto print it for us. That was one of the big things we changed for our 25th anniversary was we brought in a POS system. Before then everything was handwritten. You had to memorize all the prices for all the things. And this just makes it so much easier. It Is much faster to take a ticket. You don’t have people going, oh, I write things this way. I write things this way and with all these differences in tickets, everything is universal across the lines. So it makes it so much easier.
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Taylor: Yeah. Last time, with handwriting, we could just write it out. You guys can start the work, right? Exactly.
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Taylor: Did you get any advice from your dad when you stepped into the business with him?
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Jerry: This actually came from John as well. The original owner was just keeping things simple. You throw in too many complicated things and it just makes it worse. It makes it harder for the employees. It’s harder to manage if you keep things simple. The thing we liked about our online ordering thing was the first day an order came in within the first 10 minutes, it was easy. It was printed out there. It was no difficult backend stuff. And so just keeping all that simply helps us move along.
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Taylor: But what happens if the online system goes down, you guys kind of revert back to what you did before?
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If our POS system goes down. Yeah. We keep our tickets. There are two or three of us currently that know how to do the old-school handwritten tickets. And we have our old dinosaur register. We can type everything real quick. We’ve had to do it before we keep it there just in case. It’s kind of fun pulling that thing back out every so often to go. And the new kids. Yeah. We used to do this and the new kids look at it and they’re like, what in the world is going on here? And we’re just chaffing away upfront. But yeah, it’s a lot of fun. So we do have a backup. If the internet goes down, all of our orders are backed up on an email so I can go online and still accept online orders. So we’ve got a dummy-proof to the point where, you know, even if the internet goes out, if our phones go out, we can still accept orders very easily.
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Taylor: That’s convenient. Do you have any advice for anybody maybe who’s looking to get into a small business, kind of like what you guys have right now?
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Jerry: Sure. Well, a couple of pieces for saying, keep everything simple. You know, over-complicating things just won’t help you at all in the long run, and doing a lot of research, do you know what you are selling? Who are you selling it to? Where are you selling it at? Right? There might be a lot of people that want to buy your product or use your service, but maybe it’s not right for this town or the town next door. Maybe you have to go to another place to sell that product that might do you a better business. So really dig into that.
00:07:26:04 –> 00:07:29:24
Taylor: And I know you mentioned you guys are located in Eaton Rapids.
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Jerry: We are at Eaton Rapids. So we’re at 101 West Night Street, just behind Abby’s Bar over here. Just a block from
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Taylor: For online ordering and calls. What is that email, phone number? How can people get a hold of you? The website and all the details.
00:07:46:13 –> 00:08:08:02
Our website is MrMsGrinders.com. It’s an older website. Very simple, the big button says order online, click it, and it’ll take you straight to the slice website. You can order there. You can order on the Slice app. To call us it’s (517) 663-4346. And we’ll pick up within three rings.
00:08:08:17 –> 00:08:12:02
Taylor: Nice. Do you guys have any plans for finishing out this year and going into the next with the business?
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Jerry: Yeah. So we’re actually closing down for the first two weeks of January to give our employees a break, give ourselves a break and then come back next year and plow through it. We don’t have any plans for an opening for lunch anytime soon. Not until I can get more people.
00:08:31:18 –> 00:08:38:00
Taylor: Awesome. But you guys are open dinnertime, so that’s perfect. Everyone’s getting off of work and can stop by.
00:08:38:00 –> 00:08:50:29
Jerry: And swapped by, or they can have it delivered to their house. Contact-free. We’ll leave it right at the door. You don’t even have to see us.
Brad: So that’s too funny. Awesome. Well, Hey, thanks for coming and sharing your story with us today. Well, thank you.
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Check out Jerry Robinson Jr.:
mrmsgrinders.com/
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