BusinessReport.com

Young Businessperson of the Year: Louis DeAngelo Jr.

Age: 35

Accomplishments: Opened his first restaurant at 19; now owns seven DeAngelo’s Casual Italian Dining restaurants, along with a produce and specialty foods company that supplies 50 local restaurants; employs nearly 600 people in the Baton Rouge area.

As a boy in Bayonne, N.J., Louis DeAngelo Jr. lived for his weekend job in his godfather’s pizza place. It seemed natural to him to open his own place as a teenager, despite knowing next to nothing about how to run a business.

“Nobody told me I couldn’t,” he says. “It’s amazing what you can create and what you can do when you don’t have a preconceived notion you can’t.”

DeAngelo is taking a break from refining his new lunch menu, reminiscing about a Friday less than a year into his career when he broke $1,000 in sales for the first time. Not bad for a 965-square-foot pizzeria that could only seat 30 or so patrons at a time. But what excited DeAngelo wasn’t just the money; it was the party atmosphere in the room that night.

“It was the first time I realized I’m not just cooking,” DeAngelo says. “I want to create an experience.”

He says the average restaurant patron sticks around for less than an hour.

“For 47 minutes, we have the opportunity to improve the quality of someone’s day, even if it’s just this much,” he says, holding his thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart. “How do we make people feel? People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did.”

As a hungry entrepreneur, DeAngelo felt he had to know everything and do everything. When you’ve got 50 or 60 employees, you can be the center of everyone’s energy and inspiration, he says, but when you have 250, you’re a CEO. DeAngelo says he gradually realized he couldn’t depend on the charisma, enthusiasm and cooking skills that were the key to his early success.

“I didn’t recognize that quickly enough,” he says.

DeAngelo wasn’t a particularly good student, and he still doesn’t consider himself much of a manager. Something as simple as meeting with his CPA was a nerve-racking experience for the first four or five years, simply because he felt out of his depth.

Like most people in his position, he learned to surround himself with people who could do the things he’s either not good at or can’t get to. He finds building the right team “as easy as blinking and breathing.”

“You can see who’s got it and who doesn’t,” he says.

Business is good, although he’s getting squeezed a bit on the margins as prices increase on everything from fuel to dairy. And DeAngelo is a bit skeptical of the rapid growth in this market: By his count, Baton Rouge just added 3,000 restaurant seats in 13 months—700 in Towne Center alone.

“I fail to see hard evidence for all this hype,” he says.

He’s been working for the past year or so on Extraordinary Care, Extraordinary Concern, a nearly complete leadership book for his employees that he also hopes to publish for a general audience. The work builds on the journals he’s been keeping for years. Some of his own biography has found its way in there, but the book is decidedly not about the technical aspects of the restaurant business; it’s about building relationships and adding value to other people’s days [there’s that theme again].

DeAngelo speaks regularly to LSU students majoring in business or marketing. He serves on the local board for Junior Achievement, which teaches children about entrepreneurship, work readiness and financial literacy, and he’s pledged to raise $1 million for JA through his annual “Win Italy” raffle.

And while no one told young Louis he couldn’t run his own restaurant, he’s well aware that lots of people are more than willing to tell kids what they can’t do. This year, he plans to start his Young Entrepreneur Foundation, which might provide a little early intervention for a few of those kids.

Kids visiting a DeAngelo’s restaurant will have a chance to choose a business venture from an activity sheet or submit a rudimentary business plan. He hasn’t settled on the age range yet, but he’s leaning toward the junior high level. One winner from each location will get maybe $500 or $1,000 to make the idea happen. They’ll have a weekly board meting with DeAngelo and learn leadership skills along with basics like how to balance a checkbook. Whether they make money or blow their stake, DeAngelo hopes they’ll gain some confidence and learn something about themselves.

Meanwhile, the DeAngelo brand continues to evolve, in ways both large, like the produce and specialty foods business the company says serves 50 local restaurateurs, and small, like the new lunch menu items. But the backbone of the operation remains the pizzas and calzones that made DeAngelo’s reputation in the first place.

“We never forget where we came from,” he says. “Everything we do is evolving.”