DIANA CLINE

Meet Diana Cline of @dianas_cucina_and_lounge in Winnipeg, Canada!

Diana grew up baking with her mom and grandma. “I like to say it’s true that baking is in my blood. I’ve always had a natural affinity for real food and ingredients. It’s just one of my talents and passions. My great grandpa was a baker and my grandma worked in his bakery.” However, though it was something she loved, Diana didn’t necessarily always see it as a professional career path. “Growing up, it was considered maybe not successful enough for a woman to be in the cooking industry. I felt I had to go out in the business world and be behind a desk. If my grandparents were still in physical form, they’d tell you I was a born entrepreneur. When I was 11 and 12 I started little businesses – I stained glass jewelry and boxes and I would sell them at consignment shops. I wanted to get a job, but I was too young. Earning money was freedom. I would have freedom to do what I wanted and buy what I wanted. I had a home cleaning business for my neighbors, and I babysat. I had a nice little empire.”

By the time she entered college, Diana had decided to study Computer Programming. “I love learning, but I’m not good at sitting at a desk for 6-8 hours a day. It’s not in my spirit. While in school I got a job as a delivery driver for an internationally known pizza delivery chain. I also worked a few other jobs at the same time to earn more money. One day, my boyfriend and I were presented with the opportunity to buy a franchise. We asked ourselves, ‘where do we see ourselves in 5 years?’ I liked the idea of being your own boss and making your own direction. With computer programming, I saw a future behind a desk in a cubicle and that sounded like prison to me. My boyfriend saw himself getting to a cap he wouldn’t be able to grow beyond. So, we said, “ok, let’s do this.”

@dianas_cucina_and_lounge’s decision to buy a franchise brought together her passion for food and her entrepreneurial spirit. “Pizza to me is a fusion between baking and cooking, and I’ve always loved cooking. As a little girl, I had an easy bake oven where you could bake a 4-inch cake with a light bulb in about an hour. I loved it. I was always geared to go into the food industry in some way or shape.”

Buying the franchise was a handshake deal. “It was run by an old boy’s club. Even though the agreement was between my ex-partner/husband and I together, only he was invited to the meetings and discussions. At the time, I thought, ‘I guess this is how it has to be until we own the store.’ When I think back to those guys and how they do business, it’s like, ‘no wonder they didn’t want any extra people or a woman at the table.’ They wouldn’t have been able to have meetings at certain places or have certain discussions. I say I’m a tom boy through and through, but I’m still a woman. In the early 80s, society really put females and males in different boxes. If you were female, you were assigned pink – but I don’t like pink, I like red! If I naturally want it and like it, I’ll have it, but if you tell me I appear this way, it doesn’t mean I’m just going to fit into a box. It was only in the last few years that I became ok with pink.’”

When Diana and her ex bought the franchise, they had 3 stores to choose from. “They were dog stores meaning none of them were performing well. They were poorly run, dirty party places. We chose one that was doing less than $5k a week. Every week, the old boys had regular meetings with the managers, only guys, and everyone knew everyone’s sales. This was now around 1993/94 and we had increased sales within 4 months to more than $11k a month by putting in place operational efficiencies that didn’t previously exist. My then partner/ex was the golden boy to the corporate old boys, but it was my work, too. I made a grid system of the map for the drivers – I was a driver, too and I was the one training them.”

The deal had been that @dianas_cucina_and_lounge and her ex would run the store for 6 months, they’d agree on a price and the store would be theirs. “After 6 months, we kept getting pushed off and we wanted to talk numbers. They had done it for someone else, so we thought they’d do it for us. Sales were at $14k a week and labor and food costs were in line. Finally, my then partner was able to corner them and pressure them to sit down – I wasn’t at the meeting, but they told him that now it was worth too much and they couldn’t sell it to us. They asked if we wanted it for $250k. We were invested in it. It was ours. We felt very betrayed that they didn’t honor their part of the deal. We had made their corporation money during that period. We had just bought a house and had no intention of moving. But it was a good thing it didn’t work out this way. The franchise model is a box, and I’m not meant to be in a box.”

Diana and her ex left the franchise and made another handshake deal with some ex-corporate chain guys. “We would be the 3rd store and grow together, bringing our expertise. We took out a loan and bought the contents of an existing pizzeria. Within 6 months of opening and operating, we were doing more sales in our 1 store than the other 2 combined. Sometimes people, when they are faced with a competitor and they aren’t willing to grow and learn, want to attack the competition and bring them down. The next thing we knew, we were being told we used too much cheese, the wrong pepperoni, etc. Our agreement was never formalized through a lawyer, though it was supposed to be. After 18 months, we received a cease-and-desist letter. It was a bogus franchise agreement from their lawyer, who has since been disbarred. It was literally a copy of another pizza chain’s franchise agreement. We were told to sign it and send it back, but when we read it, it had nothing to do with anything we ever talked about. Since we incorporated as our own entity, the only common thing we had was a phone number. They realized we weren’t going to play ball. As men, they wanted to dictate everything including how we can only grow the way they are growing.”

One day, @dianas_cucina_and_lounge and her ex arrived at work, only to realize their phone lines were redirected to one of the other stores. “Sometimes crappy things happen, and you try to get through it and you don’t try to hold onto all of the details. We went from doing really healthy sales – $9-10k a week, to less than $1k. We were pick-up and delivery only. They weren’t telling my customers that the pizzas were coming from another location, and they weren’t telling people to pick up from the other store. We had to come up with a new name very quickly with no cash flow and very angry customers. This was before the internet – before email and social media.”

When Diana and her then partner needed to come up a name, they went back to their University marketing textbooks. “It was all about the logo, image, and branding, which was terrible advice unless you’re big. We came up with the name Pizza Stop which was cute and gimmicky. We quickly changed to new menus and did our best for direct marketing with mail outs to let people know. But it still went on for months and months where people would call the wrong phone number and show up for their order.”

At this time, within a 5km radius of Diana, there were over 20 different pizza places operating and competing. “Here we are trying to relaunch our and gain our customers back and up the street, there’s a place with stop in the name, so people are starting to confuse us. When people wanted to refer us to their friends, they would inadvertently get the other one. We kept at it, but those were grueling years. I studied marketing and direct marketing and found a couple of different mentors. I wanted to learn as much as I could, especially what’s important if you’re only one store. One mentor said, ‘nobody cares about your logo except your mom. It’s only after you’ve made it.’ I programmed a computer database so my background in computer programming came in handy. This was before POS systems were a thing.”

By 2003-2004 @dianas_cucina_and_lounge and her then partner had conducted all of their research. “We had done all of this different marketing. We sent a blank, anonymous survey on behalf of a fictional entity to see where we fell in with other pizzerias. Some of our best customers filled it out not realizing we were pizza stop. Our quality was setting us apart, but people couldn’t distinguish our logo. Pizza Stop doesn’t reflect the top-quality ingredients we were using. The pepperoni we get is close to $6 a pound. I could get 50 cent pepperoni, but I wouldn’t feed that to my cat because of what’s in it. We decided we needed to change our name to something more personal, and Diana’s Gourmet Pizza was born.”

Diana and her then partner gave people a heads up when the change was happening. “Now the name matched what people could expect from quality. A year later, I started winning awards and I launched my pizza competing career. I went to Las Vegas, Italy, New York, and Ohio. I’m a lifetime learner, so I took the Italian pizza certification course with @capopizza. I was the only woman there. I went to the American Institute of Baking and took their pizza production course in 2006. They asked me to come back and be a speaker in 2007 in a gourmet course. I was a guest speaker for 3 years.”

There was a lot of push and pull at this time in Diana’s life. “I realized by reading and studying marketing and belonging to different restaurant marketing groups, that I couldn’t run the business and grow the business. The restaurant business is not a business of 1. You need a good team. You’re quickly going to run out of energy and time.”

In the restaurant industry there can be high turnover, so @dianas_cucina_and_lounge and her team created an interview structure that helped them build a stronger and more stable team. “There’s a learning curve on how to bring in the right people and interview. We have an information application kit on our website. It’s 3 pages of reading about what you can expect from us and what we expect from you. There are 4 pages you fill out and what we found was that it’s self-weeding. It was too much work for 80% of the people coming in with resumes. If that’s too much work for you, then you don’t belong on this side of the counter. Everything we do is from scratch, so I need people who really want to work with their hands and bodies. I ask what their expected salary, hourly wage, and availability are. You’d be surprised how many people say they want M-Th, 9-3. It’s like, ‘did you check the website? We’re not even open then.’ But the cream floats to the top. At that point you can schedule an interview and we have a standard form we follow.” Diana has found that anytime they veer away from this system, they regret it. “Before, we had what I call Academy Award Interviews. They would tell you everything you want to hear, then, you hire them and make all of these commitments that just fizzle.”

Diana’s Gourmet Pizza was a 900sq ft pick-up/delivery spot with 3 bakers pride ovens and they were outgrowing the space. “Sales had grown close to $16k a week. We had 18 staff including drivers and we couldn’t fit anymore. This was before 3rd party delivery. We started looking at new spaces and we had some false starts, which you don’t realize until you’ve started down the path. We built the new store and went to Middleby Marshall to test out our recipe in their ovens. On average, you have to spend 40-50 hours training an oven tender, so we wanted something that would guarantee a more consistent bake and involve less training. We built a new location 5 minutes south of our existing location and opened in December 2007. I still love the location. It was built to last. We had beautiful stainless steel equipment and fiberglass wall coverings.”

In 2011, @dianas_cucina_and_lounge and her then partner took over the space next door, built a restaurant, and expanded into dine-in. Then, in 2013, her then-partner, who had also become her husband, unexpectedly stepped away from the business. “I had a 6-month-old and 3.5 year old. It was always part of the plan – work the business, grow the business. We had a team and everyone could fill in different roles and grow so my day to day was oversight. When my ex stepped away, it was really really ugly. We had been through all of these difficulties together, so I always felt that if we fell out of sync with each other, we’d become one of those weirdo uncouples who were still good friends and partners. It didn’t go that way unfortunately, so I tried my best to run things for 9 months. My youngest was just over a year and I would have to bring him because I didn’t have care for him. I would be so drained and angry. I had these 2 perfect little faces looking at me and I just couldn’t take it anymore. My soul was telling me, ‘this isn’t right,’ so I made the very very very difficult decision to close my business and go through bankruptcy not knowing what was on the other side, just knowing there would be an end to this financial and physical and spiritual drain.”

Diana made the decision on her birthday. “I thought, ‘I’ll start again and I’ll rebuild.’ I didn’t want to do this for another 5 years. I knew 2 women who were going through something similar. They were husband and wife partners that had big falling outs and suddenly the whole foundation that they had spent their whole life building was crumbling and gone. I had the hard thought, ‘what am I fighting for? A year from now I could be ½ a mil in lawyer fees, for what? To prove this should be mine? In the meantime, I’m being destroyed physically, mentally, and spiritually. My children need me.’ I had waited so long in my life and now I had become a mother and I felt like that was being ripped away. When you’re so angry because all this bullshit is happening, it’s so hard to be a momma. I knew bankruptcy was really ugly and nasty, but at least it would have an end.”

@dianas_cucina_and_lounge had always been very deliberate about stability. “Here I am deciding that it’s better to set sail and figure it out until I can land again safely. I never knew if I’d be in the restaurant industry again. I locked the door and burst into tears. I gave it up divine to the universe. ‘if it is meant to be mine, guide me, and I will listen, and I will gladly take this back.’ The good thing about bankruptcy is that it takes a long time for it all to happen. In that time, I was building my relaunch. I made phone calls and listened to intuition. 6 months later, we reopened in the same location with new partners. I bought the contents through auction sale. There were still brown envelopes telling me I was in shit, but I was building a new life at the same time. It was very tumultuous, but I kept in sight what was really important to me: a house for my babies and I, income, and stability not dependent on someone else. I was disbanded from my bankruptcy in 2015, and I’m happy to say that I bought a house in 2020. One step in front of the other.”

Today, Diana oversees an incredible and successful business while remaining an important member of the pizza industry. “I still judge. I still very much love that pizza is my legacy. A lot of my day-to-day is administrative – marketing, phone calls, emails, some ordering, reviewing new products, interviewing/hiring. I’m lucky that I don’t need to be on the floor every day. Pre-pandemic I was doing tasting nights regularly to test new creations. We’d do pizza and paint nights and pizza making classes. The pandemic set so much of it down and the whole world changed form.”

Though she’s an accomplished pizzaiola, Diana doesn’t always immediately get the recognition she deserves. “When I go places, I don’t wear a sign that says, ‘award-winning pizzaiola,’ and I’ve had old school guys come in and ask if my dad is around. It says so much about the person, not me. How people treat me is a reflection of how they are where they are in their journey. And sometimes in competitions, people are appointed as judges because they need to fill seats, but I’m here because I know.”

@dianas_cucina_and_lounge is also a member of her city council. “When I show up to different board meetings and training events, people don’t realize I have all of this business experience. I’ve been in meetings with members from other municipality’s and they’ll make the connection and go, ‘oh, you’re that Diana!’ and want to know more. If I come in guns blazing and trying to prove myself, I might be off-putting, plus I don’t feel a need to prove myself. Someone once said, ‘oh, you used to be a big deal, and I looked at him and said, ‘does that mean I’m not as talented as I was because I should be more so because I continue to develop myself.’”

Diana wants to be accepted as she is. “I’m not saying I’m better than a man. I love this and I want to play in this space, too. I can remember the early days when I was competing and they were like, ‘all the great chefs are men.’ Right now, this is what I really feel I should be doing. A lot of guys were very kind and respectful and appreciative of my skills and what I was bringing to the table, and there were some that were projecting and undermining. Years ago, I won this second award and publications called me ‘Canada’s Pizza Queen.’ People would call me, ‘Canada’s Pizza Princess,’ and I’d correct them and say, ‘I’m not a princess, I’m a queen.’ Queens run empires, queens have armies. That’s how I identify.”

For other women out there, @dianas_cucina_and_lounge‘s advice is simple. ‘Follow your heart. Tune into your heart. I meditate every day and it’s something I wish I started 20 or 30 years ago. Always trust that gut instinct and divine feminine energy running through you. When you tune into that and let it flow into you, you will rarely get steered wrong. It doesn’t mean there won’t be difficult patches and rough waters, but it’s how you get through it. Trust in that higher self of you. And because of what I’ve been through, always keep your own bank account. In business, have that exit clause. It needs to be a legal document. It’s important to talk about those conversations ahead of time.”

Diana’s boys are now 10 and 13 and they have a strong mom to look up to. “I took my time and I’m glad I did. I’m an older mom and I see the world differently and I’m much more comfortable in my own skin and more likely to stand in my own power than be pushed along in someone else’s agenda.” Diana is authentic, exuberant, and resilient. She’s many things – a columnist, international culinary competition winner, author, judge, consultant, and mother. She’s open, honest, and exemplifies standing in your power. Next time you’re in Winnipeg, reach out to Diana to grab a slice and talk all things business and pizza!