Pizza 9 GM works hard for franchise, donates locally
Pizza.
The cornerstone of many memories — pizza parties celebrate achievement in school, birthdays and a kind of affirmation putting a stamp on a solid victory or providing a cheesy balm after a bitter defeat.
No matter its purpose in our lives, pizza, like the plastic disk preventing the roof of the box from caving in, is a shelter of sorts, a community safe haven meant, by its very design, to be shared.
Pawel Chmielewski, Director of Training for Pizza 9 and General Manager of the chain’s Española North Riverside Drive location, is a firm believer in this dogma and believes that it is the duty of himself and his store to be that very bastion of a traditional, hometown pizza joint.
Individually, Chmielewski’s store, located at 819 N. Riverside Drive, has become a major part of the Española community. Running the gamut from supporting district schools to aiding families raise money for health expenses.
On Sept. 12, he aided the family of Juan Bernal raise money for his fight against bone marrow disease. Offering to give the family 50 percent of all sales made using a special coupon made specifically for the fundraiser.
“The gentleman was sick, and his family was trying to help with expenses,” Chmielewski said. “So we worked with the family and did a fundraising day. We agreed to donate 50 percent profit to the family for the fundraising day to help the family. We were able to give them $1,200.”
Chmielewski’s story is similar to many immigrants taking the long journey from their home countries, in his case Poland, to the U.S.
“I came to the U.S. in 1992, to Massachusetts to the Boston area it was very tough,” he said. “I think I had $5 in my pocket, I was 22 years old.”
He arrived in the U.S. on a Saturday, and immediately went to work the next day, helping his mother clean a bar at 6 a.m., which was one of the three jobs she worked to make ends meet.“My mother, Zofia Chmielewski, was very tough, a very tough lady,” he said. “She worked three jobs, saving money, money, money for family, and I’m like, ‘Oh, I cannot come to this country to do this the rest of my life, something is not right here.’ I walked three miles every day during the winter to a textile plant looking for work. I didn’t know English, and finally the woman in the office said, ‘Don’t come back tomorrow, I’ll call you if there is an opening.’”
He would continue, despite being told not to come back, to walk the total six-mile stretch almost every day to the textile plant seeking employment, his slice of the American Dream. One day, after months of trying, the woman in the office called him.
“After three months of showing up almost on a daily basis, the woman called me and told me to come over,” he said. “She told me that she is going to give me a job in a department where English was necessary. I didn’t know English, but she told me it was my problem and to make it happen. I made it happen.”
Make it happen he did, Chmielewski quickly moved up the ranks until layoffs and the eventual closure of the plant would force him back into the job market. He quickly found a job with Summit Services, an organization specializing in janitorial services, cleaning houses.
Within three months he was assistant manager and within six months, he became facilities manager. Time passed, and eventually Summit Services was absorbed by their competitor Health Care Services, he chose not to move with the transition.
In 2002, he made his way to Albuquerque to work with Service Master Performance, a company similar to Summit, but quickly decided that he needed a change.
“I put in an application to the company that owns Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut, they were looking for general managers,” he said. “The guy told me that I had no experience, and that he didn’t think I was going to work.”
Like much of his experience over 10 years of pounding the professional pavement of the U.S., Chmielewski’s iron work ethic and determination paid off, and he found himself running the Lobos Pizza Hut, near the University of New Mexico Campus where he met Hasan Aslami, the man who started the Pizza 9 franchise.
“I was working for him at the Pizza Hut, and he quit and told me that he was going to open his own,” Chmielewski said. “When I left Pizza Hut, I took a huge pay cut and went and worked for Hasan.”
While taking a brief hiatus from Pizza 9, due to the need for more pay to support a wife and newborn child, he quickly found his way back, and has remained a fixture, for the franchise.
“I left, it was tough, I had a baby, and needed to make more money,” he said. “It was hard, because when I left, I wanted to come back.”
He returned with a vengeance, and started in the kind of grassroots marketing and community support strategies that he, and Pizza 9, continue to maintain to this day.
“I remember coming back, and we started walking door to door, house to house, handing out flyers,” he said. “I would have my wife drop me off at one block early in the morning, and pick me up across town that evening. We worked day and night to get people to come to that first store.”
As Pizza 9 grew, so did its philanthropic and community mindedness, allowing the franchise to build and support its respective communities statewide. As a whole, the franchise was able to make $26,000 in charitable contributions last year.
Outside of community action, he makes a point to be involved with the District’s schools and causes. For this year, he provided 10,000 Great Job gift certificates, offering 7-inch personal pan cheese or pepperoni pizzas to the District to honor students who have achieved academic or personal success. He is also involved in the upcoming Española Valley High School Spirit Walk and Pep Rally, provides fundraising check books to the District to help sports and programs, raise money, provides pizza for concessions at Northern New Mexico College’s home basketball games and is in talks with the District about providing fresh pizza to the District’s lunch program.
“We are going to try and cover the whole District,” he said. “It is a special crust that has to be gluten free, and the government is worried about calories and health. We have found a dough. We found the best dough that we could find, we tested a lot of different options, and found one that we all liked. On top of this, instead of the frozen pizza that kids are getting right now, we will make the pizza fresh right here in our restaurant and we will deliver it to the school fresh. It is all about taking care of those kids.”
It is a strange and uphill journey that brought Chmielewski from Poland to the main drag of Española, but it isn’t that strange, especially in a community that takes care of its own and is built on the shoulders of various and equally remarkable chapters of the American Dream.