Sweetie Pie is a Toronto-based business that sells all manner of pecan pies, lemon pies, strawberry pies, apple pies, blueberry pies, and even some non-pie-related sweet treats. Owner Cesario Ginjo is one of our long-time clients and a serial entrepreneur, so we wanted to talk to him about what made Sweetie Pie such an explosive success in such a short time, how he manages so many businesses, and what he looks for in internet support for his companies.
PRIMUS: Could you tell us a bit about yourself, where you’re located, and what your three companies do?
CESARIO GINJO: I’m in downtown Toronto, my full name is Cesario Ginjo, and I’ve been a serial entrepreneur since the age of 21, so for over 30 years.
I started my career not in business. I actually went to technical school, graduated, and started a career in aircraft maintenance. So I worked in the technical sphere, how things work together, taking them apart and whatnot. And I always had that gift of talking too much. So I had two sides of my brain fighting with each other. Early on, many years ago when I worked for Boeing, unfortunately, I got laid off.
I kind of didn’t know what to do. I had a certain set of skills that it’s not like you can just go find a job—there are only really one or two employers in Canada. So I started a business that led to me really enjoying being my own boss. I was in the meat business for 15 years until I sold that business, then in 2000, I got into the floral business. I created what ended up being the largest floral company in Canada. And again, this is from complete ignorance, not knowing the industry, and coming in as an outsider. In 2000, we created the first online presence for flowers in Canada and grew that to a very sizable company. We’ve partnered along the way with 1-800 Flowers in the US, and we created the first online flower program for Costco, which still exists.
We helped a lot of large businesses create an online presence, when it came to gift-giving, which kind of planted the seed of being a techie, building websites. We did everything in-house. In 2015 I had some personal problems. I had to downsize and change things. And then I found myself asking, what do I do after being in the floral business for so many years? I took stock of what I had and built a digital agency called INDigital Group where we do content development, websites, apps . . . mostly what we do at INDigital is what I did for myself: we help small businesses go from an idea, a seed, what the flowers were in 2000, to creating a complete enterprise company. The third business is Sweetie Pie, which opened its first location in March of 2021.
Did you coach other entrepreneurs?
Well, that was the funny part. That was the free part. So that was what I was giving away for free because I love doing it. People would call me up and say, “Look, I have this idea, how do I do it like you did it with flowers? And you were successful. How do I do it?” And then the by-product was the realization that, well, I need a website. I need an app. I need some content. I need some digital marketing. And being a pioneer in that industry, you could appreciate that in 2000-2003, having an e-commerce website, it wasn’t even called e-commerce back then.
Social media wasn’t what it is today. Every six months we had a different platform that didn’t stick around, until Facebook. It was the one that stuck around. So understanding how to market yourself to these new platforms became important. So that’s what I did. And then along the way, in late 2017, we purchased and then developed a chocolate company called Dolce Chocolate.
A lot of people say to me, “You’re all over the place,” but if they really look at what I do, they’ll see that every business that I get into has a synergy effect. One supports the other.
How long has Sweetie Pie been in business?
Since July 2020. You know, purely by accident. My wife and I were driving down Little Italy in Toronto (if anybody knows that area where I grew up) and I would drive by this little coffee shop that had been there forever, and I noticed it had a For Sale sign. This was about three weeks into COVID, and I didn’t believe that they were closed due to COVID. So me being inquisitive and nosy, I had my agent call up and learned that they were also going through some personal problems and were selling. So we ended up consummating a deal. And then what I had left was a little coffee shop. It’s one thing when you look at it and want to buy it because it’d be fun to own the business—and then once you own it, you’re like, “So what do I do with it? Oh no. Now I’m in it.”
Who are your customers?
I had a brand that I had kind of shelved many, many years ago called Sweetie Pie. And I kind of looked around, you know, as I do for other customers, and went “Well, we have a lot of bakeries in Toronto, but there is no pie place. Like something that if you think pies this is what you think—sweetie pie. We had a name that kind of was really cute. So I went off and do what I do, and then started a brand, and this was originally supposed to be one location. This was something for my partner to have a full-time job, and it quickly grew. We did a lot of work. She was the force behind it.
The community is what took us. They embraced Sweetie Pie and they just demanded more. So we realized really quickly that one store wasn’t going to cut it. In March 2021 we opened our second location and then after that the floodgates just went. It literally went from two locations in March 2021 to where we sit today with seven locations.
So the dream of many entrepreneurs is to grow and have multiple locations, and you were able to do it in a pandemic.
I mean, everybody has their take on what they can take on. I would never recommend to anyone or my clients to attempt to do what we did. I think we are the fastest growing baking business in Canada. And it’s because I had that experience. I had created the largest floral company in Canada, you know, and at our peak, we had nine locations across Canada. And back then it was a more difficult time because when I did it with our floral company, we didn’t have the digital tools that we have today. We didn’t have Zoom calls. If I needed to speak to my manager face-to -face, I had to get on a plane, fly to Calgary, fly to Vancouver, fly to Ottawa. In today’s world, we have so many tools, we could be in Calgary within seconds.
My partner is great. She’s the sweetie pie in Sweetie Pie. She just has a way of connecting with people. I do all the business and the background development, the construction and whatnot. So we have a really good team and I think that’s what it is. If you really think of it logistically—two years, seven locations—that is a super, super, hyper speed to do that. They’re all in great locations.
You can build the locations, but I mean, speaking with you guys, Primus, made a difference. A lot of the things that get small businesses in the mud is connecting with vendors. Working with Primus made it very easy. It’s simple to the point where it became robotic; I send an e-mail to my sales rep, and he sends me back an installation date.
It gets installed 2-3 days later. My modem is at my office. And literally it’s plugged into the modem. And our phones and our Wi-Fi are up. With the long laundry list of things we need to do, that’s the one thing that we didn’t have to worry about, thanks to Primus.
Are you the IT guy at your company? Are you the technical lead at your company? Do you have to fill those multiple hats?
Well, that’s a great question. Friends of mine and people that I work with, they always say, “You’ve got your fingers in so many pies.” But to your point there, if I didn’t own a digital agency, I would have to outsource my IT. That would then become cumbersome because now there’s friction between what you need and how to explain it to an outside company, how to explain your dilemmas and how your business works.
We all have individual needs as a business, right? I mean, we all need internet, but other factors change. We all need phones, you know? But do we need IP phones? Do we need landline phones? What’s the signal like? A lot of people don’t think of that. Instead they go into their business, and they don’t analyze even the bandwidth that they need—what do I need today? What do I need tomorrow? And can Primus, my provider, be there to support me, and how do I do that? What’s the path going forward?
It also sheds light on how having the right vendor partner supplier. Either you have to do more of that consulting work and do the thinking or you have a partner who can take that on for you as a business.
100%. And COVID just compounded things. So getting into locations, making appointments, not making appointments, even though you can make an appointment with Primus, there’s still other people that have to do other things that don’t always fit your schedule. We all went through challenges in the last two years with COVID. And again, we did what we could. I think our success is from having done it before.
How important is the internet to your businesses? Where do you rank internet service in terms of importance? How much time do you want to spend thinking about your internet plan day-to-day? We won’t be offended if it’s zero percent.
Internet is probably the most important thing. Most businesses today are tied to their internet. That’s still another thing that people kind of look at and make mistakes when starting a business, is that they look at their location so much. They put so much emphasis on trying to be somewhere, and paying very high rents, when they should be looking at their industry, the service provider, the internet. Because if your internet is too slow, it affects your entire business.
So let’s use an analogy. If you hire an employee and they’re very slow, you would not be happy with that employee. So why are you OK with your internet being slow? Or spending a few extra dollars on your internet? I think people have that mindset, and what needs to be changed is that it’s not viewed as an expense. Your internet should not be qualified as an expense; it should be qualified as an asset. Because that’s what it does. Your internet makes you money. You know, your lights are an expense. You don’t need five lights on, you can have two lights on—but you can’t have zero on your internet.
Your internet is provided by Primus for Business to your Sweetie Pie locations. Who do you use for your phone system, if I may ask? Do you use Primus?
It’s an internal. Again, we use our own software for our phone system and that goes to being able to leverage our technicians, where we have developers on staff. I’m a big proponent of building within. And when growing, this allows any business—and again, not every business can do this—but when we started, when we were about three stores in, we did use Primus for all our phone service.
What’s your favourite part of using Primus for business internet? What’s it like to use our products? What are the aspects or features of our service that you enjoy?
You’ve heard of the old adage time is money. So in that case, Primus saves me money every time I open a store. Because it’s essentially very simple. You send an email to your sales rep. They then send an onboarding email. They then call you to confirm and ask what address you’d like the modem to be sent to. The modem typically shows up in 24 to 48 hours.
And then from there, you wait for a tech to set up the line, what they call the dry loop, and you plug it in. You show up at the location, plug it in, and it’s working.
I’ve also used Bell, Rogers, and Telus in thirty years of being in business. Primus customer service or tech department, they’re great. 100%.
How would you describe our customer support?
That’s the thing. You guys have a smaller customer support team, but the chances are, if you call in every once in a while, you’re going to get the same person. And they remember you.
Reliability has been in the news a lot for obvious reasons. How did you evaluate reliability before choosing a service? Do you have contingency plans for a possible outage? How did you feel about the recent outage with a large vendor?
Once that happens, it’s now personal. So you’re not talking to a robot even though it’s a physical person. And I say “as a robot” because they’re going through the motions—they’re dealing with a thousand people a day. And when you’re dealing with that many people, there’s no way you’re going to be able to connect on a personal level, right? But with Primus, it’s such a small team. And they know each other and you might say, “Well, I talked to Jim. Oh yeah, I saw Jim in the hallway. He told me you were gonna call.”
That’s what you want when your internet goes down, because it will. Nobody’s perfect. If people want perfection, they should go somewhere else in the world because we’re dealing with wires and tech and things that break.
I know people get mad when their internet goes down. But don’t look at that. Look at how the company deals with the problem. For me that’s more important. A big provider’s internet went down. You know, a month ago I had that provider at home. The biggest problem for me was no communication. I’m okay with it taking 24 hours. Great. I can now live my life accordingly. But when you don’t know, you can’t move on. At least with Primus, they’ll tell you. And they’ll call you back, which is what I like. If they say they’re going to call you back, they will call you back.
You talked about price and you talked about speed. So what would be the third most important factor beyond price and speed?
We all like price. But I’m not a price shopper and I’ve never been. I’m Portuguese, so we like a deal, it’s in our blood. That’s how we were raised, to always negotiate. With that said, for me service comes first. When you save that extra $5 or $10 a month, but you can’t get an answer? You don’t think about that $10 you saved. You think about bad service—that is your first complaint.
It should be service first, price second, then accessibility. If you’re a smaller business, if it takes an extra few days to set up, you might not care. If you’re a start-up and you’re on a budget, the extra $10 means a lot to you. If you have one location, what are the chances that anything will ever happen? Might be once a year, right? But when you have multiple locations like we do, it’s the odds. So if you think about it, if I have seven problems a year, that’s like one problem per store a year. I look at it that way. It’s all about the analytics.
So you talked about outages. As somebody who owns multiple locations, do you feel that you have to have a contingency plan for a possible outage?
In a perfect world, if we had unlimited funds, absolutely we would have multiple providers. You’d have two accounts, and you’d turn over. But instead what we do is we invest a little bit with our partner Moneris and we went to complete digital processing machines, so our credit card machines do not rely on having internet. So when there is Wi-Fi, we use the Wi-Fi. If the Wi-Fi goes down, we can continue to run our business. That’s because we also understand that, again, the world is not perfect. There’ll be outages; there’ll be problems. Somebody will push a button and delete everything. Everybody will have problems. But again, it’s about communication. It’s how the provider communicates with the customer when this happens.
Do some of your employees work from home? If yes, do you add them to your internet plan?
We don’t have any, and some of our divisions could. But maybe call me a dinosaur. I’m a believer that work is done from the office and your home life is at home. There has to be a boundary. If you’re going to work from home, how do you stop your employer from bugging you at home? Not everybody shares my beliefs on this, but I believe that once you go home, you go home. Spend time with your family, do what you have to do. You can always do it in the morning.
Do you think there’s a visibility for smaller providers? Do you have any advice to other business owners about choosing the right provider?
The conversation comes up regularly. In fact, over the years that I’ve been with Primus, we’ve converted, I think, five of our clients over to Primus. I’ll be honest with you, it isn’t about Primus. Because if Primus wasn’t good, I would say Primus wasn’t good. We don’t benefit from sending customers to Primus. I do it because I truly believe that they fit. You know, they’ll benefit by working with Primus, be it with, like we were talking about, price or service.
We work with a lot of start-ups and they’re looking for providers. We lay it out and say, “Listen, it’s your choice. You’re starting up. This is what they offer. It’s gonna cost you this much. You know, you don’t need a Ferrari right now. You’re okay with buying a Honda, right? Once you get to needing a Ferrari, and if you feel that Primus can’t supply that, consider your options then.”
Because Primus has a niche. They’re never going to be your one thousand phone system supplier. But Primus has a market. And the market is your little bake shop, like we were. I’m proof of that. We were new to Primus at one point. As we were growing, we did have conversations about will we have to leave? At what point are we going to, you know, get to the point where Primus cannot provide us that same service, right?
How many Sweetie Pie locations do you have today? What are the challenges you face owning a business with multiple locations?
We’re at seven locations and we have another four leases signed. So we’ll have another four locations by March of 2023. So we’ll be at eleven locations. And we don’t see anything changing. The great thing is, if you guys don’t hear it first, we start franchising in January 2023. So, Sweetie Pie will be available for franchising. And as part of the franchising deal, Primus will come with the package.
So how can Primus for Business keep your business? What do we need to keep doing?
It goes back to, you know, status quo, right? I don’t foresee our business model changing. If all your employees changed, that’s the only real hurdle I see. We’d have to redevelop all our relationships again. But with that said, you always have Jason in the service department, you always have that connection. So you can always reach out and say, “Hey, you know, can you hook me up with a new rep?”
What differentiates us from our competitors? What’s it like to work with us?
Primus is not faceless. Primus for Business, that group, it has a face. You know who you’re dealing with. It’s what you know when you’ve been doing business as long as I have—it’s the old-school way of doing business. It was done with a handshake. You knew who you were dealing with. When you said you were going to do something, you did it. So it’s that mentality. They know how to deal with small businesses.
Why is it important to work with the same providers?
When you call some of the larger providers, you get a script. With Primus, you get a person.
I’m not blaming or saying anything bad about the other providers. It’s that they’re dealing with lots and lots and lots of customers. So at the end of the day, do you want to be a big fish in a big pond? Or a big fish in a small pond? So working with Primus, if you’re a fairly sized business, you know, with even one or two or three locations, you are now a big fish in a small pond. Big fish get taken care of. Big fish in a big pond—you’re just another big fish. They don’t care, right? They see you as just another customer.
So I tell my customers to leverage that. If you’ve got some business, use that. When you call Primus, say, “Listen, I’m adding another line. What can you do for me? Do you have a dedicated rep?” You know, it’s not always about money. It’s about having a phone number that, if I have a problem or question, I can call. And you guys have that, so that’s important.
What advice do you have for the team at Primus for Business?
At the end of the day, I think everybody’s doing a great job. I mean, it shows in the retention of your customers. You don’t hear of people leaving Primus.
Is it worth it to look for a bargain internet?
You know, pricing for the most part, they’re just looking for somebody that gives a crap. And I’ve been there myself. So, you know, I was with Blue, mostly with cell phones. And then they do something where you know they don’t care. People will not change. I find that I will not change services because it’s a lot of work.
But when I felt unimportant—then price doesn’t matter at that point. It doesn’t matter what you give me, how much I pay. You know, it’s my pride and how dare you make me feel small. Primus should be the person that gives you empathy. That shoulder to cry on. You know that they’re there.
Because when I have a problem with my provider and all I get is “I understand, I understand,” I think, no, you don’t understand! Because I just spent three hours on the phone and I got disconnected six times!
But I can tell you, I’ve been with you guys for over two years, and I’ve never gotten disconnected like that. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. But if I do, I get a call back. And it’s the same person who calls me right back.
It doesn’t matter what we spend, even if it’s $5. It’s still our hard-earned $5. I worked hard for those $5. So you are minimizing how hard I worked, and I gave you that money, right? Just because I have a $30 plan and somebody else has a $600 plan, you should treat me the same way.
And with Primus they don’t care if you have the $30 plan. They have one way of treating people. So if you’re going to get treated really nicely, then why not come on board?
