Venezia's New York Style Pizzeria

Challenge

At Congenius, our mission is to help the everyday company solutionize challenges to optimize their business and boost the organization to the next level. Recently, that everyday company happened to be an award-winning local chain of pizzerias located in the metro Phoenix area, Venezia’s Pizzeria. We were proud to leverage our connected team, our geniuses, to facilitate their transition to a more efficient, cost-saving merchant payment system.

About Venezia’s Pizzeria

For more than 20 years, Venezia’s Pizzeria has been a local, family-owned New York-style pizzeria with five locations across Phoenix and the East Valley. Blessed with family recipes passed down for generations from Italy, the first Phoenix-area Venezia’s location opened in 1998 on Mill and Southern in Tempe, with “Mom” making her signature marinara at home and transporting it to the restaurant in a huge sauce pot. From that original location in 1998 to 2015, the family-owned operation expanded to five Valley locations, the most recent location found in North Phoenix at Tatum and Greenway.

In 2019, Venezia’s partnered with Sun Devil Athletics, and their signature giant pepperoni and cheese slices became available at all football games at Sun Devil Stadium, baseball games at Phoenix municipal stadium, softball games at Alberta B. Farrington Softball Stadium, volleyball matches and gymnastics competitions at Wells Fargo Arena, as well as other Sun Devil events.

Between running dine-in, online orders, pick-up, and delivery options at five Valley locations (with plans to soon expand to seven locations total), plus the partnership with Sun Devil athletics, Venezia’s needed a little genius inspiration and help in streamlining the merchant processing aspect of the business. And that’s where Congenius came in.

Solution – Business Optimization (BizOps) with Congenius

At the heart of Congenius is our people, and the relationships we are proud to build with our client partners. When consulting with Venezia’s on the goals for their organization, it was clear they were in need of some business optimization when it came to their merchant processing system, and we were thrilled to be able to improve their performance while reducing costs. Here’s how Congenius was able to solutionize for Venezia’s:

• Facilitation of a Direct Partnership with FIS Worldpay. Congenius was able to help facilitate Venezia’s transition over to Worldpay Direct on their Vantiv Express platform to cut out the middleman, Congenius is a direct partner of FIS Worldpay. Previously, when problems would arise with Venezia’s merchant payment space, it was never clear where to turn for a solution, which resulted in too much downtime with their payment system. With this direct partnership, technical support issues are resolved much quicker, which means less downtime and more time to sell more pizza!
• Realization of a Significant Annual Operational Cost Savings. Congenius secured new, discounted POS terminals for all of Venezia’s locations that include contactless payment such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. In addition to the optimization of hardware, we structured a cost per transaction that has allowed Venezia’s to save about $2000 monthly, or $24,000 annually. With two more locations on the near horizon, over five years, that’s a projected annual savings of nearly $28,000 or almost $140,000 in a five year time frame. That’s a lotta dough!
• Continued, Ongoing Support. In full transparency, there were a few, minor hiccups while transitioning Venezia’s merchant process system to a more efficient system intended to reduce organizational costs, as to be expected with any large undertaking. But according to Domenick Montanile, Owner & President of Venezia’s, the cost-savings has been “astronomical,” plus he’s appreciative of the consistent integration support provided by Sean Miller of Congenius. Domenick states, “Sean Miller is a man who stood by his word, which is not normal in this industry. There were several conference calls and long days when Sean dedicated time from his busy schedule to assure all issues were resolved and orders were flowing correctly with our website, mobile application and in restaurant locations. We are grateful for Congenius to be able to use their partnership with Worldpay to make this a smoother transition. They also went to bat for us to make sure the cost savings was what we expected, which is why we’ve been able to save about $2,000 per month because of this process.” From the perspective of Congenius, we are humbled to be able to leverage our ongoing partnership with both Worldpay and Venezia’s to create this win-win solution, and we certainly look forward to helping Venezia’s with their future business optimization needs, technical and beyond.

For more information regarding merchant payments, or our business optimization services, please contact us at 480.900.1850 or email, info@congenius.io