Let me explain how video games and app development translate to food. It’s all logistics. What do you get when you spend 15 years delivering pizzas and managing delivery drivers? Someone whose brain has been not only trained but perhaps born to think this way. Consider what I did for work prior to all that — connecting people with tickets, then connecting those tickets to the venues, in cities I’d never been to, like New York. Handling throughput at a theater. Handling throughput at a restaurant. These are jobs I really enjoyed doing. There’s something about me that looks at life through the lens of a logistical algorithm.

Everything had to derive from somewhere. Nothing just showed up magically. So how did it get there? What did it take to get there? What were the costs, the fuel expended, how many people did it take, did it arrive on time? If it broke down, what was the contingency plan? I think I was just born and trained, and then spent a lot of years developing a brain for logistics.

The Early Years: Red Lobster and the Art of Throughput

When I was 17 and 18 years old I was on a team of hosts and hostesses at Red Lobster on the east side of Madison, Wisconsin. We used to take bribes to get people seated quicker. Our team’s throughput numbers were the highest the restaurant had ever seen. The servers made more money, the bartenders made more money, the restaurant made more money — so much so that it put them in the next earning bracket for Darden Restaurants’ capex expenditure program. They got a brand new remodeling, all because of me and my hosts and hostesses.

Customer service was baked into every job I had — from selling tickets at Ticketmaster and Reserve America, to upselling popcorn at a concession stand when I was a teenager working at a movie theater. It played a big part in my later management years at Glass Nickel Pizza.

15 Years of Pizza Delivery: Managing the Door

At the Glass Nickel Pizza east side store, I was responsible for roughly 70% of that company’s take through the delivery door. I managed a team of up to 40 drivers at one point. They all came and went through one door, and I managed that door — which probably earned whatever 70% of $5.5 million in annual sales works out to.

I got interviewed twice by the news: once because my vehicle got stolen, and once because we were delivering through a polar vortex. Both I would chalk up to logistical expertise — or lack thereof in the case of my vehicle getting stolen. I should have known better.

The RV Journey: Logistics on Wheels

When I left the pizza place, I encountered a brand new logistical challenge. I now lived in an RV and towed behind me a Jeep Wrangler. When you’re traveling the country in an RV towing a Jeep, the logistical challenge is immense. You have to navigate routes, figure out where there are low bridges you can’t clear, or narrow construction lanes you can’t pass through. And here’s the critical detail: when you’re towing a Jeep behind an RV, you cannot reverse.

If you try to reverse, the front wheels of the Jeep go all out of alignment and the whole rig immediately goes off track. I traveled all over America by myself in an RV with a Wrangler in tow and I couldn’t back up. I couldn’t accidentally go down a road that would require reversing. I had to solve the logistical challenge of a brake system operating across two vehicles through mountain passes, and figure out how to feed myself off the grid, solo.

I did all of this while simultaneously selling my house as a for-sale-by-owner. If you’ve ever tried that, you know it’s its own logistical adventure. I thought the house would sell in two months tops — everyone said it would sell by the end of the week because it was a seller’s market. It took five months. The issue was that my house was an oversized corner lot in a tiny-house neighborhood, with five bedrooms, three bathrooms, and two kitchens. Nobody who could afford to live in that neighborhood could afford my house. But I sold it — coordinating showings from thousands of miles away — because logistics is what I do.

Coming Home: Food Bank, Willy Street Co-op, and a New Direction

When I came home from my journey, I was directionless. I had nothing to manage. I tried to start a photography business doing real estate photography; it went nowhere. I convinced myself that I was much better when someone gave me a to-do list than when I had to invent my own. So I took a job at a food bank, because a friend was the director and it seemed like a good fit. It was not — but it taught me a lot.

From there I went on to assistant-managing a deli at the Willy Street Co-op on the east side of Madison. It’s a great place, though honestly it bored me. I never had much of a passion for cooking, and I was managing a cheese department while not even eating cheese. But I was able to put my ingenuity and my logistical need for an outlet to good use.

Building Apps: The Logical Next Step

I created the six different apps you’ve read about in other articles here — one of which is MadFoodLoop.com. That was a great idea, and I think it’s still going somewhere logistically. And in creating these apps I realized something: because my mind has a knack for logistics, it naturally understands how a web app or an Android app comes to life. There is a natural sequential order to things. Formulas, equations, if-this-then-that chains have to happen in the right order. That’s where I excel, and that’s why I’ve been able to build six different websites.

letsnarf.com: Answering “Are You Still Serving Food?”

One of my proudest achievements is letsnarf.com. I always ask the same question whenever I go out to a bar or a restaurant: “Is your grill still on? Are you still cooking food? Are you still serving food?” So I decided to build an app that answers that question.

It works through a combination of search results, user feedback, and owner feedback. Add a little Google AdSense into the mix and we’re off to the races. It connects to platforms like DoorDash, GrubHub, and Eat Street so that when a user finds a late-night restaurant that’s still serving food, they can pre-order or head there in person. The app is intended especially for people getting off the bus or leaving a concert who want to grab a shawarma or a hoagie. It searches specifically for kitchen hours — not alcohol hours, not general open hours like Google returns. It answers one question: is the kitchen still serving food right now?

That’s the thread that connects everything — pizza delivery, an RV trip, app development, video games. It’s all logistics. Thanks for reading. —BRB Scotty