I was doing five jobs at once

Prepping food. Running the deli counter. Answering phones. Managing staff. Trying to keep a legacy alive.

It was 2000. I’d just opened my own gourmet shop in Oakville, Ontario, carrying on a tradition my parents started back in 1980. We weren’t just another deli. We made real meals for busy professionals who didn’t have time to cook. Gourmet pasta. Prepared entrées. Grilled chicken.

I had the passion. I had the recipes. I had the vision.

What I didn’t have was a system that actually worked.

Everything fell on me

Finding the right people was a constant battle. People didn’t show up. When they did, they were overwhelmed. And when they weren’t there? Everything fell on me.

That’s when the real damage started.

A customer calls at 10:30 in the morning on a Tuesday. They want lunch for their office — a decent order, two or three hundred dollars. I’m elbow-deep in prep work in the kitchen. My hands are covered in flour and sauce. I can’t get to the phone in time.

Thirty minutes later I call them back. Too late. They’d already ordered from the sandwich shop down the street.

This wasn’t a one-time thing. It was happening daily. Multiple times a day. Every missed call meant lost money, and the sinking feeling that I was letting people down.

Watching customers walk back out

I’d watch someone come in, realise they’d have to wait, and just leave. And I couldn’t do anything about it, because I was stuck in the kitchen or on another call or dealing with a staff problem.

My family built something special. We had the quality. We had the reputation. But the system was broken.

I was working eighty-hour weeks trying to do the impossible — be everywhere at once, answer every call, manage every crisis. And I was still losing orders. Still watching competitors win by simply picking up the phone.

It was never a cooking problem

One day it hit me. This isn’t a cooking problem. It isn’t a staff problem. It’s a system problem.

I couldn’t hire perfect staff. I couldn’t clone myself. But there had to be a way to never miss a call again — to answer every customer, every time, without the hiring chaos.

So I started looking at how bigger companies solved it. The technology existed. It was just built for businesses with IT departments and budgets I didn’t have.

That’s when I decided to build something different. Something for owners like me.

What happened next

I built an AI that answers the phone. It picks up on the first ring, every hour of every day. It takes the order, books the appointment, and writes everything down properly. It never gets overwhelmed and it never calls in sick.

One of the businesses using it now is Palma Pasta, in Mississauga. Same problem I had — a busy kitchen and a phone nobody could get to. Here is their owner talking about what changed.

What I learned from all of it is simple. The businesses that win aren’t the ones with the most staff. They’re the ones whose phone always gets answered.