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May 29, 2024
We chat with Leslie Polizzotto, founder of The Donut Project, about her journey from practicing law to running a successful doughnut shop in New York City.
Host: This is Leslie, founder of Donut Project. We'll do an official introduction again here in a second. But what is your morning routine? Your coffee routine? And you're asking me, right?
Leslie: I'm asking you. Yeah. When I wake up, I usually drink a little bit of water that's leftover on my bedside table from the night before. I always have water. And then after that water's done, I go to my espresso machine and I do two pods and I pull long shots of those. I drink it black—the two shots in one cup. And then after that, I usually don't drink any more coffee. That's usually around 7 a.m.
Host: So I think context for everyone—you used to go into a shop to make donuts every morning. What was your routine then? Did you use the espresso machine at the Donut Project?
Leslie: I did not drink coffee once I got there. I pulled shots on my beautiful La Marzocco GB5 dual handle espresso machine—that was the most expensive piece of equipment in the shop. But I didn't drink it. I don't know why. I just didn't really have time, and I like coffee when it's really hot. So if it sits around and I have to set it down, I don't want it anymore. So I just, once in a blue moon, I might pull a shot and have it. It wasn't a habit.
Host: That would have been my guilty pleasure if I was in your shoes. A lot of questions. I'm even curious what happened to the espresso machine, but we'll talk about that later.
Host: So to give everyone an introduction, Leslie and I are both in New York right now. Leslie is the founder of the Donut Project, which has a fascinating story leading up to before the Donut Project. She was a Bottle customer, which I loved, and the shop was actually in the neighborhood that I live in, which was really cool. Before we get into the discussion, I also want to give a shout out to Lou from Smash Meals. Lou pushed us to do a meal delivery conference, which we did in Nashville. It was amazing—so fun meeting so many people in person. We're going to be doing more of those around the country and getting people together.
So I see this as a two-part conversation. We're going to start talking about Leslie's journey, what the Donut Project was all about, how she grew to over 200,000 followers on Instagram, and marketed the business. Then part two of the discussion will be her realizations as an entrepreneur—what it's like thinking through life and running a business and what she's up to now.
Host: To start out, Leslie, give us the backstory as quick as you can—what led you to open the Donut Project? It's a very unusual path.
Leslie: I was actually a lawyer practicing law in Los Angeles, California. My husband had a lot of business in New York, so we would go to New York a lot and I would tag along and work out of my law firm's New York office. I had everything curated around food. I was totally a foodie and defined dining. I knew about chefs. I was really into the food scene.
My husband and I decided we were going to move to New York. It was good for his business and I really wanted to do it because I was in love with New York and I'm an East Coast person. California was fine for 12 years, but after that, you're done with it pretty much.
I met a guy who was a bartender and we became friends because we would frequent where he worked. He told me he wanted to open a donut shop, and I pulled out my phone and showed him pictures of donuts. I said, "I love donuts. They make me so happy. I'm moving to New York. Maybe I can help you write a business plan and raise capital." It was exciting to be involved in a food business.
So long story short, I moved to New York right after Sandy hit. My law firm's office was underwater, and they said they couldn't really have me start right away. So I started diving into this donut deal, and the more I got into it, the more I loved it. I said to my law firm, "I'm just going to do this." I opened the Donut Project in October of 2015. I'd never owned my own business before. My partner at the time had never owned a business either. New York has the highest failure rate of any city in the world. It's super competitive. We were stupid and naive to even try it, but we did.
Host: That's always the case. I feel you have to be too naive to give it a go.
Leslie: I just loved them. I used to eat them. I grew up in the South and I only knew Krispy Kreme—that was literally the only donut shop there. When I moved to California, there were donut shops everywhere—all these mom-and-pop Korean shops. There were different kinds, and people would bring them in huge boxes to the office. I would notice how everybody would laugh and gather around them and make jokes. It brought some relief into the very tense daily life of a litigation attorney in downtown Los Angeles. It was joyful instead of negative.
Host: So was that part of the vision of the Donut Project—more fun flavors like Krispy Kreme had, but in New York, where they weren't doing that?
Leslie: No one was doing it here or anywhere. My old business partner was a bartender who had worked in fine dining, and I was a huge foodie. So it made sense to take inspiration from food and cocktails for our flavors. That's what set us apart from everyone else and actually put us on a path of gaining notoriety and publicity all for free—literally changing our lives overnight because of what we were doing.
Host: Let's dig into that. I'm curious to set the scene. What did you guys open? Was it a shop? Where was it? How did you figure out where to open?
Leslie: We had a retail storefront in the West Village of Manhattan, on Morton Street right off of Bleecker. It's a highly trafficked tourism heart of Greenwich Village. We were right off the corner because we couldn't afford to be on Bleecker itself. The corner spot on Bleecker was $27,000 a month for not even 500 square feet. Our location of 725 square feet was $8,000. So we said, "Okay, we'll take that one," and it ended up being a beautiful street. We became a destination. So it didn't matter where we were. People would have come to us if we were hanging off a cliff. The location was a financial thing, but it ended up being just fine.
Host: And this was the original location you kept to the end when you closed in February?
Leslie: Yeah, that's right.
Host: So what were you serving? What was your vision for the donuts you would sell?
Leslie: From day one, we had a bacon maple bar. A bar-shaped donut is a Midwest and West Coast thing that no one does here. So all the West Coast and Midwest people who come to New York are thrilled to get our bar-shaped donut. We did an olive oil black pepper donut that nobody had ever heard of. We called it "the Bronx," and it stayed on the menu the entire time.
But a really important one was our beet and ricotta donut. We called it "Those Beats Are Dope"—it was a ricotta filling and a beet glaze. We literally went to the bodega on the corner, got beets, cut off the greens, juiced the beets, and made a glaze from it. That's the donut that actually won us a donut competition when we were only three months old.
Host: I've had that one. And honestly, we should have told everyone to bring doughnuts to this talk because otherwise we're going to be thinking about it the whole time.
Leslie: We had absolutely no money because when we signed the lease, they gave us three or four months free to do renovations, but renovations took six months. We were literally paying rent for two months without getting any revenue. We were woefully undercapitalized. The whole thing should have crumbled many times, but it didn't—just from sheer determination. I don't quit, and I won't quit until it works.
We had no money for advertising, and there was this little thing that was just becoming really popular called Instagram. It didn't have algorithms. You post it on Instagram and it could go viral. We would have videos go viral for a million views. Now, it's almost impossible to do that. But food and Instagram was becoming a big thing. This was 2015.
I just reached out to a couple of people that seemed to like food and had food feeds, and invited them to come taste the donuts. If they liked them, I asked them to please post about them. And that's what they did. So organically—which is the only way I've ever done it—is how I grew our following. It's crazy to think that's less than 10 years old.
Host: It was the Wild West. You could post on there and if you had a hundred thousand followers, all a hundred thousand followers would get that post. Nowadays that's not the case.
Leslie: Exactly. It's a completely different ball game. We were fortunate enough to get the publicity and press from Instagram when it was free and fair.
Host: What did you do to grow your following further? What were the strategies you used?
Leslie: It all really came from inviting people to come taste. There was this one influencer called Food Baby Mike Chow who, at the time, only had one child. I invited him to come taste a donut we were thinking about releasing. It was really crazy and outside of the box, and we were a little concerned that we were pushing the envelope too much. It was called the Everything Donut.
He came and tasted the donut and took one home. He took a picture of it with his son's face in the middle of the donut hole and posted it to his feed that afternoon. We got a call from Gothamist, a website here in New York that was heavily into food and lifestyle. They called the shop and asked, "Hey, we just saw this doughnut on the feed. Can you tell us about it?"
We did a short story over the phone, and literally the next day we were like, "Okay, how many of these should we make?" The phone started ringing off the hook—ABC News, NBC News, papers from London. Every daytime TV show in New York City wanted it on their set. It literally changed our lives overnight. We were four months old.
Host: Wow. That was insane. And nothing like that would happen today.
Leslie: Right. It's really hard for anything like that to happen now. But yeah, the shock and awe—it changed our life. And with that press, the newspaper articles, the online articles—all of those bundled everyone to us, and they followed us. So we just grew our following for free through traditional forms of media that were keeping an eye on social media.
Host: How did you see that happen and dream up other ways to leverage Instagram and grow beyond just the influencer stuff?
Leslie: I really wanted to grow our following, but we were just so fortunate that we started getting requests to do collaborations and partnerships. We were doing special donuts with other brands, and they would have huge PR teams coordinating everything. We would send donuts to media and influencers. That would continue to grow our following.
We were touching more and more people's lives, and they would become fans. Our growth came from our collaboration marketing tactics.
Host: So for everyone listening, Leslie would feature a new donut with a partner of some kind every week. I didn't realize—this was happening before there was even the word "collab" or "collaboration." How did that start?
Leslie: The initial ones just came in from the press. Since my business partner was a bartender and I was a huge drinker, we always had a cocktail donut on the menu. That was something novel and different from everyone else. We had bacon, olive oil, black pepper, beets, cheese—and we had old-fashioned cocktail donuts. We had a bourbon maple donut. We always had an alcohol one on the menu.
So all these alcohol brands started reaching out saying, "We'll send you the alcohol. Can you make a donut for this event or for this release?" We had a cage full of alcohol in our basement that we would get because they would send us so much stuff. It was insane.
When that gets seen by the eyes of other PR people, then they reach out with their clients. "Oh, I have a brand releasing a new cheese. Can you do a donut with that?" Sure. Here's the process: we sell the product, we promote your brand. It became a strategy that I set up a process around.
Host: So that really became core to your strategy—you needed a new thing each week?
Leslie: In New York City, there are carts on the streets that sell donuts for a dollar. There was competition—Donut Plant had been here for 20 years, Dough was here before we were. There was lots of donut shops. So in New York, you can't just open a donut shop and be like other people. You will not succeed. You have to be different. We were fortunate that was what we wanted to do anyway. We didn't know that we had never tried to run a food business in New York. But we were different, and that's what made us successful.
I realized you can't just sell chocolate-glazed donuts. That's not going to work, especially to meet your rent and your labor costs. My donuts were not cheap at all.
Host: I think one interesting observation is that we service mostly meal delivery companies, and the number one most-read email is always a new menu item or new menu alert. It's interesting observing that same phenomenon with you. That was so important—something new every week to check in on.
Leslie: Exactly. That's how I used Instagram. That's how I communicated to people. "Here's what this weekend special is going to be." It was a collaboration with Angry Orchard—apple cider, and we're doing hard apple cider fritters. Angry Orchard sponsored my apple cider. Skippy sponsored my peanut butter for my peanut butter and jelly donut every year. Brooklyn gin gave me gin so I would have the Brooklyn gin donut on my menu every day.
So it just built on itself. I realized this is the way that I can stay relevant and people will continually come back because it's not the same. We have a classic menu that's on there all the time, but there's always something new. You could come every week and get a different donut. That was the strategy, and it worked.
Host: Did you ever seek out these partnerships, or did pretty much everyone approach you?
Leslie: Everyone approached us. It was insane. Yeah.
Host: What was the process if you didn't have a partnership lined up? How much pressure was there?
Leslie: Before the pandemic, we weren't so worried about that because we might talk about this later. But before the pandemic, I had two locations and lots of employees. It was usually just when we had collaborations that we would do something new. But when the pandemic hit, I switched it over to every single weekend. We would have two, sometimes three donuts available for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday only. And they go away forever or for an entire year. It brought people in, really did.
Host: Let me ask about what was then the arc of your business. You started in 2014, 2015, opened a second location, and then COVID hits. What was your journey in terms of the Donut Project and its major phases?
Leslie: Early success, but we were still newbies at running a business. I had a partner who was in charge of operations, and I was in charge of everything else. When the pandemic hit, I had two locations, 25 employees, and we were open every day for 9 hours. We were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and made absolutely no money. Not a penny. I was miserable and so stressed out. I was like, "This has to work. I can't fail at this."
The pandemic happens—bad for the world, good for the Donut Project. I closed the second location, unfortunately laid off a lot of employees. Me, my old business partner, and our head pastry chef kept the one location open. We were open five days a week, five hours a day. That was it. We started doing weekend specials because people would drive from Boston, from Montauk on Long Island, from Vermont, from Jersey to come in during the pandemic and pick up their bag of donuts.
To this day, when we closed, people came in and said, "You saved us in the pandemic because it was so exciting every weekend to come get the new donuts. It was like a little outdoor activity."
Host: What was then the process for that? How did you manage inventing something new for that week?
Leslie: During the pandemic, we would have two, sometimes three donuts available for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday only. They go away forever or for an entire year. It brought people in really did. They were either collaborations or something we came up with—like a pop culture reference or a nostalgic dessert. We went through a cinnamon roll phase. We did the Tiger King donut because Tiger King was really popular on Netflix. We created a tiger donut. It blew people's minds. They were so excited to get these donuts, and I was happy. I loved it. I was in the business.
I was pulling shots, making doughnuts, glazing doughnuts, selling doughnuts. We were three people running like chickens with our heads cut off. Then my business partner left, and it was just me and my head pastry chef. I brought back a couple more pastry chefs. I kept it at 25 hours a week, and it would be me and three pastry chefs doing crazy collaborations and weekend specials every weekend. We killed it. I paid off all my debt and became profitable by being less.
Host: Less is more.
Leslie: Literally. I was open half the amount of time and became better at it. I had the storefront, the original location in the West Village—that tiny 724 square foot space. By keeping it tight, small, creative, and just making it almost like an art project, it just turned around and became successful. Not just from the outside looking in where everybody thought, "Oh, you're so successful." Before the pandemic, I didn't make any money. Not a penny. We owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. I owed my food purveyor $30,000 when the pandemic hit. Every day I woke up, I owed them money. I owed over $100,000 before I made one penny. That's a lot of pressure.
Making it smaller and more manageable changed everything and made it better. I loved it and I was super happy. I made money. I actually made money. It wasn't just Bottle that made me super happy.
Host: But Bottle correlated with the time. I'm curious about your thought process. When the pandemic hit, was this kind of a narrative opportunity to take advantage of, or did things just break and you said, "I have to change something"? What was your thought process?
Leslie: I think it was a selfish one. I was not going to just close it owing all of this money in this bad of a shape of a business. It was successful visually in terms of what we were doing, but it wasn't making money and it was in debt. I was not going to quit at that point. So we scaled back and we just made donuts and saw what happens.
I started to make money because my expenses were so much less. You become more efficient and you're streamlining processes and making little changes. When you have fewer people doing things, you better have good people. When you have all these people, a lot of times it's inefficient and people don't work very hard. But when it's you and a couple of people who are really committed and you pay them well and you treat them well, you can achieve great things.
I only hired professional pastry chefs who went to school. This is their career, what they want to do. I was very targeted on who I wanted on my team and I paid them well. Every day I would be like, "Oh, here's our sales today," and our minds were blown. We would make $5,000 in five hours in sales. That's pretty good in New York City. You do that and you get out of debt and you start making money.
Host: I feel like your goal shifted, right? What was your goal before the pandemic, and then how did it change?
Leslie: Before the pandemic, I was treading water trying to stay afloat—not from drowning physically, but mentally and physically, I was drowning. I was very unhealthy. I drank a lot. When I look back on how I was at that time, I was in a very unhealthy state. But I just never quit. It can be a detriment at times when sometimes you should. But at this point in the pandemic, I was just not going to walk away owing all this money. Slowly but surely, I found, "Hey, if we do less—less is more." It turned everything around. I became very happy working in the business.
But after three years, I was like, "This is great, but am I going to do this the rest of my life? No, probably not." The lease was going to come up and I was like, "Am I really going to sign another lease for this?" It's been a great run, but I don't want to do it forever. I'm tied to this store in Manhattan. I could be working somewhere else, or a lot of people can work from anywhere.
I just started to reconsider what do I want my life to be? It's not going down to the shop every day serving coffee and donuts. People are like, "You can hire somebody to do that." Sure. But then it changes the vibe. People liked coming in and talking with me, meeting the owner. Any small business where the owner's involved is successful. Small businesses where the owner is not involved and they hire a bunch of people thinking it's going to do everything for them won't be successful.
But then I was ready to do other things. I was going to move on to other interests.
Host: What helped you redo this framework and self-evaluate your goals in life? Because I think so many entrepreneurs find themselves at moments like this.
Leslie: I just took a journey. I'm older and—my husband jokes that I'm having a midlife crisis. But men buy a sports car and make bad decisions. Women pivot or hit a reset. We shake off unwanted things and grow. That's my experience.
I went through a lot of self-therapy and figured out things that were causing me to behave certain ways and have an unhealthy lifestyle. I really started to focus on my physical health and mental health, my relationships with family. Before the Donut Project, I was doing research and writing—intellectual work. I started to dive back into reading and writing and realized I love my business, but it's time for me to move on to other things. I want to help other people.
I'm in a position where I can do what I want. Even though my business made money, it wasn't like I was going to buy a Ferrari or a mansion. It was sustainable in New York City because I have a spouse who also has an income. If I was by myself living off of that, I probably wouldn't have closed it because I would definitely need it to survive. But I was in a position where I didn't need it to survive, so I chose to do something different.
Host: If you could start over, what do you think you got right? What would you do again?
Leslie: Definitely the marketing of collaborations and having weekend specials. Any food people—even those not in the donut business, just any food people—and be creative. You can't stay stagnant. You can't just have the same menu. Think about a restaurant you frequent a lot. If they never change their menu, don't you start going somewhere else because you can't have the same thing all the time?
Our weekend specials were creative. We would do lemon meringue pie donuts, tres leches cake donuts—just bringing nostalgic feelings of happiness to our customers so they would want to come in and get it. The strategy of collaborations and weekend specials and a unique take on donuts, pushing the envelope on what a donut can be—that's what I would do over for sure.
Host: What's the opposite? What would you not do again?
Leslie: I would never open that second location. New York City seems huge if you don't live here, but it's not. It's very small. You can walk from one side of the island to the other in no time. You don't need to have multiple locations. I've seen that with a lot of coffee businesses here that had five, ten locations within a year and they all failed. It's small enough that people will come to you.
That's more true than ever in New York now with Google Maps and Uber. You can be uptown and jump on the subway and be in the West Village. It's not like Los Angeles where you have to get in a car and drive an hour and a half.
I definitely wouldn't have hired so many people. My business partner thought you were supposed to hire people to do everything. But there are certain things you have to keep a handle on. You have to know what's going on in your business or things just don't go. Especially in a fickle business like donuts. Every day we open, we had nothing to sell. We had to make it. So you have to make sure somebody shows up in the morning to make the donuts. When I had the second location, I had to have a guy drive through the middle of the city with donuts because the second location didn't have a kitchen. It was just retail.
These are all people you're depending on, and they let you down. That's what was so hard and stressful. Keeping it small—I wouldn't try to make it a big deal. The uniqueness will always rule. Just never anything mediocre or easy to do. If you think it's easy to do, you can hire people to do that. That's not the case.
Host: What was something that was just always a challenge for you in operating the business?
Leslie: Labor is the main thing. Before the pandemic, it was a nightmare—people stealing from you, not showing up, calling out. After the pandemic, when I switched the pool of people I was targeting, it made a huge difference. I was looking for professional pastry chefs or people who went to culinary school—people for whom this was their chosen career. I paid them more money obviously, because otherwise they're not going to work there. So elevating the labor was the hardest challenge, and how I counteracted that was changing the pool of people I was looking for and increasing the amount of money I paid them.
Host: What are you doing now? I know that your last month on Bottle was crazy. There was a point where you texted me at midnight saying we've got to shut it off. I can't remember exactly, but getting so many orders.
Leslie: We were so popular. Before the pandemic, I would take pre-orders, but the pre-ordering system I had before didn't print out anything. I had to manually calculate how many of each flavor we needed. Every night I would spend an hour counting and tabulating to know what we needed to do the next day. We would cut it off at 50 pre-orders because we couldn't handle more than that. We still had to have donuts for people walking in the door and for people on Uber Eats or Grubhub.
Bottle came and changed my life with the pre-ordering system. It produced reports that told me exactly how many of each donut I needed. It literally added an hour to an hour and a half of my evening back to me. That's how Bottle was so important to us.
But at the end, we would have to shut it off because we couldn't take any more. We'd hit 50 pre-orders, and that would mean sometimes 400 donuts had been pre-ordered—and that's not people coming in to buy them, because people are also coming in to buy them.
Pre-ordering was great for us, and Bottle was so important because of our business model of collaborations and weekend specials and limited runs. People wanted to preorder because they wanted to secure them and make sure they got their weekend special donut. With Bottle's system, I could easily update and change the menu every week, which was very easy to do. And because we had a constantly changing menu, which was key to our success, that's how Bottle worked so well for us.
Host: I was out of town your last weekend and scrolling Instagram. I saw videos of people posted and people lined up around the block trying to get in. I knew because of the context of "shut it off"—you had too many orders. It was like that scene from I Love Lucy where they're working the conveyor belt with the chocolates and trying to shut it off. It was that kind of thing.
Leslie: People were just ordering and it would happen in the blink of an eye. There would be 10 more orders. It was scary because we can only execute so much in that timeframe. It was shaky there at the end, but we made it work. And it was with Bottle every week—I would have to remove a couple of things off the menu and add a couple of things. With your system, it wasn't like I set it up and we were good to go. I was updating and changing it constantly, which was very easy to do. And because we had a constantly changing menu, which was key to our success, that's how Bottle worked so well.
Host: Tell us about what you're up to now. You closed in February. What are your plans from here?
Leslie: I'm in the process of working with my head pastry chef. We are writing a cookbook of our brand. I've always kept the recipes very close to the chest. I get asked every day on Instagram DMs, "Please, can we buy your recipes? How do you make this?"
I've always kept it very secretive because it's part of our intellectual property, which we do trademark through licensing locations. I have three locations in Saudi Arabia. But now we are converting all the recipes from mass production to home use—so you can make a dozen donuts versus 400.
I'm reliving everything because I'm going to include in the cookbook a lot of our weekend specials and our collaborations with images and blurbs of what they were. I'm reliving the brand as we speak by going through all the images. I have over 40,000 images on my phone of donuts. We have done thousands of different options and it's amazing. I hope to have the cookbook out by Christmas so it can be given as a gift. It's for our customers, for other donut shops, and for a lot of global customers as well. Everyone's interested in seeing our recipes.
Besides that, I'm traveling. I've been visiting family that I haven't seen in many moons because I was so tied to the shop. I'm going to California a lot to visit family. We're going to England on Friday, spending a couple of weeks there. We love England. I have a lot of food connections there with other donut brands and ice cream brands that I go visit, and friends and stuff. So just traveling, writing, and falling in love with living.
Host: I love that quote. Martha Stewart said something similar about falling in love with living. And I think you're doing that.
Host: What advice would you have for entrepreneurs either operating their own business or thinking about starting?
Leslie: Once you do it, you'll never go back to working for anybody else because it is very rewarding and wonderful. But it is very hard and it is a 24/7 situation. It's not for everybody. If you like going to work and clocking in and then leaving and not thinking about work anymore until you have to go back, it's not for you because it will infiltrate every day of your life, even when you're on vacation.
You've got to have the right character traits. You've got to be very motivated and driven with a never-quit attitude. Do what it takes. You also need to love what it's about. If I was selling cell phones, I probably wouldn't be very happy with it. I don't really care about cell phones. But I love donuts and they were fun and I got to be creative with it.
It touched on my passions of art—I had studied art in undergrad—and food. I was a huge foodie. It touched on all of those and it allowed me to go from reading and writing in a room by myself to creating works of art and interacting with people and being on TV shows and filming and creating content. It was a creative outlet for me.
You should also partner with people who maybe have skills that you don't because it is very hard to start a business alone. Sometimes when you have a partner with skills that you don't have, it helps. I was very structured from my legal profession. My old business partner was from the food world, so he brought that knowledge. If we had both been like me or both been like him, it would have failed.
But you also have to make sure that they have the same work ethic, because otherwise you're going to take on more than what you should because the other person is not carrying their weight. And you also have to have support from your family because I went from a six-figure job to not taking a salary for over a year. If your partner is upset that you gave up a job to struggle and devote all your time to something, it's not going to work. Support from whoever you surround yourself with is very crucial.
Host: Do you have any funny stories from running the shop? A funny celebrity encounter or a donut failure?
Leslie: I've done a lot of crazy stuff. But one of the funniest things was my business partner and I went out and got plastered drunk, and the next day we had a filming with Sean Evans from Hot Ones. We were creating a Hot Ones donut for National Chicken Wing Day with First We Feast.
He was coming to film to talk about the donut we created. I wasn't even supposed to be on camera, but my business partner was so hungover that he didn't come in. I had to do the video off the cuff with Sean Evans, and you can see it on YouTube. I did great. You would never know how hungover I was. This is another thing—I don't even hardly drink now. I've changed my whole life. But that's how crazy it was. We would just go out and have fun and then, "Oh yeah, we have this filming tomorrow and we actually have to act like we're human beings."
I definitely deserve an Oscar for that performance because I was hanging on by a thread.
Host: I'll have to look up that video. Thanks so much for your time. Is there anything else you wished we had covered?
Leslie: No, we've covered everything. But I would say if any of your people want to call or chat, let me know. I'd love to give advice. That's one of my favorite things to do—share what I know. If anyone has questions, they can get my information from you. I have a Calendly phone call system set up so people can schedule a call if they have questions or want to ask advice on their business. I don't know everything, but I learned a lot from my 10-year project.
Host: I encourage anyone who wants to get in touch, email Will@Bottle.com and I'll put you guys in touch. Thanks so much for the time today and congrats on what was an amazing journey. It's still going, and I'm sad that the shop is gone, but I miss the donuts for sure.
Leslie: It's a moment in time, just like Studio 54 or whatever. Something so special doesn't last forever. Usually it doesn't. And if it does, it's changed. Something changes from being truly special to now it's everywhere in every city because it's changed. It's changed for the worse. So when something's truly special, it stays small and it usually doesn't last forever.
Host: I think I agree with that. Have an awesome rest of the day, enjoy your trip to England, and hope everyone has a wonderful Tuesday. Thanks for tuning in.
Leslie: Thank you. Bye.