How did you get started owning your own business?

When I was 17 I wanted to open a movie rental business in Ingleside. A developer agreed to white box the space and let me lease it if my dad would co-sign for a year. Looking back, I think the owner must have thought, “Here is this kid, and I am going to white box it anyways..” So I got the space for $750 a month.

How did that lead you to the arcade business?

I used to rent out Super Nintendos and the Sega Genesis games. The games had to be returned by 7:00. There would be customers waiting to rent the games, and they would wait until 7:30 and leave; meanwhile, the games would be returned at 7:40 and then sit overnight not making any revenue.

We were avid video gamers, and there was this game, Mortal Combat 2, and I had just gotten a credit card. So I bought the system and put it in Movie Mania. I would get $5-$6 from people playing a game I loved while they waited. Not paying to play the game myself probably saved me a hundred dollars a month. So it was a win-win, and I fell in love with that industry.

When I was in college in San Antonio, I decided I would open an arcade there. That is when CyberZone was born. Eventually, I had 11 locations.

How did that lead you to Pizza?

I started seeing the decline of the arcade business. I remember when the PlayStation first came out, I was like uh-oh.

Luckily, at one of my arcades in Dallas, I decided I wanted to sell pizza because they were having parties and bringing it in. After a year and a half doing that, I started thinking, ‘Well, what if I used this olive oil? or this ingredient?” and made this crazy pizza that I loved. About two years into this arcade, we were about 60% take-out. That is when the idea for Stout’s Pizza began.

And now you have Stout’s Signature, tell us about that.

So I got into fine dining by accident. I had a food truck right after I opened Stouts Pizza Co. and it would go out to the wine country. We started getting a following, and no matter what vineyard we went to, up to a couple of hundred people would show up. The owner of one of the vineyards approached us about something more permanent, and as we went on, we started getting a little fancier. I nitpicked everything on our menu just like I did our pizza ingredients.

One evening, the people who work with the Tobin came to the vineyard and invited me to open a location at the Tobin Center. Covid was a blessing in that we got to really develop this concept before opening and I am loving this [Stout’s Signature].