And Bill is the first to admit that the secret to his success is that there isn’t one.
“I started with a little kiosk at Parramatta Station when I was a student, studying law,” Bill says. “Looking back, if I had stayed with what I was doing and not gone into restaurants but instead, something more café-style and casual, I would have been better off. But I went the other way.
“Restaurants are the most dangerous business you can go into because you need the skills, you need the knowledge, you need to work long hours. Cafes are more casual, people are more accepting and their prices have crept up to the same as restaurants. You go to a café and have a steak, you’ll pay the same price as I’m charging.”
But while he momentarily laments taking a more challenging path to establishing a business in the hoispitality industry, Bill’s most important decision was to not bite off more than he could chew from the outset.
That allowed him to purchase the property from which Peronis Restaurant operates – featuring a charming, federation house with sandstone features - and the properties alongside it.
Bill knows only too well what an advantage it is to own your own premises. To satisfy his need for a change of scenery and a break from business in Parramatta, he established and ran Sabatinis restaurant in Crows Nest, parting with about $600,000 over that period in rent.
‘That’s a lot of money, especially when I owned the place in Parramatta and for three years had squatters living in it, for nothing,” he says.
Increasing competition and steep rents, along with the many other costs associated with the restaurant game are acting as barriers to entry as well as impediments to profitability.
“I took my son and we had something to eat at Concord. You’ve got the shops at Haberfield, you’ve got them at Burwood now and at Parramatta. Every centre has its own eat out area, so there’s just too much of everything, everywhere,” Bill says.
“And then they’re making things even more difficult with all the regulations. I had to go back and do a course in liquor recently and you’re talking about a couple of hundred dollars there. There are more laws, more health requirements, more safety regulations – it’s becoming more complex.”
Bill says the growth of Parramatta’s CBD began around mid-1993 when he established Ziggy’s Café in Church Street and along with City Extra, there were only two cafes on the strip.
After three and a half years of 110 hour weeks, Bill found another position around the corner to establish Sabatinis and since then, about 10 tenants had been through the original Ziggy’s site.
On the whole, the growth of the CBD should have created some opportunities, but instead, resulted in numerous aspiring small business owners losing significant amounts of money.
“They just don’t do it right, they get their formula wrong. They don’t run it properly, they think it’s easy, they get the wrong staff working,” Bill explains.
“There’s no one overlooking to keep an eye on the staffing and service levels, the quality of the food and stuff like that – you need someone guiding it all.”
Switching back to a rent-free existence and the solid earning potential of Peronis Restaurant, hasn’t tempered Bill’s tendency for hard work.
But there’s now more strategic reasons for personally taking care of some of the critical functions of the business, not the least of which is protecting his solid branding and the goodwill and awareness Peronis Restaurant has generated in the local community.
“Our restaurant is pretty clean, it’s probably one of the cleanest ones around. The toilets are cleaned twice a day, the floors are spotless and we maintain maximum hygiene in the kitchen, so there’s a lot of work that goes on even before and after service each day.
“I don’t just walk out when we close. The waiters leave and I stay back for a couple of hours to keep the place up to standard.
“And I do all the cleaning myself, I don’t let anyone else do that because they don’t do it well enough – they slop the mops up against the skirting boards and they become dirty and they just get away with things and it all builds up.”
Bill even tends to most of the gardening duties, with the greenery and immaculate hedges among the stand-out features of Peronis Restaurant.
“I trim the hedges myself. But that in itself takes about eight hours to do because they’re pretty long hedges – on one side it’s about 80 metres and the other is about 20 or 30 metres. “If you get someone in to do it, they end up taking chunks out of it.”
It’s now more risky than ever to be setting up any type of food service business in Parramatta’s CBD, Bill says, particularly with some of the astronomical rents being sought by landlords.
And that’s despite an oversupply of sandwich and coffee type outlets which he says “are now popping up all over the place – there are now 20 where there used to be two!”
“There are people paying absolute fortunes for some of these places and then suddenly others opened up around them and they’re worth nothing,” Bill says.
“If you’re lucky to have something that other people can’t copy around you, you’re okay, but that can change. At my old location for Ziggy’s on Church Street, I don’t know what the current occupants are paying, but the people before that were paying $16,000 a month.”
Bill's original Peronis Restaurant operated from 1989 to 1993 and following that, Bill operated under the name Ziggy’s Cafe/Restaurant.
Then from 1996 to 1999 he ran Sabatinis in Parramatta which he later sold to Steve and Jackie Walker.
From 1999 to 2004 he ran a second Sabatinis in Crows Nest before re-establishing Peronis Restaurant at its existing location at 48 Station Street East, Parramatta. .
