~story and photo by Boris Ladwig
The entrepreneurial spirit of Ryan Seward, who owns Brozinni Pizzeria in Nashville, began in his teens, when he’d find good deals on inexpensive cars and sell them for a small profit, often hundreds of dollars.
His career has involved everything from bussing tables at restaurants to advising people at a hardware store, and launching multiple ventures: pizza restaurants, a party supply rental company, and a foam insulation business.
Seward moved from Delphi, Indiana, to Brown County at age 13 with his brother, Dale Jr., and father, Dale Sr.
He bussed tables, washed dishes, and worked as a server at the Artists Colony Inn from age 14 to 20. During those later teen years, he’d go to school in the morning, work at Bear Hardware, and then head to the inn to work a few more hours.
“I was a hustler,” Seward said.
Penny Scroggins, who co-owns the hardware store with her husband, Curt, said Seward often would drive cars to the hardware store and park them with a forsale sign in them.
Seward said he sometimes found clients while working at the hardware store. People would come in to ask him where they could find “for sale” signs, and when he’d take them to the right spot in the store, he’d ask them what they were selling.
“I ended up buying a couple of cars that way,” he said.
His relationship with the Scrogginses proved helpful in other ways on his journey to becoming a business owner.
Seward said he was a huge Pizza King fan from when he grew up in Delphi, and when he spotted a for-lease sign at Salt Creek Plaza on a lunch break in 2007, he called his father, who had befriended a neighbor back in Delphi who worked as a delivery truck driver for Pizza King. The father called his friend and asked about the franchise, and, Seward said, it was surprisingly easy and inexpensive. The chain charged neither a franchise fee nor a percentage of restaurant sales but required Seward to buy ingredients and supplies from them.
Seward said he also got help from the Scrogginses. “They were very supportive,” he said, “and Curt actually co-signed on a small business loan to help me get going.”
Seward combined the loan with $20,000 he had saved—mostly from selling cars—and opened his first restaurant at age 20.
Seward hired three friends from high school and a colleague from the inn, and they got to work. Everybody did pretty much everything that was needed. Seward, too, would take orders, make the pizza, put it in the oven, and serve it. Even his high school sweetheart, and now wife, Kharysa, would deliver pizzas in a pinch.
With low overhead, the restaurant became profitable right away, he said.
“Did it ever make a huge profit? No, but it was a stepping stone,” Seward said. “It got me a ton of experience.”
Some of that experience involved less-than-supportive customers. Seward remembered one occasion on which a woman was unhappy about not being able to get a deal without a coupon. After Seward told her she needed a coupon, she demanded to speak to the manager.
“I was, you know, maybe 20, 21 but I looked like I was 14,” he said. “I was tall, but I didn’t weigh anything, and [had a] baby face.”
When he told the customer he was the manager, she said she’d just come back the next day and talk to the owner. She had no comeback when he told her he was the owner, too.
Seward ran into some startup challenges.
As he lacked bookkeeping skills, Penny Scroggins functioned as his accountant for the first year of the Pizza King venture. She said she remembered a day on which Seward rode his motorcycle to the hardware store to bring his payroll paperwork, which he carried in a backpack. Only he had forgotten to zip the backpack, and when he arrived he realized the paperwork was likely scattered through various Nashville streets.
Scroggins and Seward had to call the employees to get information about how many hours they had worked.
Despite some of the hiccups, Scroggins said she knew Seward would succeed.
“He is one of the hardest-working young men that I’ve ever met,” she said. “You’ll never hear him complaining about how much work he has to do.”
From early on when he worked a lot of hours as a teenager to running multiple businesses now, Scroggins said Seward has always tried to improve, to take the next step.
“He’s just an exceptional young man,” she said.
A year after he opened Pizza King, Seward launched a party rental business with bounce houses, wedding tents, and tables and chairs. He sold that business to his brother, who still owns it.
He owns some properties for rental income, and recently built a duplex, though he said a friend did about 95 percent of the work.
Seward also started up and operates an insulation business called Affordable Spray Foam.
Around 2015, one of his frequent pizza customers, the late Bob Kirlin, local real estate agent and community leader, convinced him to buy the former Harvest Moon Pizzeria building on Main Street in Nashville. Seward initially planned to move and expand the Pizza King restaurant there, but decided to launch a Brozinni Pizzeria instead after chatting with the owner of one in Greenwood who had a Brown County connection.
With support from his wife, Seward opened the new business. Brozinni meant a big step up in size from the Pizza King. The restaurant can seat about 100 and during the busy season has about 25 employees.
Seward still pursues other opportunities. His most recent venture involves flying.
Seward got a pilot’s license two years ago and bought a four-seater 1968 Piper Arrow, on which he has gone on a couple of lunch trips, to Franklin. He uses it primarily, though, to take the family, including children Ellie, 10, and Emerson, 8, to Mobile, Alabama, where his parents would take the family on vacation, in part to visit the battleship USS Alabama, on which his grandfather, Charles R. Seward, served.
Seward said he got the “entrepreneurial bug” probably from his father, who worked as a police officer but also owned a car wash in Delphi. His mom, Melinda Rossetter, worked in the athletics department at Purdue University.
But he’s also quick to point out that lots of family, friends, and acquaintances in the Brown County community have provided a lot of help for which he is immensely grateful.
A local electrician he knew from working at Bear Hardware put probably about a thousand dollars’ worth of work into what would become the Pizza King restaurant.
When the electrician was done with the work, and Seward asked how much he owed, the electrician just said, “Don’t worry about it, kid. I’m glad to help out a young entrepreneur,” Seward said, still visibly touched by the kindness.
In addition to the assistance he got from the Scrogginses, friends helped him remodel and paint the Pizza King restaurant, and his father-in-law and other family and friends helped remodel what would become Nashville’s Brozinni Pizzeria.
For Seward, opening a restaurant was a huge undertaking, especially early on as a young man with little experience. The community’s support played a vital role in his success.
He says this is a great place to live.