How Our COO Ryan Sturgis Figures it All Out
By: Delivery Dudes
Tags: Small Business, Delivery, Entrepreneurship, Food Delivery, Restaurant

How Our COO Ryan Sturgis Figures it All Out

It was a moment of location-based kismet that led Ryan Sturgis, 34, on his righteous Dude path, courtesy of his parents. When the Sturgis family decided to sell their house but stay in the same Fort Lauderdale neighborhood, it was none other than the Koss family who purchased their old home. Shortly after, both couples got pregnant, setting the Dude wheels in motion with a baby Koss and baby Sturgis on the way. Koss and Sturgis have been friends, “or more like brothers” ever since, making Delivery Dudes a family since day one.

When they started the company in 2009, Sturgis kicked off a grassroots marketing campaign by skateboarding around town with friends handing out flyers. While they were both excited about the possibility of starting a company and being their own bosses, working together at this stage provided some creative differences, which took them on different paths. Both Sturgis and Koss took time off to pursue other goals but decided to give the partnership another go in 2012 when Koss recruited Sturgis back to the Dude cause. For Sturgis, it felt good to trade in a suit and tie for shorts and flip flops again, even though it was no easy ride “bootstrapping it from the ground up.

“Jayson has always been the idea guy, and I’ve largely been the detail and execution part of the equation,” Sturgis said. “We started building our little empire one delivery at a time. Delray was the original and the epicenter. The business was so small at that time that it couldn’t support many people financially, so we spread out over multiple markets to encourage faster growth. We started recruiting our friends and teaching them what we knew about our ‘systems’ of the time, which were comprised largely of duct tape, spit, and bubble gum.”

While that system proved to be successful, and they experienced phenomenal triple-digit growth, they were still learning how to run a franchise business as well as managing multiple markets. “It took everything I had just to keep up with the business,” said Sturgis, who worked non-stop for three and a half years.

With their eye on the prize, they restructured the business in 2015 as a commonly owned entity instead of an extremely segmented one. While this presented a whole new set of management challenges, it provided their early team members a chance to transition into more of an upper management style role. They learned and grew from each challenge and opportunity, and day by day, with one foot in front of the other, they started to figure it out.

“In fact, it’s been such a pervasive theme, we tweaked it into one of our core values: ‘It’s all good dude, we’ll figure it out,’” Sturgis said. “It’s taken a couple of years to really elevate our team, myself included, and we’re finally getting into a pretty stable flow.”

While occasionally being called upon to department hop, he’s mostly responsible for company operations, sales, and legal. Concerning longer-range focus, he champions vital projects that require multiple departments to work together. And of course, always ensuring that Delivery Dudes is still a great company to work with and for.

“For us, it’s all about having the best service and selection. We’re entrenched in our markets, and we have all of the best restaurants in the cities and towns we service. When something goes wrong, as it inevitably will, just let us know, and we guarantee you’ll be satisfied with the outcome,” Sturgis said. “Lastly, when it comes to our Delivery Dudes, we’re very selective with whom we will work with to bring you your order, this is crucial to order accuracy, an order being transported with care, and your interaction with Dudes & Dudettes both at the door and out in restaurants.

In the beginning, the goal was simple. Create happy customers by delivering the food people want from the places they love. Today, however, it has become significantly apparent that we can make a more significant impact on our customers, community, and the planet. We have the power to make life better.

Sturgis’ passions include creative projects and being one with the ocean. In the coming years, he hopes to continue to work on ways to soften the Dudes’ environmental footprint through deeper partnerships with their restaurants. The Dudes teamed up with 4Ocean earlier this year to help eliminate plastic cutlery from their orders. While this partnership was a small step, it was a small step in the right direction. Sturgis is confident they’ll have more ideas coming down the environmental pipeline that will better the Earth’s pipeline.

When this doer of all things Dude isn’t Dude-ing, he’s surfing, spearfishing, mountain biking, building things, traveling, and skiing. Or, you’ll find him indulging in healthy and delicious fare from Myapapaya in Fort Lauderdale, where he still lives in the neighborhood where it all began.

He’s been a part of the serious growth, serious thinking, and serious fun of the Dude empire, and the anti-norm rollercoaster isn’t slowing down.