Today we’d like to introduce you to Brady Leffler.
Hi Brady, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I was born and raised in a small town in Nebraska. Hard work was instilled in me at a young age, mowing lawns and scooping snow. I followed my older sister in working at the local diner ‘Chef’s Corner,’ my first restaurant job in my hometown, at the age of 16. I’ve somehow continued on that path, working around food and beverage in various capacities, to this day, some 22 years later. It’s not even that I set out to do that. It just naturally followed me and organically flowed parallel to whatever it is I was doing in life, which always revolved around music. An example is being in a band in Toledo, Ohio. We get off of a months-long tour, and have some down time… I need money, so I get a barista job down the street from the tour manager’s apartment I was crashing at between tours. A 4 am clock-in time, I might add, and I am not what you’d call an “early bird.” My early days of planting seeds in LA whilst between music tours had me taking the bus down La Brea to Jefferson to a ghost kitchen down some alleyway prepping vegan cuisine 8 hours a day for a home-meal delivery service, cash under the table. I always toggled between food and music, the one to sustain the other and sometimes vice versa. In 2010, I began working for the market leader in Kombucha doing field marketing and continued working for that company for 12 years. In 2017, after a heavy desire to move on from the hustle & bustle of the service industry in LA cocktail bars and restaurants, I took a career leap and went “full-time,” creating the R&D department at that Kombucha company I was working with. Here I was allowed immense creative control over recipes of new flavors, and even a host of new product lines, like medicinal mushroom drinks, wellness shots, and hard kombucha to name a few. As the company grew at an incredibly rapid rate, then faced with the challenges of a global pandemic, the weight of working a corporate job became too much. There was absolutely zero work-life balance, the inspiration and joy began to dry up, and I was beyond burnt out. I needed some freedom and new inspiration. I was happy to take a gig working with a wonderful local Kombucha brand, helping to expand their beverage portfolio outside of just Kombucha, and had a wonderful time transitioning out of the big machine into something more “Mom and Pap.” This allowed me the freedom, inspiration, and, most of all, work-life balance to begin building my own brand, finally! I had been working with food and fermented beverages for quite some time now and had been honing my sourdough bread skills since pre-pandemic days, when I acquired a 200-year-old sourdough starter in 2019. The idea to start with something small and mobile, that I could call my own and merge my love of food and music came to me quick and I began to build Hi-Fi Pizza Pi. It was a combination of food, fermentation, my love for collecting Hi-Fi music equipment and vinyl records and was MY brand that I had full creative control over. I use mobile pizza ovens and typically occupy a 10X10 footprint which can be multiplied and scaled easily to accommodate any type of festival, private event, or bar pop-up. It’s a fully autonomous, modular, and mobile pizzeria that can go anywhere and fit anywhere with ease. And let’s face it, who doesn’t like pizza? Name me one person; I dare you 😉 And for the record, I did actually work at a pizzeria once back in my college days in Lincoln, NE. This mobile restaurant operation is just the gateway to a plethora of food and beverage concepts that I’m opening up and expanding upon as we speak. Just as soon as this operation got rolling, my other worlds of beverage and music began to steam-roll as well. I took another contract job with an emerging NA beverage brand and launched a beverage podcast called “The Dry Run,” a sober podcast about drinking. Live music performance began picking up as well in 2023 and I was hired to play as a multi-instrumentalist with the All-American Rejects on their ‘Wet Hot All-American Summer Tour’. Returning home from the tour, I picked up right where I left off with Hi-Fi Pizza Pi and hit record numbers month after month to close the year out. Another highlight was sitting in on keys with a favorite band of mine, Phantom Planet, as we all rang in the new year 2024 at midnight, performing their iconic anthem, “California,” with our beloved friends in Venice Beach. The year has begun with a joyous fire, and I look forward to growing my ecosystem of food, beverage, and music like I was meant to.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Los Angeles is a city that will never provide a smooth road, and that’s part of what keeps me here and still interested. I like the challenges it provides. I’ve had many ups and downs in my 15 years of living in this city. It took me the first 5 years to accept that this was my home and plant some roots. Up until that point I had done what most short-term transplants do, and simply used this place as my hub to do my business before I bounced. Once I set an intention to truly give it one more shot and settle in for once, I was able to find my community, albeit scattered all over town. Once you can play “Sim City” with Los Angeles and piece together your own version of the parts of it that serve you, you can make a pretty cool and fitting home for yourself. Aside from these pretty standard struggles, I really didn’t hit my largest hurdles until the pandemic hit, where I was experiencing significant elevated pressures from the corporate job I was in. Little did I know the ship was in fear of losing its growing fortune, and that pressure rained down on everyone involved. I was one of the few that still had a full-time paying job through this pandemic we were in, so didn’t feel I could leave. I felt trapped. No way out. I battled with many issues between 2020–2022 including anxiety, depression, and to cope, excessive alcohol use. Burnout and stress led to a rare condition of facial paralysis in 2021 called Bells Palsy, to which only about 90% returned to full function. My fiancée eventually left me, I left our home, and then at the same time, I was able to finally escape my job. The “escape” was a relief I hadn’t felt in many years, and moving to a more fitting company for 6 months fueled me exponentially. I was able to get back on my feet quickly with this newfound joy of life and the city with this new opportunity. I got sober, got back into shape, new home, built my new business, and felt determined to write my best chapter to date. The best way for me to fail is forward, pick myself back up and keep going. Building a business for me has felt easy. I take one day at a time and tackle micro-goals consistently in order to achieve my macros instead of getting overwhelmed by the bigger picture too soon. A hard work ethic and a bit of a masochistic personality and drive have gotten me to where I am today.
Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
From a young age, I was involved in the arts. My mother put all of us kids in piano lessons, and I began mine around the age of 6. I joined the school band playing percussion, then drums around the age of 9, and then picked up guitar at 11. I joined my first real band at 19 and still continue to perform and tour at a professional level today. I was also always into drawing at a young age, and then picked up paint brushes entering high school. I took a job as a house painter mid-way through high school and still continue to do little side gigs with interior design to this day, merging the artistic aspect with functional feng shui. In addition to music and painting, I did also excel in acting during high school and even went on to major then minor in theatre performance in college. Aside from a few small gigs and some commercials, acting has not been a focus of mine in LA, oddly given it’s the mecca of.
Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
Focusing on micro-goals to achieve your macro goals has been the way for me. This way, you can take a day at a time and not get overwhelmed by the larger picture, which can be far too massive at times. It’s okay to go slow as long as you’re GOing. Slow and steady wins the race; don’t burn yourself out too quickly. Patience and steady hard work pays off. One of my biggest pieces of advice for overall health, and what I believe can give anyone an extra superpower, is proper sleep. Something I wish I knew when I started out is that I CAN do my own thing. I thought you HAD to work for someone else, and learning to bet on myself has been the most rewarding journey of my life. Jump, and the net shall appear 😉
Contact Info:
- Website: www.hifipizzapi.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/bradyleffler , instagram.com/hifipizzapi , instagram.com/thebeveragejunkie
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/hi-fi-pizza-pi-los-angeles-2
Image Credits
Cameron Jordan
