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Key Takeaways
- Wing It On started by addressing a simple gap in the market.
- Earning nine trophies at the National Buffalo Wing Festival was a testament to concept, and not just pride.
- Early success and take-off took Wing It On far, but franchising exposed gaps in systems and support too quickly.
Matt will take care of it did not set out to build a wing brand. He was trying to solve a simple problem. He lived in Waterbury, Connecticut, where he hosted friends on Sundays to watch NFL games, and there were no good chicken wings around.
“Within 30 minutes of my house we were in a desert,” says Ensero.
If you drove 40 minutes to a bar, you missed the first fifteen minutes. Nobody wanted to do that. So Ensero bought a small fryer, started making wings at home and tested recipes on friends. He wrote everything down and kept refining.
Finally, one of those friends said what everyone else was thinking. “These wings are really damn good,” Ensero remembers saying. “They’re better than the ones we have to go halfway across the state to pick up.”
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That comment was turned into a business plan for a restaurant concept with quick service and takeaway meals. When it came time to name and brand the restaurant, Ensero turned to this company Justin Egansomeone he already knew and trusted from previous work. Sitting in a coffee shop, Ensero discussed the business plan while Egan searched for a name.
“I was on GoDaddy trying to come up with every chicken or wing pun in the world,” Egan says. “WingItOn.com was available. Let’s go.”
The opening did not go smoothly. Wing It On sold out on the first day. Ticket times stretched on for hours. Within a few days, they took a break to regroup and get the kitchen flow in order.
The question was real. The restaurant was profitable within two months, even though Ensero worked 80 hours a week behind the fryer and paid himself nothing.
As the brand grew, Wing It On received national recognition at the National Buffalo Wing Festival, winning multiple first place trophies for its traditional buffalo sauces. The competition in Buffalo, New York, against some of the most established wing institutions in the country, gave the brand credibility outside of Connecticut.
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With momentum building, Wing It On started franchising early. “We probably did it two to three years earlier than we needed to,” Ensero says.
They tried to do everything themselves. The concept worked. The system lagged behind. That realization made one thing clear. The next phase would require more than hustle. It led the co-founders to Craveworthy Brands.
Beyond bootstrapping
As the business grew, Ensero and Egan knew the challenge was no longer about food. It was about scale.
They had momentum, franchise importance and national validation from their wins at the National Buffalo Wing Festival. What they didn’t have was the infrastructure to support growth without exhausting themselves or shortchanging franchisees.
“We got a little too addicted to bootstrapping,” says Ensero.
They opened one or two stores a year, worked 80 to 90 hours a week, and tried to support franchisees while wearing each hat themselves. The pace was not sustainable.
The turning point came in Las Vegas during the Restaurant Finance and Development Conference. Ensero traveled there to meet a potential partner, but the meeting fell through. He was standing in a hotel lobby when someone from his PR team urged him to attend a happy hour instead.
There Enserro met Gregg Majewski. De Majewski asked Ensero to tell him his story.
As Ensero went through the Wing It On journey, Majewski looked up the brand and saw the press surrounding the top spot at the National Buffalo Wing Festival. That detail changed the conversation.
Majewski later visited a Wing It On location, met Ensero and Egan and tried the food. He liked the product and saw opportunities to strengthen the company.
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In early 2023, Wing It On became one of the first brands to join Craveworthy Brands. Craveworthy didn’t revise the concept – the food remained intact, but the focus was on creating a stronger system.
They refined the logo, adjusted the store layout and interior graphics for multi-unit growth and reorganized the menu to highlight combos, family packs and larger plates to help increase average check values.
“It sounds like details,” says Ensero. “But it all adds up.”
With Craveworthy’s operational playbook in place, Wing It On finally had the support to scale what it had already proven.
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