Christine Mikulec of Italian Fiesta Pizzeria is a fourth-generation pizzeria owner-operator in and around Chicago.
Founded by her great-grandfather in 1947, the tavern-style pizzeria business was taken over by Christine, her siblings, and her cousins from her parents in early 2025. Prior to that, Christine was still involved in day-to-day operations. The company boasts 160 employees, most of whom are part-time throughout their five locations.
Wrong W-2s, Missing PTO, and a Vendor Who Disappeared
Italian Fiesta Pizzeria stuck to its roots in more ways than one. That’s why, when Christine helped take over operations in 2025, managers were still using fax machines to send overtime sheets and run reports.
The HR solution the business had in place had been implemented a few years earlier and was a cloud-based system.
According to Christine, there were many “major issues.”
This came to a head in February 2024 when something began to seem “very wrong” with their payroll data. Employees began to notice something was wrong too.
Reports and messages came in from employees stating that their W-2s were incorrect, tax tables were incorrect, and sick and PTO time were not being tracked properly. “It was one thing after another for a full year or year and a half,” Christine recalls. “It never got back to good.”
Twice, Christine had to go into the system and manually update the time sheets of over 150 employees.
Desperate for help, Christine flagged a support team member from the old vendor. The former vendor’s employee tried to take over but abruptly cut off all communication without any explanation. She later discovered that he had left the company, and no one had picked up where he left off.
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