Pamela Silvestri, owner of American Grill, praises SCORE's business help.  In 1994, Ms. Silvestri and her husband, David Cavagnaro, began operating a food service business for private and parochial schools.

American Grill

"We were going to issue a lunch card for each child, using a sophisticated card-swipe system, where the information was stored on the card itself.  But Milton Zlotnik pointed out that a child could easily lose the lunch card, thereby losing all the account information.  He gave us a guideline in designing a computer program, based on an existing program, which worked on a principle of debit, maintained by a data base system.  It saved us $20,000,"  Ms. Silvestri said.  

The savings allowed the company to grow from five employees and one account at its inception in 1994 to 80 employees, serving 10 schools.  It improved the new company's cash flow to the extent that she could realize her lifelong dream of opening a restaurant, the highly praised island eatery, which now includes Mayor Bloomberg as a regular customer.

"If we had not saved that money from the computer system, we would not have had the money down the line to open the restaurant," she said.

 American Grill