Giuseppe ‘JP’ Piccinini Talks Life After JPAR: La Stella, Vesuvius Holdings, And Living it Up

When Giuseppe ‘JP’ Piccinini sold his eponymous real estate brokerage and franchising brand two years ago, many wondered what the man behind the successful companies would put his hand on next. We heard something about great Italian food. So we sat down with JP at La Stella Cucina Verace, just one of his exciting new ventures, to talk about life after JPAR.

La Stella feels both intimate and grand, and I waited briefly at the elegant bar while JP finished meeting with a visiting chef from Italy, who was consulting with La Stella’s chefs to ensure that the cuisine is always 100 percent authentic.

“Verace” means authentic in Italian, and beyond just the name of the restaurant, it occurs to me that it’s the perfect way to describe not just the meal we shared, but our conversation. As we sat in a plush corner booth in the back of the restaurant, JP introduced me to our waiter, Jonathan, who brought us a beautiful Southern Italian white wine.

“Ask me anything,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye. “I’m excited. Life has changed.”

Since the sale of JPAR two years ago, life has indeed changed. JP has been busy, but it’s a different kind of busy. He’s been laser-focused on Vesuvius Holdings, the umbrella company to which JPAR belonged prior to the real estate firm’s sale. Vesuvius is a private equity family office that invests in startups, “interesting businesses,” and everything from a gas station to a luxury yacht rental business, to commercial real estate development. The restaurant, La Stella, is one of the many businesses that JP is invested in currently. We talked about a few of them.

And then we ate the best Italian food ever.

Grande Vita Homes

Grande Vita is the homebuilding arm of Vesuvius. Partnered with a JPAR agent, Barrett Blakeley, Grande Vita is building modern luxury homes in East Dallas.

“It’s a start-up, but we have very ambitious plans to build hundreds of homes a year,” Piccinini said.

They recently closed the first two homes and have four more going now.

“I always look for a way that I can fill a niche, something that the market does not already have, and I try to do it better than everybody else,” he said.

Giuseppe ‘JP’ Piccinini

JP says Grande Vita brings something different in terms of floor plans and innovation. The homes are “Midcentury Modern, courtyard-style homes,” and the average price point is about $1.4 million. Current locations are in Lakewood, Lake Highlands, Little Forest Hills, and White Rock Lake, but the intention is to expand locally and then the sky is the limit.

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Let me pause here to gush over the ‘U Purp appetizer which arrived while we were discussing Grand Vita. This is a sous vide then char-grilled octopus, served with Italian olives, Tuscan marbled potatoes and spicy ‘nduja Calabrese. We’re not here for a restaurant review, but whether or not you think octupus is a thing you enjoy, this is a thing you enjoy. For the uninitiated, ‘nduja is a simply delectable Calabrian sausage that adds incredible flavor to this dish, but the star is the smoky artistry of the preparation of the octopus. The accompaniments will have you licking the plate.

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ZFG Nation

After the sale of JPAR, JP spent several months in the Caribbean, taking time to reflect, and learned to love the island lifestyle. He bought a boat, then bought a few, and ended up investing in a yachting company. Think Below Deck, but smaller scale boats and no cameras crews. ZFG Nation is a fleet of charter boats in the Caribbean you can rent — complete with a crew — for a luxury experience. If you’re wondering about the name, ZFG stands for Zero F*cks Given, a decidedly boat-life attitude if there ever was one. Perfect for the Caribbean lifestyle.

“I always think, when I invest in a business, Do I see myself involved in it, is this a passion of mine?”

Giuseppe ‘JP’ Piccinini

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I have to pause again to swoon about the Frittura Mista, which I was decidedly not eating way more than my share of, while JP lovingly described his island business venture. Perfect food pairing for the subject matter, no? You may be thinking, meh, fried calamari, been there, done that. You have no idea what you’re talking about. This is branzino, calamari & the most succulent prawns frittura in semolina flour, served with fresh lemon and sea salt, alongside lemon tartara and beautiful house San Marzano marinana sauces. Oh my. Again, we are not here to talk about food, but it’s simply too good not to!

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Workdrive

Workdrive is an incredibly exciting technology that is a big piece of Vesuvius Holdings. Once known as Bosss®, the technology that JPAR agents are familiar with has evolved into a bigger, more all-encompassing system. JP said when they created Bosss, JPAR had grown to such a scale that it wasn’t just a local Frisco brokerage anymore, and they needed a way to be able to communicate on demand, not just with each other, but administrative and management as well, so they came up with their own system. Workdrive is an improvement upon Bosss.

Think of it as Intranet, that also replaces Zoom, work-related Facebook groups, the support desk, and allows for file sharing (similar to Google and Microsoft Office Suite). It allows for meetings to be set up and live streamed, and replaces a Slack-type message system. It’s a one-stop shop. We’ve already sold it to several clients.

Giuseppe ‘JP’ Piccinini

La Stella

Over the past two years, many business interests and life changes, JP says that La Stella has become his hobby. While he says it’s the most labor-intensive of his companies, out of all the businesses, everyone in the company finds themselves drawn to La Stella. For JP himself, he’s honest: “It’s the ultimate flex to come in and say ‘Hey, I own a restaurant.’ That’s rewarding in itself.” After celebrating a successful first year with rave reviews, Vesuvius is looking at expanding the concept in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, first in North Dallas and then in Fort Worth; then they’d like to venture out across the U.S.

I asked if he would consider another restaurant or hospitality concept. He said that while restaurants are not as profitable as other types of businesses, they like it for diversification, cash flow, and a way to enjoy what they do. 

“It’s funny, if I were to ask our CFO, our HR Manager, our Marketing Coordinator, which business do you enjoy working on the most, every one of them would say La Stella.”

Giuseppe ‘JP’ Piccinini

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I really have to say just a brief word about the Chef’s housemade herb ravioli, which was on special that evening. Your Italian grandmother’s herb garden. The pasta she made that day. I wept.

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AMA With JP

Family Background

While we waited for dessert, JP got a little introspective and told me how his background informed his journey. Born in Southern Italy, he moved to America with his parents when he was 13 years old. His father was in the Italian Air Force and was attached to the NATO training program out of Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls. His father’s assignment was for four years, so he graduated high school in Texas, and when his father’s assignment was up he decided to stay in and attend school at Midwestern University, where he got an engineering degree.

JP had a career as an engineer for about eight years, then at age 29, decided to go into business for himself, which is when he went into real estate. He eventually became a broker, then a team leader, then started JPAR in 2011, grew JPAR from “a kitchen table in my home to 3,500 agents in 23 states.” He sold that business two years ago to a private equity firm that then allowed him the flexibility to embark on the journey he’s on today.

Life After JPAR

How has life changed? He says he works a lot less now, he doesn’t have to be as involved as he was with JPAR. “Not having my name on the door doesn’t require me to be everywhere all the time. Having sweat equity partners allows me to really spend more time with my family, which is what I wanted to do.” He remains extraordinarily proud of his work at JPAR, in fact, a lot of the upper management at Vesuvius are JPAR people.

I’m a self-diagnosed workaholic. I can work 16 hours a day and not feel weird about it. In fact I feel weird when I’m not working.

Giuseppe ‘JP’ Piccinini

All this is said with a wink and a smile as he excuses himself to greet the table of nurses who’ve come in to celebrate a special award and say a few words in Italian to Ravaglia. But that’s just a day in the life: come by and greet people at the restaurant, go home and change diapers, wake up in the morning for a call with a team of developers in Pakistan, then a text from a boat captain saying the sh***er’s full and the guests are unhappy. “That’s what you call diversifying your portfolio,” he said.

JP says another big life change after the sale was that he started taking better care of his health.

“That Realtor diet. It starts when you’re eating in your car,” he said. “Then you’re taking meetings all day: sometimes I’d have two breakfasts, three lunches, happy hour, two dinners, and crawl into bed, and that takes a toll.”

After the sale, he took the time to take care of himself, and spent months at a time in the islands having adventures with his young daughter Juliet, who wasn’t yet in school at the time. He fell in love with island life and purchased a home in St. John. He was enjoying the bachelor life for the first time, having married young, when he met his beautiful fiancé Alexandra. They now have a new baby girl together, and between them share five children.

Life has changed. One of the pledges I made to myself when I sold JPAR is, no matter how busy I get, I’m not going to go back into the rat race, and make my family a second priority. I really value family time first and foremost.

Giuseppe ‘JP’ Piccinini

JP speaks passionately about his kids. “My older kids saw their dad go from engineer to Realtor to CEO: they saw it happen in the living room. The younger kids —  Juliet, Beckett, and Penelope — they won’t know any different, so their experiences are totally different. I didn’t work all weekend showing houses because I wanted to be away from my kids, but because I was working toward something: to create generational wealth. There were times when I started out when we were living paycheck to paycheck. Having reached a certain level of success, now I can spoil all five of them.”

JP’s oldest daughter is now studying law in New York, and her brother is at Texas Tech. They’re not too spoiled, though — JP says they’re both working part-time jobs while in school.

On The Decision to Sell

Babe Ruth said, “All ballplayers should quit when it starts to feel as if all the baselines run uphill.” Piccinini says it’s not that it wasn’t fun anymore, but that with hindsight, he wouldn’t have named the company after himself. When your name is on the door, no matter what it is, they always want to talk to you. He says he could never walk away.

It was such an incredible journey starting JPAR from just me and a couple of agents from the kitchen table in my house to where it got, that I wanted to go on another journey.

Giuseppe ‘JP’ Piccinini

What Next And Investment Tips From JP

I asked JP what’s next for Vesuvius holdings investment-wise and while earlier he hinted that he’s very interested in the tech space, he advised smart investors to hold off a bit to see what happens over the next few months. “I see tremendous opportunity opening up in commercial and residential real estate space, but I would be waiting on the sideline.”

JP advised that in the coming months, we’ll see opportunities for investment properties, both commercial and residential, that people can no longer afford because of mortgage rates. He says multifamily complexes have been overbuilt in Dallas, so he thinks investors will be dumping them, as well as their single-family rentals because rents are going to go down. “Look for people needing to get out of vacation homes they can’t afford because they have a floating mortgage rate … The rentals they bought in the peak of the Airbnb boom that aren’t profitable anymore.”

As a long-time Frisco resident, I wondered what JP’s thoughts were about the proposed Universal Studios project. He said he’s fascinated by it.

“The great opportunity is going to be, what goes next to a Universal Studio-type project? Hotels, retail, multi-family apartments, and restaurants. I saw the master plan, and I’ll tell you we’re strongly considering putting a second La Stella up there. You have Ritz Carlton residences; there’s a Mastro’s (Ocean Club) going up there, all the big names, high-end stuff. You think about theme parks around here and you think about Arlington, and it took decades to get Texas Live! and the kind of high-end entertainment they have there now. They’re doing it backwards here, and I think it’s going to be a bright future for everyone involved.”

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It’s 5:45 on a Tuesday and the restaurant has filled up. I’m making my way through what I can only describe as an orgasmic tiramisu. I said it. We’d shared the rest of the meal family-style, and when Jonathan served me my own dessert, I looked at him questioningly, and he said, “Trust me, you won’t want to share.” This is the tiramisu by which all tiramisu should be judged. I will never be the same.

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I’m very grateful. I hope to inspire people. I want to let people know that if I can do it, you certainly can. I’m an immigrant kid, didn’t speak any English, I don’t come from money. I just come from an internal desire to not want to be average, and if I could say anything, it’s please don’t settle for average. Average is boring. Go live it up.

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Finding balance doesn’t exist, it’s a lie. The truth is life is all about priorities. And priorities can change based on what you value most and what your goals are. 

Giuseppe ‘JP’ Piccinini