By Michael P. LaMarca
Welcome to “Beyond the Box: Building Your Pizza Business”! This new column will focus on the many issues, challenges and best practices related to the pizza business—not just inside the box, but beyond. In every issue, we’ll take an in-depth look at what’s required to build your concept into a fully operational and thriving business—and then maybe a pizza empire!
Beyond the Box will feature topics such as:
- Choosing your concept
- Defining your mission and vision
- Building out your menu
- Recipe development
- Policies and procedures
- Managing costs of goods sold (COGS)
- Third-party delivery
- Building a reliable team
- Developing and protecting your brand
- Protecting your business and yourself
- And much more
Related: Are the Big Pizza Chains Slipping? Download PMQ’s 2026 Pizza Power Report and learn more.
By way of introduction: I’m the owner/CEO of Master Pizza Franchise Group (masterpizza.com), located in Cleveland, with 14 locations and more than 225 team members. We opened our first pizzeria on July 1, 2000. I’m a current member of PMQ’s U.S. Pizza Team and served as team captain from 2015 to 2025. I’m also a five-time National Pizza Champion and a one-time International Pizza Champion.
Over the years I’ve learned that running a pizza business can be very easy—or very easy to mess up. The margin between your pizza business being successful or being a constant struggle is very thin. Making sure that you, as the business owner, are aware of these critical points and how to navigate through them is the main goal for “Beyond the Box.”
Consistency Is Key
Topping the list of these critical points: your procedures and policies. Consistency will be a key ingredient for success. The challenge is making sure every employee is able to duplicate your best practices—and your concept—once you finalize your recipes and your menu.
Offering a complicated menu is guaranteed to create problems for your pizza business. We all are guilty of putting more on our menu than what’s needed. That’s because we all love the pizzas and food we create. But the more complicated your menu is, the more difficult it will be to make sure every item is made to your specs every time.
Fortunately, there are several ways to make sure your menu items are prepared and cooked consistently. And it starts with a written step-by-step procedure for every menu item. Spelling out the details of every step better ensures that consistency will be achieved.
The other key to consistency is to develop written policies for your staff on how everything works. The clearer your policies are, the better your chance of getting the entire team rowing in the same direction. From your restaurant’s dress code to knowing exactly when payday is, you should have a written policy. Never assume that someone knows how you want something done. Make sure you have a clearly stated policy for everything, and I mean everything! We will delve into this topic more deeply in future columns.
Setting and Meeting Customer Expectations
Finally, it’s also vital to nail down the desired experience that you want each customer to have every time they order or dine in with you—and, more importantly, to meet the customer expectations that you’ve created every single time. Whether your model is a quick-service setting or a full-service dine-in experience, you’d better have that pizza ready when the customer expects it to be ready. Nothing will hurt your business more than failure to meet your customer’s expectations. You won’t notice it right away but, over time, you will lose customers. We call that “death by a thousand cuts.”
Take your time and make sure you plan out exactly what you want your customer experience to be. Evaluate everything to make sure you can maximize that experience. If your customer knows what to expect when they order from you and you always meet that expectation, it’s a win!
Now, relax and take a deep breath. In future issues of PMQ Pizza, we will dig deeper into all of this and much more. This is just the first conversation of many to come. My father used to ask me the same question every time he sensed that I was becoming overwhelmed: “How do you eat an elephant?” Then, he would quickly answer his own question: “One bite at a time.”
Michael LaMarca is a veteran pizzeria owner/operator and owner/CEO of Master Pizza Franchise Group in Cleveland. To engage with him directly, follow him at @michaelplamarca on Instagram and Facebook.
