By Charlie Pogacar
When David Goldy bought a struggling Westside Pizza franchise with plans to make it a standalone independent pizza shop, his first big branding move wasn’t a splashy logo or agency-driven makeover—it was a frugal letter swap. City rules required channel lettering, and a new sign was pricey.
“To save money, we realized if we named it Wild West, we could scramble the letters and only have to add two new ones,” Goldy said. “That probably saved me a couple thousand dollars—and it was, truthfully, one of the reasons we chose the name.” Take a look at the photo below, squint your eyes, and you can see the two letters Goldy added to his sign—the L and a second W—to change Westside Pizza, the predecessor’s name, to Wild West Pizza.
The pragmatic move exemplified Goldy’s knack for operating his Lompoc, California pizzeria on a shoestring budget. But it also proved serendipitous—pieces began falling into place in a way that emboldened the shop’s Old West theme and backstory. What Goldy didn’t know at the time was that the owner of the shopping center was a man named Stuart Whitman, a former cowboy actor who had been in Western films with John Wayne and many others.
Related: A True Turnaround Success Story, Wild West Pizza & Grill Wins $15,000 Award
“Also, my dad loved westerns, so that was kind of in his honor…and then Lompoc was also an old cowboy town,” Goldy said. “That all came together sort of by accident, but it worked.”
From there, the Western theme grew legs—especially on the menu. Pizzas are named after famous western movies and characters. From the Magnificent Seven (a seven-topping pizza that serves as the shop’s Supreme pie) to the Annie Oakley (mashed potatoes, country gravy and fried chicken on a pizza).
The menu puns get playful, too, sometimes spurred on by Goldy’s good friend, ChatGPT: “We do a Thai chicken pizza which is called the Thai Murray, which is named after the most successful rodeo cowboy of all time,” Goldy said “His name was Ty Murray, he spells it T-Y, while ours is spelled T-H-A-I.”
While the brand voice is warm and local, the operation underneath is crisp and methodical—skills Goldy credits, in part, to his earlier career. Goldy opened Wild West Pizza & Grill in 2013, but his pizza career dates back much further. He came up in the Pizza Hut system as the brand was thriving in the 1990s and 2000s. He moved from store manager to the marketing department, where he helped over 60 Pizza Hut locations with their local store marketing.
“On the business side, Pizza Hut was awesome at teaching things like labor control, inventory management and controlling food costs,” he said. “They had incredible training programs…so you learn great systems from them.” He’s translated that to an indie context by using relentless documentation. Goldy has a checklist for everything, from opening and closing to prep work. He’s recently begun investing in technology to aid these initiatives, including Jolt to help with his checklists and Wook AI to help with his inventory management.
The biggest difference between running his indie shop and working at Pizza Hut, though, of course, is the marketing budget. “Their solution to everything was to just throw money at it,” Goldy said. “Obviously, I can’t do that here.”
Goldy’s approach to marketing at Wild West Pizzeria & Grill has been purely grassroots. His approach, he said, was to get people enjoying his pizza in any possible way. One of the best ways he found to do that was by forging connections with the local schools. He became the official pizza of the two local high schools, with exclusive rights to advertise inside the football stadiums and programs.
He also sold pizza outside of the school during lunchtime, shuttling a van to campus in order to sling slices on the sidewalk. This saved kids from having to walk into town and grab lunch, which would leave them with virtually zero time to enjoy the food before having to walk back to school. “The school really loved it because it kept kids on campus instead of them trying to speed into town and come back,” Goldy said.
As his relationship grew with the schools, so did his influence. For younger grades, he built incentives around anti-bullying initiatives—the “Be Nice For a Slice” program, as he dubbed it, recently earned him a $15,000 grant from Hillshire Farms. It’s delightfully simple: If teachers witness a student demonstrating positive behavior, they can give the student a certificate for a free slice of pizza.
“The kids really respond to that,” Goldy said. “They love pizza so much that they start going out of their way to try and get a certificate—so it really encourages good behavior on their part.”
Across all of it—recognition, fundraisers, curbside slices—the north star remained the same: get great pizza into the hands of future regulars while solving real needs for schools. “I say, I’m just trying to get my pizza into people’s mouths, and I think that speaks up,” Goldy said. “So I give away a lot of stuff…and if I see an opportunity, like somebody will make a post about something and…they’re having an event, I’ll volunteer. Like, hey, we’d be more than happy to donate pizza to that event to help it be a success.”
Goldy’s grassroots approach feels emblematic of the Wild West itself: scrappy, thoughtful when it matters and consistent all the way through. When Goldy was first rearranging letters to save a few thousand dollars, he may not have made that connection. But, like he said, sometimes it all accidentally works out in a way that would’ve been hard to plan.
