By Charlie Pogacar
When Bart Bortles decided to serve pizza at his biker bar in Golden, Colorado, he planted a seed that would one day sprout into nine different Woody’s Wood-Fired Pizza restaurants. Only the original location survives, and it is now owned and operated by Bart’s son, Jon Bortles.
When the younger Bortles attends trade shows or industry events, he’s often asked how many locations he has. The answer—one—sometimes seems to let people down. “It’s almost like you’ve got to have multiple locations to be taken seriously,” Bortles said on the latest episode of Peel: A PMQ Pizza Podcast. “And I just think that’s the wrong way of looking at it.”
Jon’s mentality is that growing revenue streams without adding locations is not only possible, but more profitable. This is something he watched his dad learn the hard way.
Related: How This Iconic, High-Volume Pizza Buffet Concept Keeps Things Fresh
“Not only did it kind of destroy him personally to work 80 hours a week,” Bortles said of his dad, “but he could never be everywhere at one time. There was no way he could stretch himself that thin and still execute on the level that he needed to…we had a successful store in Golden that was kind of dragged down by the other stores.”
View this post on Instagram
So when Jon returned to the business in 2015 and eventually took over operations, he made a deliberate choice: to build depth inside a single brick-and-mortar rather than chasing unit count. For example, Woody’s built a dedicated takeout and delivery kitchen that now adds “well over a million dollars a year” in revenue.
More recently, the team launched a large, high-volume food truck—affectionaltely nicknamed “The Pizza Beast”—that now books weddings, festivals and major community events. Woody’s also began selling its dough to other pizzerias through a distributor. And Bortles is currently exploring carefully structured licensing opportunities on nearby college campuses.
“We can do all those things while still maintaining the integrity of our flagship and our original store,” Bortles said, “without having to grow into multiple locations to feel like we’re expanding. I’d rather do fewer things better.”
For Bortles, the answer isn’t more locations—it’s a better version of the one he already has. “We’re not going to grow for the sake of growth,” he said. “Greed isn’t really playing a factor here. It’s just, ‘What are we going to do this year? What’s next?’”
To listen to the full podcast episode, check out one of the following links:
