By Charlie Pogacar
When Kerry Steed took over the family pizza business, he cut a pie in front of 150 people for a grand opening occasion. People cheered, and Steed showed off the knife, with the store’s opening date etched into the metal. Steed barely had time to soak it all in before his grandmother, Millie Waag—who had founded the business with Steed’s grandfather, Dick Waag, in 1962—scared him straight.
“She leaned in,” Steed recalled to PMQ Pizza, “and she goes, ‘Now, Sonny, don’t you ruin what I spent my life building.’”
Steed is happy to report that, over 30 years later, Generations Pizzeria, in Wilmington, Ohio, is still up and running. In fact, he’s grown the business by leaps and bounds, taking the sales from about $100,000 in 1993—the year he bought the business from his mother—to about $2 million last year.
Related: How a Clip From Seinfeld Launched One of the Midwest’s Hottest Chains
The fact that Steed has been able to grow his business to that degree is no small feat—Generations Pizzeria is the only independent pizza shop in Wilmington, a town of about 11,000. There are a couple of other restaurants with pizza on the menu, but Steed’s chief competition is the dreaded chains: Domino’s, Pizza Hut, Papa Johns, Little Caesars and Donatos all operate stores in Wilmington.
To compete, Steed has had to make a series of hard decisions as the words of his grandmother still ring in his ears. One of the first major changes was spinning his franchised pizzeria off into a true independent restaurant: Steed’s grandparents and mother had been Cassano’s Pizza King franchisees, starting in 1962. In 2001, Steed decided to rebrand as an independently operated restaurant called Generations Pizza, a name that had a couple of different meanings to him.
“I’m the third generation of my family that has operated [a pizza restaurant in Wilmington],” Steed said. “We’ve also been serving generations of people who have lived here. And if my kids want to be the fourth generation to take it over, they can be, but I’m not building this business and operating it for them to take over—I’m building it and operating it so that I can pay the mortgage and put them through college and whatnot.”
Steed knew transitioning into an independent restaurant would be an uphill battle, but he also believed it was an opportunity to set his business apart. He had already become known as the “Pizza Man” of Wilmington—a nickname he wears with pride, one earned by being omnipresent both within the story and outside of it, embedding himself in the community. To compete with the chains, Steed felt that Generations Pizzeria had to further lean into the personalized experience that his grandparents and mother had before him. He had to lean into becoming the pizza man, a role that came into focus just months after he took over the family business.
“The first six months of running the shop, things were going great,” Steed recalled. “But it wasn’t until one morning, I was having breakfast at a Bob Evans, where things became clear to me. There was a family in there who had been in the shop the night before. You know how you can kind of tell when people recognize you but they can’t really place you? These kids were looking at me, but they just couldn’t figure out where they knew me from. And finally, as I was walking by, I said, ‘How was your pizza last night?’ And the kid turned to his dad and said, ‘That’s right, Daddy! He’s the pizza man.’”
“I’m telling you, that night my life changed,” Steed said. “I went from being Kerry Steed, president, owner, whatever I was, and I just became the Pizza Man of Wilmington. And that is probably a similar story to so many other independents in small towns across the country, but that’s truly how it happened.”
Indeed, Steed’s approach to connecting with the community will be familiar to many pizzeria operators across the country. For example, he gives his personal phone number to every coach, athletic director and church in town. But Steed also spends a lot of time strategizing his marketing spend.
In particular, he has found his social media channels and rewards program to be effective modes of bringing in new and repeat business. But his best marketing ROI, Steed said, comes via direct mail. Steed mails out fliers to certain ZIP codes across town, typically targeting middle and upper-middle class neighborhoods.
He knows that Generations Pizzeria isn’t thought of as a value play in town, and he’s okay with that.
“Being a small operator, you don’t have access to the resources that many of these big chains and operators do,” Steed said. “We realized early on that if we tried to compete with them on discounts, coupons and flyers, we were going to lose every time. So our direct mail is actually usually showcasing a lot of different specialty pizzas that you can’t get if you go somewhere else. We also let them know that we provide different types of services, like you can bring a group of 80 people in here if you wanted to. In the summertime, we have music on our patio. Those are the types of direct mail marketing we send out alongside our menus. They have had a huge return for me.”
Another big change Steed made during the 2001 transition to an independent restaurant involved the pizzeria’s oven. As Cassanno’s franchisees, the family had used a hearth stone oven, one that would require six to eight weeks of training each time a pizza maker onboarded. It also meant Steed spent a lot of time in front of the oven, making pizza when nobody else could. In one of the hardest decisions he ever had to make, Steed transitioned to conveyor-style ovens.
“When we went to the conveyor, you put the pizza in one side, and it comes out the other, and it’s done,” Steed said. “And [making the switch] allowed me to start to focus more strategically on the business. Rather than me standing in front of those ovens all night every night, I was able to step back a little bit more, do some management, do more customer touches, work on sales and marketing. I became a tactical operator.”
Other changes came later, like investing in technology, from order-taking AI that kept him off the phone to investing in somebody who could grow the brand’s social media marketing. But all of these changes have the same thing in common, which is that they’ve freed Steed up to focus on the day-to-day.
Another unique change Steed made was heavily influenced by his wife, Valerie. (And it should be noted that Steed’s entire family, including his children, Abbey and Andy, as well as his sister-in-law, Ashley Shanks, play an active role in the business). When Steed was building a new restaurant—the one where Generations is currently located, where it moved to in 2005—his wife strongly advised Steed to install a drive-thru window.
“I was like, ‘Honey, this is a pizzeria. It’s going to be a restaurant. Why would I want to put a drive-thru on it? It’s only going to take away parking spaces.’ So she said, ‘I’ll tell you what. You take the kids, go to the grocery store and pick up the groceries.’ So I did that, and I realized she was dead on.”
Steed went so far as to say he would not open another pizzeria without a drive-thru window, as it’s become a key revenue artery for the busy pizzeria—he estimated 20% of Generations’ sales come via the drive-thru. Typically, customers will order in advance and pick up their pizza at the window. But Generations also accepts orders at the window and has dedicated parking spots reserved for customers following that procedure.
“If somebody drives up to my pizzeria to order a pizza, I’m not going to make them call me,” Steed said. “I’m going to say, ‘What do you want?’ It’s no different than when we’re here at 8 a.m. and we’re doing our prep work. If the phone rings, I’m taking that order—we are open.”
It’s that flexible ethos that has taken Steed from a 20-something-year-old, recent college graduate to a successful pizzeria owner and operator for over 30 years. But the story of his evolution into becoming a thriving operator is not complete without knowing a bit more about Steed’s past. It’s a journey that will be familiar to many who have grown up in small towns.
As a teenager, Steed was determined to leave his hometown of Wilmington and never return. He went to college at Wright State University down the road in Dayton, Ohio, and studied engineering. The experience was revelatory, but it also taught him that his hometown had a lot more to offer than he’d initially thought. So when Steed’s mother called him one day and asked what he was doing with the rest of his life—and then, when he hesitated, asked him if he wanted to come home and run the family business—he thought about it for a weekend before saying yes, he would love to take over the pizza shop.
Still, it wasn’t until Steed’s grandmother put the fear of God in him that he really understood what he was getting himself into. That moment has carried on in his life, the guiding force that has driven Generations Pizzeria to become the success it is today.
“Everything we’ve done, it’s because my grandmother’s words haunt me every day,” Steed said. “For all the decisions that we make—I mean, we’ve made some pivotal decisions that have altered our course—it really goes back to that moment.”
“But we’ve been successful by focusing on the quality of our products, by being part of the community and over-servicing the customer,” Steed said. “Now, don’t get me wrong, [the chains] have been very successful in this community, and they sell a lot of pizza, and I understand that. However, I’m exceptionally successful in the area in which I want to compete—and none of them match me in that aspect of the business.”
