By Charlie Pogacar
For Billy Bricks, 2024 was a year for the books. The Chicagoland-based brand, which has seven brick-and-mortar locations as well as seven food trucks, was named to PMQ’s 20 Pizza Brands to Watch in April. Two other industry publications named Billy Bricks to similar lists, indicating that one of the industry’s best-kept secrets is no longer a secret at all.
So what’s got everyone buzzing about Billy Bricks, which was founded in 2005 by Bill Wilson as “Brix”? Well, a lot of it has to do with the energy infused by CEO Ric Gruber, the son of Wilson, who took over as leader of the brand in Fall 2023.
“I was very clear that the 2024 Billy Bricks mission was not only to get our cost of goods in line and make this a strong, financially sound business at all levels, but also to get on people’s radar,” Gruber said. “That was the quote we had up on the wall: ‘Get on the radar.’”
Related: Pizza Power Report 2025: How Independents Keep Learning to Win Versus the Big Chains
Of course, that mission would not have been successful if Billy Bricks weren’t something special. But its sales numbers, operating model and move toward franchising all tell a story about the 20-year-old brand: a time-tested brand, Billy Bricks is going to continue growing. And its longevity, Gruber pointed out, is partially owed to its willingness to be nimble in the face of challenges.
For example, at the outset of the pandemic, the brand—known for its woodfired Neapolitan-style pies—began hearing demand for larger pizzas. “Well, a 16” Neapolitan pizza doesn’t really exist for a reason,” Gruber said. “So we said, ‘Let’s make it New Haven [style].’ I have a connection to [apizza] because that’s the other style of pizza I grew up on [having gone to college in Connecticut].”
And just like that, Billy Bricks became one of the first pizza brands (if not the first) with no obvious connection to New Haven to offer apizza. The move helped Billy Bricks rapidly expand its DELCO and catering sales, growing revenue streams in a way that wouldn’t have been possible with Neapolitan-style pizza alone.
Here’s a lightly edited conversation with Gruber in which he tells a bit more of the Billy Bricks story—and why the brand is, once again, one to watch heading into 2025.
Q. Billy Bricks has been around for about 20 years, and it was founded by your father. Have you been involved with the brand since day one?
Ric Gruber: I was going to college when my parents called and told me they were going to do this. I was just kind of living my life, playing college baseball [at Fairfield University] in Connecticut. New Haven-style pizza was my drunk college pizza, I was totally spoiled.
When I came home from school—when I was on breaks and all that—we had just opened, and actually, I was the first sandwich guy. I worked the sandwich station and was allowed to work the register, and that was basically it.
And then when I graduated college, I took… I don’t know what to call it. A bridge year, or gap year—it was a year between college and law school. During that year, I was working in the restaurant, basically as a shift leader.
Q. So you went to law school. And how did you eventually find your way back to the family business?
Gruber: When I left law school, I became the creative director of an advertising agency and also held a private practice of law. I moved back and forth between California and Illinois a bunch of times for different reasons. And then I took over the marketing side of [Billy Bricks]. Part of that meant managing the company’s growth plans because that’s what I did for all of my clients. That was probably 8 or 9 years ago now.
Through that process, I realized all of the stuff that wasn’t getting done, or all of the potential that was there that was not being [capitalized] on because my dad was getting a bit older. But also, you know, it’s just one of those generational things: iPhones were new, social media was new—he was missing a lot of stuff because of the age gap. And that’s not to say he was resistant to it, it was just one of those things where he didn’t even know what some of that stuff was.
At that point I was like, OK, I’m going to have to take a more active role. He was looking to expand—we opened three stores in one year—and I ended up finding myself working very heavily in the business and, ultimately, I sold my own company.
Because I knew that if I was going to do this correctly, there was going to be no time to handle anything else other than making sure these three new stores got off the ground and our growth plan was being managed correctly. It was almost 8 years ago that I jumped in full time, and I was basically tasked with the development and growth of the company. My father retired 8 months ago, but it’s been about 16 months since I took over the full operation.
Q. So having that business expertise, what were you seeing in terms of what the brand was doing that made you feel like it was really special and had room to grow?
Gruber: First and foremost, if you look at the longevity we have here. I mean, when we started almost 20 years ago, we were one of only five brick ovens in all of Illinois, I think. The fast-casual, open-kitchen, wood-fired-oven thing you see so often these days was just not a thing back then. So it was really groundbreaking stuff that my Dad was doing.
I can always be a little more aggressive in talking about this stuff because I’m not talking about myself. Even if it’s my Dad, I’m talking about somebody else who went out there and basically invented something and paved the way for a lot of really cool stuff that came after it. And people thought he was crazy at the time, by the way.
When you go to a pizza show nowadays, it’s a foregone conclusion that there are 15 different oven companies there. I mean, when my Dad was doing this, it took him almost a year to figure out the logistics of getting an oven into our store. The barrier of entry is so different now.
And I still think our business is really unique compared to the other people competing with us. I see all of these new pizzerias out there and I look at their prices and things like that, and I’m like, how are they doing this? And then I usually see them go out of business within 3-to-4 years at the most and I’m like, Oh… they weren’t doing it, were they?
Because I know where our numbers come from. I have both an analytical and creative side to my brain, so when I am saying to myself, ‘Those numbers aren’t [adding up],’ it’s usually because they’re not. And I get that thanks to my background: It used to be my job to dig into deals. I would work with creators, help them secure their intellectual property (IP) and help them structure their business in a way that it could scale, grow and structure future deals with investment groups or whatever. So I’d see what other people were out there getting investments and funding for, and I knew how much stronger of a business we had.
Even today, I still haven’t gone and done a roadshow of fundraising or any of that in order to scale, because I’m not a [salesman]. I know where our numbers are and I know we have a terrific business for my family—backed by a few small minority investors in some expansion we did—and that was why it was so important to have that strong foundational stuff really in line. It’s also why we’ve spent the better part of the last two years, cost-of-goods wise, menu-pricing wise, tightening all of that up, from operations to training manuals and beyond.
Q. So I know you started out as “Brix”—then “Bricks”—but when you started looking into franchising, you had to ultimately changed the name to “Billy Bricks.” Can you tell us about that process?
Gruber: Yeah, so you know, my background is first and foremost in creative and secondly, in IP. I will say this: It was a really hard sell internally. But again, to my dad’s credit, most founders and operators are really hard-headed and rigid when it comes to something like this. It’s just how it is, he was willing to roll with a lot of what I was saying and he trusted me and what I was trying to do.
Q. This year Billy Bricks has received a ton of accolades, one of which was being included on our list of pizza brands to watch. How did you go about getting on people’s radar?
Gruber: Again, my dad—and I think this is true of a lot of people his age and in his generational group—he’s the opposite of what works today because he’s never going to be the guy who wants to get interviewed. He doesn’t want attention, accolades about any of this [stuff] he’s doing with the business.
These days, it’s all about puffing your chest out and showing off and all of that. A lot of times people end up being, pardon my language, full of [it], but it’s kind of what’s required now [to get your name out there], right? Tooting your own horn and getting your name out there, especially when you’re franchising, it’s required now.
We’d never done any of that stuff because we’re running a pizzeria business and growing it. And then when I started seeing some of the numbers [other pizzerias were doing] being posted out there, I’m like, ‘We are outpacing all of those people that are getting all of that recognition.’ They could start outpacing us because they’re getting more attention. So I felt like I had to spend a bit more time doing this type of thing because that’s the world we’re playing in now.
Q. Well, it’s worked, because you were named to lists by PMQ, Pizza Marketplace, and Pizza Today, I believe?
Gruber: Yeah, and here’s the million-dollar secret behind that: None of that did a damn thing [in terms of driving sales] because a lot of this is happening in the bubble of the pizza world. It doesn’t necessarily get into the hands of customers.
But I will also say this: It really did motivate our team. It really got them excited because suddenly they felt like somebody other than just me was saying ‘thank you’ and recognizing what we were doing. So in that sense, it was definitely worth it. It was like, ‘OK, we’re real. We’re not just sitting here and doing this off on an island, there are people who are recognizing that we’re actually really good at this.’
Q. What was it like getting into franchising?
Gruber: Our first foray into the franchising side of the business… I was seeing what I was seeing about how successful the brand was and I thought, man, we could franchise this thing out and they’ll be crushing it, too.
Well, they didn’t crush it. And what we learned from that—why I think they didn’t crush it versus why we did—was how to retool and rethink what we did and how we did it. But one of the biggest things we realized was that we didn’t initially find people who were financially stable enough to handle it.
One of the things we’ve started trying to figure out about [a prospective franchisee] is: Are you wanting this to be a passive investment, or are you investing in this to buy yourself a job? When you open up one of our restaurants, are you looking to be where we are now? I have a team of people working with me, but it took us 20 years to get to that point.
You have to grow yours like we grew ours, and that means that you need to be in the stores for the first few years while you’re growing yours. And your plan could be to open up more than one, or you gotta have enough cash to be able to support an operations team of your own. You can’t be looking to us to be running your company for you. That’s what could happen for any of our franchisees, but they typically don’t have the money for it right off the bat. So picking more financially stable people was the first thing.
On the flip side of that, I do think we had to get our numbers stronger, too. Because that’s what people are you going to want to know, right? What’s my ROI? What’s the timeline on that?
I’ve gotten some really good advice from mentors and peers who have been through this, and they’ve been able to tell me, ‘Hey, this is what your numbers need to be in order to make this work for people like that because they’ve gone through it.’ So my laser focus has been: OK, how do we get to that number. So I’m opening up more locations to see how fast I can get an ROI on an opening and what’s my timeline on positive cash flow?
Q. When you say get your numbers more dialed in, is it so that you can teach it to other people better? Or be a better example to them? What does it mean?
Gruber: It’s to make it something that I am confident to go out and sell. Because, believe me, I could sell 10 franchises right now. But that would not necessarily be an honest thing to do, because whatever number I’d be saying is realistic for them, I wouldn’t really be 100% sure is realistic. I can make it look [really rosy] without committing fraud, because you can sell anything any way you want if you package it that way.
To me, I want to be really confident in saying, ‘We opened up a brand new location here, with this version of our operating model, with this square footage and these revenue streams inside of it. Here was the plan. Here was our pro forma. And we had a complete return on the initial investment in 16-18 months, and this was the positive cash flow and you can see how it matched up to our [forecasts].’
So then it’s a real, investible opportunity.
Q: So you said it yourself: Woodfired oven concepts are way more common today than they were when you started. How does Billy Bricks maintain its position as a unique brand in today’s market?
Gruber: Yeah, I’d say just because everybody can suddenly do something doesn’t mean they can do it well. And it doesn’t mean they can do it really consistently over a long period of time. The biggest thing we have is longevity. But we’ve gotten that longevity not by being the same brand since day one, but by being willing to change.
So if there’s somebody out there that is doing something slightly better than us, or we see there’s a new technology or piece of equipment that improves consistency, we will look at that. But we’re usually ahead of most people on that stuff anyway, honestly. For example, we started using digital menuboards instead of paper ones years ago. We modernized our POS system way before other brands of our size did, too. I think it’s just been about seeing where things are going and being able to jump out in front of it.
One other thing I’d mention is that our philosophy—actually, it’s printed on the back of our shirts. We really leaned into this: ‘real people, real food, real fast.’ We make a really strong point of having connections between our guests and our people. That’s the way we do it because people will make choices based on the connections they have to the brand more than anything.
Q. What are some of the ways you create that personal connection?
Gruber: We’re fast casual, but we pre-bus tables and fully serve the food to you. We also have real plates, real silverware, and real napkins. So it’s a slightly elevated experience in that way where you don’t feel like you’re serving yourself. Also, you do order at the counter and that’s where we take your name. And that’s a big thing for us: addressing everybody by name, because that’s a connection, too, right?
Another thing, we really don’t do a lot of major marketing. We do fundraising for local schools every opportunity we can. And the ads we end up doing… they’re never going to be like, ‘hey, 20% off, come get our pizza.’ What we do instead is we highlight our staff. So we say, ‘Hey, this is Jose. He’s been with us for 20 years. Maybe you’ve seen him in downtown Lombard. Stop by and say “hey” sometime.’ That has a doubly positive effect because it both humanizes the brand and also impacts team morale.
We also make a really strong effort on our social channels to respond to every comment, to get back to everyone with questions. If people are messaging with feedback, we have real people answering all of them.
On that same note, when we get an inquiry about one of our food trucks, we always respond in 24 hours or less. During weekdays, they’re going to get a response in probably less than an hour from when they fill something out. And do you know how I know that works? Because whenever we ask for feedback, the most common response I get is ‘We appreciated you got back to us so quickly.’
Now, if you’re our competition and you’re operating a food truck, you may be out doing something and you won’t be able to respond for two days. That’s now going to happen with us. We have admin doing that on top of the invoicing, scheduling and follow up. They are all real responses, you’ll never get an automated response.
We’ve placed a huge emphasis on that and that has driven so many people back to our business because a lot of times, their first experience with us is through catering. So maximizing those opportunities because sometimes a lot of times they’re the most profitable ones if you’re doing it right.
Q. This has been awesome. One more question before I let you go: One thing our editor in chief, Rick Hynum, noticed about Billy Bricks is that you have a lot of women in leadership positions throughout the brand. Was that due to deliberate action or something else?
Gruber: I think, for me, it’s all been based on merit. Where a lot of people have developed and grown and earned promotions, they’ve been women who have been working for us. So there’s no preference for it or something, but it’s just that there’s no bias against it, is the way that I think I’d put it.
Everybody has the same opportunities here. We have some terrific people that for whatever reason may not have been given the same opportunities elsewhere.
Also, I should point out that my Mom is a badass of a woman. She is the CFO for a pretty large company. I also have a wonderful wife and grew up with 8 aunts, just on one side, that are all forces of nature. I also have two daughters who I hope grow up to make all of their dreams come true, and having them work alongside me or take over for me one day would be a dream come true for me.
I think one of the things about women as leaders is that… one of the hardest things to hire and train for is emotional intelligence. I find that women, as leaders, tend to be better in that respect. And there’s no business where that’s more important than the restaurant business. Because in this business you have to not only take care of guests, but you have to take care of and manage your team.
