By Charlie Pogacar
When Matt Plapp walks into a room, he is hard to miss. He’s almost always wearing orange—from his shirt to his Air Jordan shoes, with sometimes even an orange leather jacket to match. But the color isn’t just a fashion choice. It’s a strategy.
Plapp, the energetic CEO of America’s Best Restaurants and Dryver, has made a name for himself in restaurant marketing circles not just for his bold branding—but for the results he gets. In a wide-ranging interview for Peel: A PMQ Pizza Podcast, Plapp shared why so many pizzerias are struggling to connect with customers, what they can do about it and how he built his own personal brand into a beacon for restaurant operators across the country.
“The biggest problem I see,” Plapp said, “is that most pizzerias don’t have a database. And if they do, [many of them] don’t know how to use it. They’ve been sitting on gold for years. Think about it—pizza is the one restaurant category where, for decades, people have willingly given their phone number and email when they place an order. But most operators never used that data.”
Related: Matt Plapp: Beating Self Doubt as a Pizza Entrepreneur
Plapp, who has been writing regular columns for PMQ.com, freely gives pizzerias suggestions on how to improve their marketing strategies. During the podcast conversation, Plapp covered tips and tricks like in-store promotions disguised as guessing games or burying job applications inside heartfelt social media posts. Plapp’s marketing philosophy centers around building relationships, not just pushing deals.
Plapp shared how helping one pizzeria boost its Monday sales by $600 using targeted outreach to just 1,000 customers snowballed into his full-time mission. “Most restaurants are only $100,000 to $200,000 away from their promised land,” he said. “But they don’t know how to get it, because they’re using marketing tactics from 1999 in a world that runs on 2025 attention spans.”
Plapp’s own rise as a recognizable industry voice is proof of his ability to build a brand—even if some of that happened by accident. On the podcast, he explained to PMQ Pizza that he didn’t set out to become “the guy in orange”—it just happened that way. When Plapp began shooting video clips of himself, he would shoot many months’ worth at a time. In the first video shoot he did, he happened to be wearing an orange golf shirt. He showed up at an industry event—where his own personal business coach happened to be—wearing his regular clothes.
“So he said to me, ‘Hey, where’s the orange?’” Plapp recalled. “And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He pulls his phone and he goes to my YouTube and every video I’m in, [I’m wearing] orange. He’s like, ‘Matt, you realize on a weekly basis, we get phone calls from people looking for help to market their restaurant, and we tell them Matt Plapp, and the first thing they say [is] ‘Oh, the guy in orange.’ … He goes, ‘Did you bring one of your stupid orange golf shirts with you?’ I go, ‘Yeah.’ He goes, ‘Go to your hotel and change. I never want to see you without orange again.’”
The lesson was learned, and it’s now a message that Plapp drives home with the pizzeria operators he works with. He believes they need to become their own brand—and quite literally wear it on their sleeves.
“If I ran a pizzeria, I’d wrap a Corvette in pepperoni and use it as my delivery car,” Plapp says. “You need to wear your brand, drive your brand, live it. Because you can’t outspend Domino’s. But you can out-story them.”
To hear more about Plapp’s marketing philosophies and his own personal background, check out the latest episode of Peel: A PMQ Pizza Podcast. He will also be a featured speaker at PMQ’s 2nd annual Pizza Power Forum, taking place September 2-4 in Atlanta. So sign up today, meet him in person and get ready to learn from the best!
