This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Chris Brady, founder and president of Timber Pizza Co. It has been edited for length and clarity.
By the time I started my second job in tech sales in my early 20s, I knew I had no desire to keep working in the corporate world and wanted to do something on my own. My coworker Andrew Dana also felt the same way, so we’d brainstorm different business ideas over lunch.
I had a lightbulb moment while talking to a potential client. I was selling catering and wedding venue advertising and called on a pizza company. The owner started telling me more about his mobile wood-fired pizza business. I called Andrew immediately, and he agreed it was a great idea worth pursuing. Now, Timber Pizza Co. has nine locations and five mobile pizza units.
We started our business with $20,000 and a lot of optimism
I was 25 when I left my corporate sales job to start Timber Pizza, so I didn’t have a lot of capital to work with. My dad lent me $15,000 to get started, and I remember walking a $5,000 check of my own money to the bank. But the beauty of a mobile business is that you don’t need much to get off the ground and can rely on scrappiness.
Without the stress of running a brick-and-mortar business, I knew we could experiment without taking a big swing. The worst thing that would have happened is that I would have had to move back with my parents and get another sales job if it didn’t work out.
Andrew and I both loved pizza, but didn’t have much background in the restaurant world. We went to a pizza camp in Colorado for a weekend to buy our first oven and learn the basics of making pizza, and then came up with our recipe after a lot of trial and error.
We started driving our 1967 baby-blue Chevy pickup truck, with our oven hitched behind, all around Washington, DC. Our goal was to make pizza people loved, not to take ourselves too seriously. We would ride around in basketball shorts blasting hip-hop music, just trying to have a good time. That definitely made us stand out.
After a year, we opened our first brick-and-mortar
Our first retail location opened in 2016 in DC’s Petworth neighborhood. Baby Blue still exists, but it’s definitely the show pony now, not the workhorse. The business was doing really well, and then in 2017, Bon Appétit recognized us as their “Pizzeria of the Year.” We also got our first Bib Gourmand from the Michelin Guide in 2019.
It felt like we were really hitting our stride and had the business where we wanted to be, but then COVID happened. So in 2021, we decided to bring on some new partners to the business and some capital to help stabilize things. It’s also when we started our franchising journey.
It felt like I was in startup mode again
We had been doing business one way for seven years, but now our goal was to bring Timber with great people to great communities. I really had to rewire my brain to go from how we had done business for the first seven years to how we were going to expand.
Since 2021, we’ve grown to nine locations across the South. The goal is to find our groove, opening between five and eight locations a year over the next three to five years and then continuing to scale after that. We’re looking at markets like Atlanta, Savannah, Greenville, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina.
There were a lot of days in the first few years with some soul-crushing moments and tough times, especially when we looked at our bank account, but I’m really glad we stuck with it.
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