The first thing you need to know about Rick Schaper is that he threw a pizza party to raise money for a restaurant and raised zero dollars. The second thing is that he kept going anyway. A neighbor, a firefighter who’d missed the party, asked if Rick could leave one in the freezer for the next day. “That’s kind of where I got the idea,” Rick shared. Nobody writes business plans about freezing a pizza for the guy next door, but 20 years later Dogtown Pizza will produce 2 million of them this year alone.
“We’ve grown a little bit every year over the last 20 years,” Rick explained. “We’ve never gone down.” No dramatic spikes, no pivot moments. Just steady work and family. In the early years, Rick’s wife, Meredith, was bartending at Culpepper’s in the Central West End and waiting tables to keep the lights on while Rick built the business. All three of their sons now work in it. “It’s very rewarding to work with my children,” he said. “We love seeing our kids every day.” They try to have everyone over for dinner every few Sundays. The business and the family are not separate things. They never have been.
Ricky, the youngest, grew up as “The Pizza Guy” – a reputation that followed him from grade school through high school and eventually into the job he now holds managing production. He designed the manufacturing line in the facility they built four years ago, a plant capable of processing 5 million pizzas a year. He tracks everything, down to the 30 pizzas lost in a single minute of machine downtime. “I really want to see those numbers go up where they should be,” he shared, “or go down for the efficiency numbers.” The gap between where they are and what the line can handle doesn’t read as failure to him. It reads as the next thing to do…