When Bart Bortles decided to serve pizza at his biker bar in Golden, Colorado, he planted a seed that would one day sprout into nine different Woody’s Wood-Fired Pizza restaurants. Only the original location survives, and it is now owned and operated by Bart’s son, Jon Bortles.
When the younger Bortles attends trade shows or industry events, he’s often asked how many locations he has. The answer—one—sometimes seems to let people down. “It’s almost like you’ve got to have multiple locations to be taken seriously,” Bortles said on the latest episode of Peel: A PMQ Pizza Podcast. “And I just think that’s the wrong way of looking at it.”
Jon’s mentality is that growing revenue streams without adding locations is not only possible, but more profitable. This is something he watched his dad learn the hard way…