Olive Wood Pizza Does 1,000 Pizzas a Night — Scott Kleckner | RTG Ep. 362

Scott Kleckner and I met more than 20 years ago, back when we were both in the trenches of stadium food service. We reconnected recently, I got caught up on what he has been doing, and my immediate reaction was that this story needed to be public.

He describes himself as a recovering restaurateur. What that actually means is 30 years of running food at scale — and then, in 2024, putting his own house on the line to buy a wood-fired pizza catering company.

What does stadium food service teach you that restaurants don’t?

Scott started with Levy Restaurants when it was still a smallish regional company out of Chicago — three summers at the Ravinia Music Festival while at school in Wisconsin, helping renovate Angel Stadium before he graduated, then opening Staples Center in 1999, Hollywood Park, Lambeau Field. From there to Aramark: Lincoln Financial Field for the Eagles, the Philadelphia arenas, Citi Field for the Mets, and eventually running every sports and entertainment venue across New York and New Jersey.

The compression is the thing civilians never see. In a restaurant you have all day. In a football stadium you have twelve dates a year, and the majority of a day’s sales land in a fifteen- to thirty-minute window.

You have 60 locations, 100 locations. You need to have right staff, right product, right process in all of those areas at the exact right time. And I wish the grace period was two hours.

Scott Kleckner, Owner, Olive Wood Pizza

What you build under that pressure is diagnostic instinct. Scott’s version, and I love this as a field audit: walk into the cooler and count hot dogs. Then walk out and count hot dog buns.

There are indicators that when you’re an operator, you quickly look and it’s like, okay, well, if you don’t have it together on matching those two things, let’s dig deeper.

Scott Kleckner, Owner, Olive Wood Pizza

He told a story on himself that I think every young operator should hear. Twenty-something, Angel Stadium, in-seat service pantries all set, feeling like a stud. An old-school Levy guy walked through and asked what his beverage-to-food mix was going to be. Scott said eighty-twenty. The man asked, is that eighty? Scott said maybe seventy-thirty. The man asked, is that food or beverage? Scott said — well, food and beverage.

It was going to be eighty-twenty beverage to food. Cue the all-nighter to flip the whole setup before gates.

That is what institutional knowledge is worth, and it is why that generation traveled to every opening. The data we have now is enormously better. The instinct still has to be built somewhere.

Why did he leave the corporate track?

The second act was turnarounds: partner in Dinosaur BBQ when it was private-equity-backed and expanding; Patina Restaurant Group, starting at the Downtown Disney restaurants and eventually overseeing the West Coast through the Delaware North acquisition; SBE’s restaurant division; a California group spanning agriculture, meat processing, butcher shops and restaurants that did not survive the pandemic; then a COO turnaround at Landmark Theatres, closing locations and opening better ones.

That work builds something real. It is also, as Scott put it, brutally unstable.

Every year and a half, two years, three years — you fixed it, and it’s thank you very much. Or you didn’t fix it, and it’s thank you very much.

Scott Kleckner, Owner, Olive Wood Pizza

He wanted to keep his family in Southern California. So he started looking for a business to buy.

How do you pick a business to buy?

Scott looked at nearly 200 businesses. Three were decent. One was great.

Olive Wood Pizza had been around since 2011, started at farmers’ markets and grown into a small regional catering company. What attracted him was not that it was broken — the opposite. The founder had built a genuinely high-margin business around his own lifestyle, with good clients and heavy repeat business, and had grown it to the ceiling of what the existing commissary could handle.

In other words, a healthy business capped by capacity rather than by demand. For somebody bringing an enterprise mindset, that is the buy.

Proud to say by 19 months in, we’re double the size on our amount of revenue and almost double the number of events a year. We’ll do over 700 events this year across Southern California. I didn’t just buy a company at this point, I’ve bought a platform.

Scott Kleckner, Owner, Olive Wood Pizza

A new commissary is being built to support the next doubling, with complementary products and companies planned out of the expanded capacity.

What was the first thing he changed?

Not the food. The pricing model — and specifically, making it legible to a computer.

The old approach was typical catering: size up the client, note the zip code, read the event type, quote accordingly. Scott standardized all of it so the whole path — lead form, proposal, contract, payment — could be digital.

What that bought him was measurement. He now watches average event value by city and by event type, conversion statistics, and exactly how many guests are being served each day at each location, weeks and months out. That last one matters more than it sounds: it is how he knows what he can accept and what he has to turn down, and he turns down a lot, especially on Saturdays.

When he asked the seller what information he had been looking at, the honest answer was the P&L, and not much else. The man liked seeing that he made money. Which was fine for the business he had built, and would have been fatal for the one Scott intends to build.

There’s no board to meet with, there’s no high net worth individual to try and get on the phone. It’s just information, pattern recognition, decision, action, measure — rinse, repeat.

Scott Kleckner, Owner, Olive Wood Pizza

James Jones and I got into the same measurement gap from the food cost side in US Foods’ Menu IQ: Snap a Recipe, See Your Food Cost — James Jones.

Can you really fire 1,000 wood-fired pizzas at one event?

This is where I pushed hardest, because I did not believe it. I have a small pizza oven in my own backyard. I interviewed Rick Rosenfield of California Pizza Kitchen a few weeks before this, and a full CPK with a full staff does not do a thousand pizzas in a day.

Scott’s answer was that he has the receipts. Warner Bros. holiday party, every year, up to five thousand guests. They bring in two or three ovens and the best crew, and they fire a thousand pizzas.

The adjustments are in service, not in product — two slices per plate across five times as many tables instead of whole pizzas on china. The dough, the fire and the ingredients do not change.

And the structural advantage is worth understanding, because it is the whole business model.

The super premium caterers show up with stuff that they made in their kitchen. They made the chicken yesterday or the day before. They’re doing the best job they can of translating a restaurant experience, knowing that they had to make a lot of shortcuts. We don’t have to make any shortcuts. I bring the entire restaurant to the location.

Scott Kleckner, Owner, Olive Wood Pizza

A wood-fired trailer plus a kitchen set up on site. Dough and ingredients arrive raw. Pizzas, pastas and salads are made in front of you. Only the charcuterie and platters come pre-built from the commissary. Par-cooking never enters the picture, because nothing needs to be par-cooked.

What does “pick your lane” mean for a pizza program?

Scott’s lane is Neapolitan, built on California ingredients, and he was specific about the supply chain: cheese made for them by Di Stefano, Stanislaus tomatoes, and sausage and pepperoni from Marissa Foods in the Long Beach area.

That specificity is the point. There are a dozen legitimate styles of pizza and no business can be excellent at all of them. Dan Smith made the identical argument about the invisible steps behind a bagel in Brooklyn Water Bagel’s 14-Step Water System — Dan Smith — obsess over the details nobody sees, and the guest feels it without knowing why.

The reputational result: every review at five stars, work with essentially every studio, every record label and most of the Fortune 500 in the area, and — Scott’s framing, which I thought was sharp — being the caterer that event planners already know, rather than the one at the top of the search results.

How do the humans fit into all this data?

I always come back to this, because systems are executed by people. Scott’s longest-tenured employee has been with the company 15 years, since the beginning. His operations manager has been there five. That continuity is what makes the institutional knowledge real rather than theoretical.

Everybody’s a guest. Your employees are either your best ambassador and your best guest, or they’re your biggest detractor. No different than the guests that are sitting there to pay. My culture has always been I am nice, I am kind, I am fair. I ask a lot of people. I ask that they have passion.

Scott Kleckner, Owner, Olive Wood Pizza

He added something about the turnarounds that stuck with me: even when the business does not make it, the question is how you treated people on the way. Did you pay the vendors? Did you pay the employees? He said he has never traded his name for treating people any way other than well and fair.

Should you bet on yourself and buy a business?

I asked because plenty of listeners are sitting in a corporate seat wondering. Scott’s answer was more honest than most, and notably refused to sell the dream.

I don’t want to sell anybody on cutting their golden handcuffs and do that hustle culture thing where I say the only path to wealth or freedom is owning a business. To be clear, I went all in. The house is on the line. There’s a life insurance policy that pays the bank and not my wife.

Scott Kleckner, Owner, Olive Wood Pizza

His actual advice has two parts. One: you need genuine passion for the specific business, which is why he steered away from the boring-business playbook — the laundromat, the landscaping company, the HVAC roll-up. That would not have kept him grinding.

Two, and he was blunt: if you are not from a hospitality background and have never owned a restaurant, do not do it. He offers a free phone call to any doctor or outsider who loves restaurants and thinks they should open one. I suspect that call is short.

What he is enjoying is not the money story. It is the freedom to be public about his work, which his last several employers made legally impossible, and the ability to take his family away for a week without a founder calling to ask how he could possibly be out. He still writes himself a quarterly report as though he had a board, because he thinks the discipline matters. Luke Christian and Jake Philpotts described a similarly deliberate approach to growth in Surcheros: The Tex-Mex Franchise Winning in Towns Everyone Else Skips.

Frequently asked questions

How many events does Olive Wood Pizza do in a year?

More than 700 across Southern California, according to owner Scott Kleckner, which is nearly double the volume at the time he acquired the business in 2024. Revenue has also roughly doubled in the first 19 months of ownership, and a larger commissary is under construction to support the next expansion.

How do you cater wood-fired pizza for a thousand-plus guests?

By bringing the restaurant rather than the leftovers. Scott Kleckner brings a wood-fired pizza trailer plus a full on-site kitchen, arrives with raw dough and ingredients, and makes pizzas, pastas and salads fresh on location. At the largest events his team runs two or three ovens and adjusts service format — two slices per plate across more tables rather than whole pizzas on china — without changing how the food is produced.

What should you measure in a catering business?

Scott Kleckner tracks average event value by city and by event type, conversion rate on inbound leads, and forward-booked guest counts by day and location. That forward view is what lets him decide which business to accept and which to decline, particularly on Saturdays. He contrasts this with the prior owner, whose primary metric was the P&L.

What did stadium food service teach him about restaurant operations?

Pattern recognition under extreme time compression. In a football stadium, more than half a day’s sales can land in a fifteen- to thirty-minute window, across 60 to 100 points of service, on roughly twelve dates a year. Scott Kleckner says that environment produces fast diagnostic instincts — his example is comparing the hot dog count to the hot dog bun count as an early indicator of whether an operation is under control.

Should a corporate hospitality executive buy their own business?

Scott Kleckner declines to generalize. He looked at nearly 200 businesses before finding one he considered great, went all in financially, and says it was the right decision for him at that point in his life. His advice to others is that genuine passion for the specific business matters more than the returns, and that people without a hospitality operating background should not buy a restaurant.

Takeaways for operators

• Buy capacity-constrained, not demand-constrained. A healthy business hitting a physical ceiling is a far better acquisition than a broken one that needs fixing first.
• Standardize pricing so software can read it. You cannot measure conversion, event value or forward load until the quote process stops living in somebody’s head.
• Forward visibility is what lets you say no. Turning down Saturdays profitably requires knowing what is already on the books.
• Pick one lane and go deep on the supply chain. Named suppliers for cheese, tomatoes and cured meats is a quality position competitors cannot casually match.
• Find your hot-dogs-to-buns check. Every operation has a two-number comparison that reveals whether the rest is under control.
• Keep the board discipline even with no board. Scott still writes himself a quarterly report. Most owner-operators have nobody making them do this.

If you are in Southern California and want Olive Wood at your event, the lead form is at olivewoodpizza.com. Scott is also genuinely open on LinkedIn to anyone in a similar business or thinking about getting into one.

Want the whole conversation? Read the full transcript of this episode with Scott Kleckner.

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This episode is brought to you by Restaurant Technologies, whose closed-loop cooking oil management keeps kitchens safer, cleaner and more consistent, and by Yelp, helping restaurants get discovered by the guests already looking for them.

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