How best friends are building their pizza and brew empire

Two childhood friends bought a pizzeria at 21 with no plan. Now they leading nine restaurants and getting ready to scale Best Pizza & Brew towards its next destination 35 locations.

Best Pizza & Brew Founder, Mitchell Millar made a decision while out golfing with Co-Founder Joey Freis to stop answering his phone. By the end of the round, Joey had five calls from their general managers, each looking for answers to their questions.

It's a funny story and a familiar problem for most Founders.

If your team cannot get through a round of golf without you, you do not own a business. You are the business.

Joey and Mitchell have been friends since elementary school. At 21, they bought the pizzeria where they were both working, called Pizza Nova.

And then changed the name to reflect their shared passion — Best Pizza & Brew. Today, they are leading nine restaurants, eight across Southern California and a first out-of-state location in Chandler, Arizona. The goal is 35 locations by 2035.

In our conversation, we discussed what it took to stop being the answer to every question and start scaling towards their vision. If you are a Founder stuck in the middle right now, this is your episode for mere answers for moving forward.

The pizzeria they bought on instinct

Joey and Mitchell did not set out to build an empire; these two friends loved the pizza business.

"We liked it so much. We were talking all the time, kept going, and realized that this is our passion without knowing it at the time," Freis said.

That passion is a real asset, and it is also a strategic filter selecting leaders who are passionate about growing Best Pizza & Brew.

Joey and Mitchell have watched talented managers burn out. Not for a lack of skill. These managers simply did not love the work the way the two of them do.

Their advice to any Founder is if you love it, do it. Loving what you do is what gets you started. It is the fuel for a business; however, it does not grow a business.

The garage doors that wouldn't stay shut

Picture a cold San Diego evening. The big garage doors at one of the restaurants are rolled wide open. The dining room is freezing. Guests are uncomfortable. And not one team member has thought to close them.

That image, Mitchell says, is what scaling without systems looks like.

At three locations, they could stay on top of things themselves. They would hold a meeting, talk about closing the garage doors and greeting the tables, and everyone would nod along. Then the next Friday night, they would look around, and nobody was doing any of it.

It's a lesson Joey and Mitchell learned the hard way, and one every Founder eventually runs into. Saying something in a meeting is not the same as building a system for it. A nod is not accountability.

The reminder lives in your head. The system lives in the building and works whether you are there or not. You scale your standards through building your systems.

Getting the team to lead without them

When I asked Joey to name one of his most critical decisions, he didn't reach for a location or an acquisition. He named their incentive program.

The more stores Joey tracked, the harder it became to analyze each number. A GM who owns one store's numbers acts on them. So they handed ownership down to the people closest to the work.

The Founder lesson — the more control they let go of, the more they got back.

More Founder lessons worth pressing play for:

We covered far more than I can address here, and I really want you to hear Mitchell and Joey's take on what being stuck in the middle really feels like, and how they moved through it.

No. 1 Why Mitchell still interviews every hire, even over FaceTime, and the reason that will change how you think about hiring: people want an experience, or they would have just ordered DoorDash.

No. 2 What buying a competitor taught them, which had nothing to do with the real estate and everything to do with two things they had avoided for years.

No. 3 The truth about going out of state, where the hometown halo effect disappears, and they could no longer train new staff at a store down the road.

Where to start if You are stuck

I asked Joey and Mitchell what they would say to a Founder stuck at three locations, unable to see how they will ever reach eight or 10.

Joey's answer was to get an incentive program in place, then start handing real responsibility to the people running your restaurants and trusting them with it.

Mitchell's was even simpler. Pick one problem. Ask your GM what the biggest problem is this week, and fix it. In his experience, the other problems are easy to fix from there, and the next location no longer feels out of reach.

And keep having fun with it, he says, because if you do not love this work, then it just becomes another job in the industry and not a passion to grow something that ultimately is the Best Pizza & Brew.

You do not get unstuck by solving everything at once. You get unstuck by fixing the thing in front of you.

P.S. Joey and Mitchell are no strangers to our Founderology Growth Summit, and the room is full of Founders just like them, figuring it out together. 

If you want to spend two and a half days with Founders doing this work, join us at 2027's Founderology Growth Summit, Aug. 2-4 in Chicago. If you are ready to grow, we are always ready to go!