12/29/2025
TLDR: I'm closing A Taste of Naples Pizza business
(Truth be told, I wrote this several weeks ago and am finally pressing the "post" button 😁)
The (very long version) rest of the story:
Yes, it's true. After 9 years of thoroughly enjoying making pizzas for all of you, I've decided that now is a good time to reclaim all of the time in my life that was previously spent making pizzas and start whittling down my list of projects. I don't have an exact number, but we made 15,000+ pizzas during the tenure of A Taste of Naples Pizza .
While my greatest joy was actually making and serving the pizzas, I came to not enjoy the preparation and cleanup process as much and found myself purposely limiting my number of gigs over the last couple of years. It seems obvious to me that it doesn't make sense to continue to reduce my amount of business to the point that I would be just covering fixed expenses.
The biggest thanks go to my wonderful wife Alice. Ten years ago at the age of 54 I was becoming more and more certain that I didn't want to endure the high-level stress of my IT Database Administrator job for 10 more years. Getting calls at 2:00 a.m. that the production databases were down and needed fixing asap was truly challenging. As remote connection had became available, I didn't have to drive into the office like we did in the old days, but I would often find myself alone in my dark office at home in the middle of the night staring at the computer with a seemingly incomprehensible database problem and no one else physically present with me to help. I needed a change.
Alice encouraged me to take the leap of faith with the pizza business while she continued in her IT job to keep us with a nice income and benefits. It made a world of difference for me to just make pizza and some profit and not have to worry about whether we were financially stable. Alice also helped out a lot behind the scenes and even was my emergency backup when I absolutely needed someone to come help during a gig. Chances are high that if you had one of my pizzas, the dough ball was cut and weighed within a couple of grams of the target weight by Alice.
My sons Taylor and Robert also helped tremendously my first year to help get me on my feet and continued to help a few times/year throughout the years. I don't think you'll find anyone able to run a wood-fired pizza oven better than Taylor and Robert.
However, at the end of the first year, my family gently suggested to me that I would benefit from taking on some dedicated pizza helpers. 😊
I owe a huge amount of thanks to my pizza helpers. I was incredibly blessed over the years to just chat with people and find folks who were interested in working a few pizza gigs throughout the year. I never had to purposely advertise looking for help. I tried to pay a decent hourly wage to my helpers, but I think most of them were working for the social aspect of the gigs. (I suspect some free pizza was a valued benefit too. 😁)
And of course, with 15,000+ pizzas came almost that many customers. Many of you were frequent customers and a few of you transitioned from customer to pizza helper. I hope you all realize how much I enjoyed serving you and that any compliments that came our way were valued far more than any money you could have paid us. One that I distinctly remember was a person who pulled me aside and told me: "You make better pizza out of a trailer in a parking lot than any other pizza restaurant I've ever been to".
My business was about 75/25 of catering/vending. Catering to backyard pizza parties was my favorite!! Vending was primarily to Kros Strain Brewing Company, Pint Nine Brewing Co. and Twisted Vine. After a few years, Twisted Vine needed to reclaim the food truck space to provide some much-needed patio space for the next-door restaurant. But I was with KrosStrain and PintNine from beginning to end and survived tornado warnings, heavy thunderstorms, hail, bone-chilling cold and on hot days the temp inside the trailer would reach 115F. Many nice days were had though!
Thank you Alice, Taylor and Robert.
Thank you Pizza Helpers.
Thank you Customers.
Thank you KrosStrain, PintNine and Twisted Vine and anyone who hired me to cater an event.
I have chosen not to sell A Taste of Naples as a business. Partially because of the complexity of it but more that I just want to be proud of what I accomplished, close the doors and not feel responsible for trying to help make someone else successful. I also consulted some other small business owners who did sell their businesses, and most of them did not enjoy watching someone else take over their business, whether it remained successful or not. As such, I will just be selling my pizza trailer and a majority of my pizza equipment. I'll keep enough to be able to host the occasional pizza party at my house. 😊 So, if you know anyone in the market for a high quality 7x16 dual axle trailer with 7' ceiling, a top-notch service window and tray, please send them my way!! (I also have a few of our special yellow tropical shirts that were our uniform at gigs)
I'll probably do more Sourdough Bread classes and will even entertain the idea of being a "Pizza Chef for hire" if folks have invested in a nice pizza oven and want me to come cook for their home party. I also have a version of my Bread Class that I've taught as a Sourdough Pizza class if anyone is interested in learning pizza skills to use at home. Just shoot me a message if you want more info.
My pizza page will remain active but will probably morph into more of a personal page as I never did much of the "friends" thing on Facebook with my personal ID. So, you'll still see a few pizza pics but even more about sourdough bread/classes, gardening, bees, woodworking, and other hobbies that I have. I always appreciate any likes or comments from people.
Those of you from my generation will likely have fond memories of The Carol Burnett Show. Back then you watched everything on broadcast tv (one of the three main networks or NE Public Television) on a tv with rabbit ears that needed constant adjusting and tweaking. Recording devices and remotes were dreamed of but were still many years away. Perhaps Carol, Tim Conway and Harvey Korman are where I got some of my quirky sense of humor that you all had to put up with. 😁
Carol closed each of her shows with the song "I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together". That song seems to very much represent my thoughts at this time. I've included a link to a Youtube video of her singing that song.
https://youtu.be/92lBJ-eGhno?si=1Lxmmsp2RGUWcXab
I truly am glad we had this time together! 😊😊😊
THANK YOU - Brad the pizza guy.
