Inside Square Pie Guys: How a Wedding Pizza Order Turned Into Three San Francisco Shops

Marc Schechter didn't set out to build a three-location pizza company. He was giving away Detroit-style pies to friends and to homeless people in San Francisco, just because he liked making them. Then a couple asked him to cater their wedding with the pizza he'd only ever made on three pans. He said yes, quoted it, and they bought him his first 30 pans to make it happen.

That's the whole business, right there, before it was a business. A guy who could cook, saying yes to more than he technically had the equipment for.

Square Pie Guys started as a pop-up at a wine bar in 2018. Danny Stoller and Marc Schechter opened their first real shop in SoMa in 2019, added Oakland in 2021, and opened a third location at Ghirardelli Square in 2022. On this week's episode, we walked the flagship shop across from Alcatraz, talked through how they scaled, and got into what actually holds a multi-location pizza operation together. Here's what stood out.

They didn't grow the menu to grow the business. They grew the systems. One size (8x10), about a dozen pies, done the same way every time across three locations, is what let them expand without the product falling apart. If you're adding items every season to chase interest, you're building three problems for every location you open instead of one repeatable one.

Training is the actual product

You can't be in three kitchens at once. Square Pie Guys' expansion only works because the training and delegation is tight enough that the pie coming out of Oakland tastes like the pie coming out of SoMa. That's not a menu decision, that's a management decision, and it's the one most owners skip until they're already in trouble at location two.

The brand travels because it's simple

"Square Pie Guys" is a description and a personality in four words. It's memorable, it photographs well, and it doesn't need explaining. Worth asking yourself: could someone repeat your shop's name back to you after hearing it once, and would they know what to expect when they walked in?

Kitchen layout is a growth constraint, not an afterthought

Detroit-style in a pan changes your workflow compared to hand-tossed. They built their kitchen line, ovens, and layout around that shape and that process from day one, which made it easier to copy into new locations. If your current kitchen only works because your best person has fifteen years of muscle memory, that's not a system, that's a liability.

Most people still order pepperoni

Doesn't matter how creative your specials get. Pepperoni still wins. Build your operation to make the classic exceptionally well and consistently, and treat the specials as marketing, not the backbone of your sales.

The lesson for a single-shop owner

You don't need three locations to learn from this. The question underneath everything they've done is: if you had to hand your kitchen to someone else tomorrow, would the pizza still come out right? Square Pie Guys built that answer into their systems before they needed it. Most shops build it after they're already stretched too thin.