“I had zero experience in building a business. Before that I was a professional alcoholic, if you like, that was my specialty.”
Tom Gozney has been on quite the journey turning his pizza oven manufacturing firm into a $100m business.
Named after its founder, Dorset-based Gozney is known for designing what is billed as the world’s first portable, lightweight stone bake oven, while it has also supplied professional kitchens in the hospitality sector.
The company has seen a period of rapid growth over the last few years. Building on its UK base in Christchurch, the company has topped it with a new global headquarters in the US state of Utah, and an office in China, more than doubling its growing global headcount to 75.
It has reported total global business growth of around 750% since 2020, with a seven-fold rise in revenue since the first Covid-19 lockdown, as customers looked to make restaurant quality pizzas in their gardens.
The company has reported a 93% rise in revenue over the last year, suggesting any market bubble for pizza ovens is yet to burst post-pandemic.
This year Gozney is looking to take an even bigger slice of the global outdoor living market, which it estimates to be worth $22bn (£18.6bn). With North America and Australia among its key markets, the business is now looking to expand into new territories including Scandinavia.
Mr Gozney said he had led the business to £50m in sales as chief executive, and has recently handed over what he describes as the “whirlwind” of the day-to-day running of the business to newly appointed CEO Denny Bruce.
Meanwhile Mr Gozney, who says his interests lie more in product innovation, has moved to the role of executive chairman in order to drive the company’s new pipeline.
A former boss at global businesses such as clothing brands Dickies and Vans, plus Skullcandy headphones and Traeger Wood Pellet Grills, Mr Bruce will look to take Gozney to the next level, and emulate his achievements with his previous employers.
It’s a far cry from where it all began for Gozney’s founder.
Born and raised in the port town of Lymington in the New Forest, the personable Mr Gozney candidly told BusinessLive he had “quite an interesting journey” with drug and alcohol addiction in his younger years, during which he was asked to leave a number of schools in Bournemouth.
He subsequently spent a year in rehab in South Africa in his early twenties, before returning to the south coast and what he describes as a “really vulnerable, interesting time in my life”.
“I threw myself into cooking as a way of socialising. It gave me a safe haven and it became my thing. I was forced to grow up 10 years at the age of 21 and have dinner parties and have friends around for food rather than getting smashed in the pubs.
“Cooking and entertaining was like a saviour for me. One evening we made pizzas in our conventional oven in the kitchen and they were just a bit soggy and ****. But the process of making the pizza was amazing. Making the dough, everyone topped their own pizza. We cooked them in the oven, they just didn’t cook very well, they weren’t very crispy.
That evening Mr Gozney decided to buy a pizza oven for his garden, only to find there was “just nothing available in the UK whatsoever”.
“There were these big Italian imports and they were thousands of pounds. We were really on a budget so I just thought I would build my own. The next morning I started digging foundations. I spent an hour or two researching how to build a hand-built brick oven and just got on with it.”
Mr Gozney admits that during the early stage of his recovery he found being around people while they were drinking alcohol “really difficult”. He compared the introduction of the wood fire oven to “divine intervention”. Cooking became the central focus of parties, as guests “stopped bringing beers and started bringing toppings”.
This proved to be the “light bulb moment” as the budding entrepreneur, keen to make the experience more accessible, set about designing an “affordable, easy to uninstall” small wood fired oven, which did not require a huge outdoor space.
First he spent “maybe four or five months” researching every single wood fired oven manufacturer, supplier and retailer he could find. He designed “a concrete igloo” model oven out of a two-piece fibreglass mould, which he then asked a refractory in Sheffield to cast.
With the help of his web developer friend Mr Gozney picked up the fundamentals of search engine optimisation. His girlfriend quit her job in London and joined him in the business. Mr Gozney said the couple “ate baked beans on toast for three years” as they grinded to build momentum behind their product, attending agricultural shows and building the brand online.
Then came an intervention from a TV chef.
“Any entrepreneur that denies the fact there is luck involved in these things is talking ****, right?” Mr Gozney said. “We were lucky at that time that Jamie Oliver really lent into wood fired ovens on Channel 4. He decided he would install wood fired ovens in his garden and he shared with mass consumers there this was this new, exciting way of cooking.
“We had built the business for two and a half years prior to that, and we saw a really interesting wave of customers coming into us. Jamie was importing ovens from Italy. They were super expensive, they were hard to install, all the challenges I had solved for.
“We had these little concrete igloos with a stand, British-made, family business, really nice branding. We rode on a bit of an awareness wave that Jamie started to create.”
In 2013 the company moved into the commercial oven market, designing an eco-friendly oven that did not require being craned into kitchens and was certified for DEFRA under the Clean Air Act, which attracted some “leading restaurant chains” as clients.
Mr Gozney said the moment he realised the potential global scale for the business came when it developed its first portable stone oven, the Roccbox. In 2016 the company launched a crowdfunding campaign to support its development.
Within six hours it had hit its $100,000 (£82,000) funding target. After three days it reached $600,000 (£492,000) and a month later it had reached $1.2m (£985,000) in sales from 2,500 backers - all from a $4,000 (£3,200) marketing budget.
The following year Gozney attracted its first private equity investor Simon Henderson, who backed the business in its early stages.
Mr Gozney said since its launch more than 50% of revenue generated by Roccbox has come from the US market, while sales in Australia have also been “strong”.
It was when the company did $8m (£6.5m) in online sales of its most recent product The Dome in five hours after its launch, that Mr Gozney said Mr Bruce, then an adviser on the firm’s board, convinced him the time was right to “get boots on the ground” and build out its American team.
“Trying to be a US-centric business, when you live in Dorset, is super hard!”, Mr Gozney said. “It’s really different from Texas to Illinois, you can’t understand the idiosyncrasies of the US market or be effective with marketing, unless you have people on the ground who understand what you’re doing.
“My wife and I sold our house in England and moved out to Utah maybe a year and a half ago, spent seven or eight months and decided to flip our corporate headquarters from the UK to the US and hire a c-suite leadership team. The final stages of that Denny and I just locked arms. Denny is a phenomenal brand operator, he has incredible success and experience under his belt.
“To be frank, I didn’t really want to run the business as we got bigger, I just felt partnering with Denny, we had build such a good relationship when we were sat on the board, partnering for him to play to his strengths and for me to play to mine, there was just magic in that relationship. That was really the reason that we decided to do it.”
Mr Gozney admits he does have to “pinch myself” at times to now be doing business with people who have built multi-billion brands, describing the experience as an “education”.
“In the early days, before we had a level of success, you try and project yourself to know more than you know, you naturally 'fake it ‘til you make it'. I had learnt so much about myself in rehab anyway, I was never going to be the guy who pretended to know everything.
“I just acted like a sponge and would sit in a room with some really intellectual people and they were talking about **** I didn’t have a clue about, and I would just ask them. I think that comes with confidence and self-esteem to say ‘I don’t know’.
“That’s been one of the most refreshing things and probably why we have been able to forge such good relationships with people, because there is a distinct level of honesty in the way I communicate, I don't pretend to know everything. I try not to be an egotistical **** about things, and be level and inclusive, and I think we do a good job of that.”
Mr Gozney says the company has positioned itself as the “premium” pizza oven brand on the market, which he said had made it “hopeful” that it can weather the current economic downturn, amid a squeeze on consumer spending from rising fuel and energy prices. He added the firm had noticed “a level of softness” in the UK market, where he said revenue hadn’t “annualised as aggressively as other regions”.
“Pizza ovens can be considered a ‘nice to have’ thing rather than a necessity. It would be stupid to think that the recession hasn’t impacted the purchase of non-essential items, but we are still seeing phenomenal growth, which is very exciting for our brand. We’re hopeful when we come out of this we will continue to grow even faster.”
Mr Gozney said the company was currently transitioning from “a young, hungry, founder-led business”, and its biggest challenge was “growing at the rate we are and not letting the wheels fall off.”
The entrepreneur said he hoped he could be a “role model” for other people struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. He struck a reflective tone when asked what his former school teachers in Bournemouth might think when they see the success he has gone to have.
“When I left treatment, a large part of my drive was to be successful. I was dubbed as a bit of a waste of space when I was drinking and using, you get labelled. I suppose that has helped to drive me to make something of myself.
“Nothing hugely positive came out of me in my teenage years. I had fun with it, I’m not going to lie, I had fun until it became really difficult at the end. When I was using, there was just no end for me, I couldn’t really imagine not drinking or doing drugs. Having people out there who have inspirational journeys now to inspire people to change is very exciting for me.
“It’s obviously nice to make something of yourself and not be a complete ******, but it is less of a motivator for me now than it once was.”
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