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Up from the ashes: the rebuilding of Rustic Crust Founder Brad Sterl recounts how he brought back his business after a fire devastated everything
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BY P A U L B R I A N D
WITH 2013 TRANSITIONING TO 2014, Brad Sterl felt his Rustic Crust business was, as he put it, “firing on all cylinders.” “We were seeing really great growth. We had the American Flatbread brand that we had acquired in 2010, and that side of the business was just growing substantially with wide acceptance at the retailers,” he recalls. “For a small company, we were growing pretty quick,” Sterl added. “At the end of 2013, we were really looking forward to the next steps in the evolution of the company — how big of a facility we might need if the business kept growing?” Sterl started Rustic Crust in 1996 after years of experience in the food service industry, the company producing ready-made organic pizza crusts. In acquiring American Flatbread in 2010, the company expanded its offerings to fully made, ready-to-heatand-eat pizzas. He is the founder and president. The head count of employees at that point stood at about 100, working two shifts, five or six days a week, depending on the orders. Production of the Rustic Crust products was concentrated in its 19,000-square-foot facility in Pittsfield. It was also using a portion of a very large warehouse located down the street. Then a fire overnight on Thursday, March 6, 2014, changed everything. “Fire destroys Rustic Crust pizza in Pittsfield” read the headline on the WMUR-TV website. Sterl was at a trade show on the other side of the country when he got word and
‘MY STUFF WAS SECONDARY’: BRAD STERL ON RECOVERING FROM A BRAIN TUMOR BY P A U L B R IA N D
A devastating fire ripped through Rustic Crust on March 6, 2014. (Photo courtesy of WMUR-TV)
saw video of the devastation. “When I got on the plane — and the last thing I saw was flames coming through the roof — the whole idea of a long-term plan for the next evolution of the business went right out the window.” Any number of decisions had to be made. What to do about outstanding orders? How many weeks of product were available in the warehouse? What about the employees? When can we rebuild? What can we rebuild? How do we replace the lost equipment? It was critical, according to Sterl, not to lose momentum, because space on a
As if the challenge of a fire that destroyed his production facility wasn’t enough. As if Covid and how it disrupted and challenged his business wasn’t enough. As founder and president of Rustic Crust, Brad Sterl had to overcome a personal challenge during this period: a brain tumor. The first indication that something might be wrong was when he’d try to sleep. “My heartbeat would keep me awake at night,” he recalls. This was in 2016, two years into the recovery from the devastating fire that destroyed Rustic Crust’s production facility in Pittsfield, two years into
retailer’s or grocer’s shelves is not easy to come by. “You can’t afford to be off shelf,” says Sterl. “If you lose your shelf space, somebody else will happily come take it. So I was looking at how do we survive? Anything from that moment forward was about how do we do this as quickly as possible to meet the needs of our current customer base?” The decision to continue to pay his employees wasn’t a hard one to make. “I knew in order to be successful, we needed to keep that team,” he says. “Two days after the fire, we called all the employ-
getting the company’s stride back. “I had a hard time sleeping. Literally, I could lay on my pillow, and it would sound like my heart was in my ear,” he says. A visit to his doctor led to an MRI, which found a tumor that doctors thought was benign but warranted watching, with follow-up MRIs every six months. In the months that followed, Sterl pushed through his personal challenges — the surgery, the rehab, the hearing loss — the way he pushed Rustic Crust through the dual challenges of the fire and Covid. “You can sit back to kind of let things happen as they are, or you
can choose to move ahead,” he says. “It’s just always been my style — I’m not about failing or being held back. It’s about making sure it gets done.” It got to a point after several months in 2019 that Sterl started falling, breaking an arm, and the decision was made to remove the tumor. With his wife, Marissa, who has a medical background, they researched the options for where to have the surgery and the risks involved. “It was putting pressure on my facial nerve, my hearing nerve and my balance nerve specifically, in addition to the base of my brain,” he says. “Almost every surgeon I talked
