Up from the ashes: the rebuilding of Rustic Crust

Founder Brad Sterl recounts how he brought back his business after a fire devastated everything

BY PAUL BRIAND

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 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 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 employees to the Grappone Center in Concord, and had a meeting with all of them and their families to let them know what we were doing.”

Communication was essential — to his employees and to his customers.

“Communication became probably the thing that I think was most important, and I think it went very well with all of our employees and our customers,” he says. “Even during the reconstruction phase, we were bringing people in small groups,

keeping them active on what we were doing, we did some training. We wanted them to really believe that we were going to be back to work in a very short period of time.”

They were back making products within Sterl’s promised timeline of 30 days.

Damage from the fire left the staff at Rustic Crust unsure of the business’s future. But founder and president Brad Sterl was able to keep to his 30-day timeline of returning back to full capacity, despite the extent of the damage. (Courtesy photo)

Settlement on the insurance claim would eventually come, but immediately after the fire, Sterl needed money, cash flow. He says he was fortunate to have a supportive board of directors … and a no-limits American Express card.

“We were on the phone pretty much all day long, calling people all over the world, saying, ‘Here’s the equipment we need, what do you have?’ In some cases, I was giving my American Express to pay for it on the spot and having it put on planes and shipped,” he says.

His out-of-pocket expenses went well north of $1 million as he waited for the insurance reimbursements.

They rebuilt the production facility on the same site, expanding it to 28,000 square feet with the help of an expedited approval process from supportive Pittsfield officials. He expanded the use of the warehouse down the street by another 18,000 square feet.

By 2019, says Sterl, “we got back on real par with where we are operating” before the fire.

NEXT, THE PANDEMIC

Then Covid-19, which took root in this region in early 2020, offered its own, new set of challenges to the business.

Those challenges included keeping his people safe from the highly contagious and sometimes deadly consequences of the early strain of the virus, and keeping the production lines staffed while maintaining production levels to keep up with a soaring demand for their products. Consumers, held inside by lockdowns and quarantines, were eating at home far more than they ever were, picking grocery shelves clean of certain foods. “Every grocery store we sold our product to sold out,” says Sterl.

The company’s response to the pandemic had some similarities to its response to the fire, according to Sterl, especially when it came to communicating with staff on top of the efforts to make sure work stations were kept clean and that there was plenty of personal protection equipment on hand.

“We started educating our people in February, because we expected something was coming,” says Sterl. “We started letting employees know that they would be considered essential workers. We let them know what we were doing for their safety and everybody else. I was in the office every day. There wasn’t a day that I didn’t come in, because I expected the workers to be here.”

He, like employers everywhere, had to find ways to keep workers, some of whom, for fear of Covid contamination or other reasons, left their jobs, taking advantage of state and federal benefits that, according to Sterl, paid them incentives not to work.

“Because we have a pretty good group of folks that understand that we need to fill the orders for the retailers, during Covid we maintained 95 percent to 98 percent fill rates to our customers,” says Sterl. Supply chain difficulties affected him too, noting, “We had places shutting down that supplied us with materials.”

The demand for their products has remained high through the pandemic years. “We grew our top line sales tremendously during 2020. Then in 2021, even though a lot of people expected 2021 to be flat or down on a year-over-year basis, we were still up in business,” says Sterl.

BUT CHALLENGES REMAIN

He has employed up to 180 people. He has between 130 and 140 on the books now. He needs more and echoes what employers are saying everywhere of his greatest need: “workers that want to work.”

“That’s been the largest challenge, not just us but other companies all over the country,” he says. “I’m in some manufacturing groups, and it was forcing companies to look at how to eliminate certain job functions, possibly by investing or restructuring how they would produce products because of staffing shortages.” Right now, according to Sterl, the company “is in a good space. “We’ve made a lot of investments over the last few years, some of it to make up for being short of staff as Covid came through and wiped out our workforce.”

He says his personal drive to continue to succeed is what will carry him and the business forward.

“You have to have that drive,” he says. “And you have to have that culture of everybody around you that believes the same thing. They don’t accept mediocrity, they don’t accept it. They don’t become complacent.”

‘MY STUFF WAS SECONDARY’: BRAD STERL ON RECOVERING FROM A BRAIN TUMOR

BY PAUL BRIAND

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 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 to said, ‘You’re going to lose your hearing. It’s likely it’ll disrupt your facial nerves, you could have paralysis and there’s a likelihood you have significant trouble walking.’”

The 12-hour procedure to remove the tumor took place at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston just before Christmas 2019. He recalls getting up to try to take his first steps 15 hours later. “My attitude was I was going to walk,” he says.

In fact, when he moved a few days later from the ICU to a regular room, he walked without a wheelchair.

“I won’t call it pretty, but I walked, and two days later I was out of the hospital instead of being in the hospital for up to a month. It’s just an attitude, in my opinion,” he says.

The surgery left him without any hearing in his left ear. He notes that the acoustic nerve was sacrificed during surgery so that his facial nerve stayed intact, saving him from a drooping face.

As he literally worked to regain his footing, he also had an eye at getting back to the office, despite some medical encouragement that he take an extended leave.

“Look, I run my company; that’s not going to work for me,” he told the doctors. “It was five weeks when I decided to go and see if I could drive, and I was in the office at week six,” he says.

Surgery to place a cochlear implant in his head took place in late October 2020, also at Brigham and Women’s, which he described as “exceptional.” According to Sterl, the implant was a recently approved model. “It was one of the newest versions, which allowed you to transfer hearing through the bone in your head right into my left ear,” he says.

He needed physical therapy to train his brain how to maintain his balance without the use of the body’s natural balancing mechanism — the vestibular system — in his left ear. By the spring, he was able to sail again during a trip to the Caribbean … without getting seasick.

And he wasn’t going to use the excuse of his surgeries or the aches and pains that followed or the rehab challenges to stay home, especially in the early spring of 2020 when Covid-19 upended life as everyone knew it.

“It’s about making sure it gets done,” he says. “We had all these people during Covid, and as that came out, it was all the more reason for me to be engaged in the business. I wanted to make sure my employees felt comfortable. We were mitigating their fears — my stuff was secondary.”