Roll Up Your Sleeves: Michael Gerard on 24 Years Building Wildwood Ovens

Michael Gerard is the founder of Wildwood Ovens and Barbecues, an LA-based manufacturer of high-end wood-fired ovens, Argentine grills, Brazilian barbecues and Japanese yakitori grills. In 1999 he imported a wood-fired pizza oven, found the packaging terrible and the product "not so good," and decided to cast his own. Wildwood now has products in 32 countries.

"Be prepared to roll up your sleeves. Be prepared to work 12 to 16 hours a day."

Read the full episode recap: Roll Up Your Sleeves: Michael Gerard on 24 Years Building Wildwood Ovens.

What Michael and Jeremy cover

• Going from importer to manufacturer with no casting experience: a fiberglass mold expert, then foam blocks CNC-shaped from computer-aided designs.
• Marketing a product that barely existed in the US in 1999, starting with keyword bids on Overture before Google search took over.
• YouTube before influencers: how-to-cook and how-to-light-a-fire videos from the early 2000s, and why video that "cross pollinates to the website" is still the mainstay.
• AI as a tool first: code fixes, tuning the site for search, and recirculating a big back catalog of social content.
• Selling to the decision maker. "The executive chefs are the ones that tell management what they want in their kitchen and management tends to listen to their chefs."
• The private test kitchen: cooking classes for home cooks, and pop-ups where guest chefs show the gear to buyers.
• 32 countries, from the Palace of Oman to a prospect in the Bahamas who found them on Instagram, and what tariffs on Chinese stainless steel did to the grill line.
• Moving from a bootstrapped founder-does-everything company to hiring upper management for marketing.

Do this next

• Teach before you sell. If buyers don't know your category exists, make the how-to video they'll search for first.
• Find who signs off on your product and write for them, not the person who uses it.
• Put "we ship internationally" where visitors can see it. Some of the world will take you up on it.

Related episodes

Jeremy's fry oil client story, the one about writing for the chef instead of the fry cook, gets a longer telling in his conversation with Grady Teske. For the SEO side of Michael's YouTube strategy, see Anthony Prichard on video SEO. See Wildwood's cooking videos on YouTube and Instagram, and shop the wood-fired pizza ovens.

More founder interviews in the small business marketing that actually works collection and the full Unscripted Small Business interview archive.

Host: Jeremy Rivera. Guest: Michael Gerard, founder, Wildwood Ovens and Barbecues.