How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

Dodo Pizza has been working in Oxford for more than a month. That gives us the opportunity to perform an intriguing experiment and compare our actual results with our now half-a-year-old expectations. In a startup, such a task always brings the joy of discovery because after launching your business, you’re doomed to face something totally unexpected.

One point has to be made before we lay down the numbers. Right now, it’s nearly impossible for us to come up with a fancy-looking P&L spreadsheet. Moreover, we can’t be sure that all the numbers we have are 100% correct, because it will take some time to establish proper management accounting. But we believe that even rough data can be useful—and fun.

It’s always soothing to see how life is making fun of presumptuous people and their puny plans.

Bullet points:

• Everything looks much better than we expected (wow!).
• We almost went crazy while renovating the Red House (that wasn’t an easy task to tackle). Now our suffering is paying off. 50% carryout orders confirm that we haven’t made a mistake with the location.
• Surprisingly, food cost doesn’t look nearly as bad as we expected, even though we buy high-grade ingredients. The labor cost will be a much more pressing issue. On the other hand, during the first few weeks, we invested a good deal of time coaching the team, so we have a pretty good chance of lowering our labor cost in the coming months.
• Our average check is $20.23 (which is higher than average in the pizza delivery business).
• Our bestseller is the Pepperoni—23.34% of all orders. By the way, the Margherita isn’t as unpopular as we expected it to be. 11.78% looks pretty good compared with, for example, 13.72% for the Supreme.
• 69% of our beta-tasters who got their pizzas for free returned to us as paying customers.
• We will reach our break-even point with average daily sales of $1500. And we’re not far from that number.

Our team was prepared to endure a bumpy start, but now we’ve got no intention of resting on our laurels. A lot has to be done. Back to work :)

Track.

Dodo Pizza Oxford. 614 Jackson Ave E

You can reach me on my Facebook page.