How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

Looking for funding for our pizza chain in Germany.

Our partners, brothers Thomas and Michael Kochman, set an ambitious goal for themselves and Dodo in Germany. Together, we are gunning for top places in the pizza market of the largest economy in Europe.

Thomas and Michael are our master franchisees in Germany. For 25 years, they have been developing their own brand: UNO Pizza. And this year, they decided to partner with Dodo Pizza. A few months ago, they launched a large dough commissary that will become the base for the future growth of Dodo Pizza in the German market.

Besides attracting partners via franchising, the Kochmans are going to develop their own corporate chain. It’s an important part of our plan. One of the possibilities is to grow the corporate chain and then sell pizza shops to franchisees to grow the chain faster. The brothers already have a pizza chain of 17 units.

Over the course of 25 years, they have never resorted to external sources to fund their growth—not even for bank loans. It’s time to change. The market spurs them to move faster. So the Kochmans are now studying different options for funding. They need money for re-branding of their existing pizzerias into Dodo Pizzas and further development of their corporate chain under our brand.

We proposed that they use our network to secure funding. So they put together a proposal for prospective investors (in German). If you are looking for business opportunities in Europe, send a letter to the manager in charge of our global growth, Renat Sagadeev, at r.sagadeev@dodopizza.com.

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Many smart people refrain from making public promises—we at Dodo Pizza revere them.

Openness is a huge motivator: when a goal is public, failure is not an option. That’s why every summer, during the company’s annual meetup, Dodo Pizza’s managers go on stage and announce five key projects they commit to pull off within the next 12 months.

Dodo is probably one of the world’s most agile retail companies with more than $150M in system-wide sales. We update our plans every other month reacting to the changes inside and outside of the company. Some...

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Some people say nobody watches TV anymore. No use advertising your brand on national channels—go online! Yet this spring, Dodo Pizza launched its first nationwide TV campaign in Russia.

Three months later, Misha Chernyshev, the company’s marketing director, took the stage at Dodo Pizza’s yearly meetup to report on the results of this promo. Here is a recap of his keynote.

The campaign lasted for 42 days, and Dodo Pizza invested $1.6M in it.

67 million people saw our promo at least once, and 56% of them saw it more than 5 times.

For the first time in our history, our...

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A historic day!

This is Bauyrzhan Sadykov. Bau was born is Kazakhstan, but for the last 13 years, he’s been living in China. He came to Beijing to study at a university. He couldn’t understand a word in Chinese back then. For the last two years, Bau has been working with Dodo—managing Dodo Pizza in Yantai and Hangzhou. Now he is responsible for the development of our entire business in China. He is holding a preliminary lease deal for our new pizza shop in Hangzhou. We’ve just come to terms with the landlord and left a deposit to secure the deal. We’re launching our corporate (company-owned) pizzeria in China. It will be a pilot concept with no cashiers. All of the orders will go through our app on WeChat. Why are we doing this? I’ll tell you about it in another post. Stay tuned.

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Every summer, Dodo Pizza holds an event for its partners and managers where we sum up the results of the previous year, present new products, and set ambitious new goals. This year, around 1,400 people took part in the gathering. Here is a recap of what was said on stage by Fyodor Ovchinnikov, Dodo Pizza founder and CEO, about Dodo’s most significant achievements in the 2017/2018 season.

Having increased its sales by 131%, Dodo Pizza now has grounds to consider itself one of the fastest-growing pizza chains in the world.

91% of...

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