How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

Our latest monthly financial report—Dodo Pizza’s key figures and achievements in March 2018.

Total sales: $17.14 mln—it’s around 981 mln rubles. Not that long ago, it took us a year to show this number in sales. As you may remember, in 2015, we set one billion rubles as the year’s primary goal which we met in December—though many people thought that it was beyond us.

Now we predict that our total MONTHLY sales will finally exceed 1 billion rubles in April. What about 1 billion dollars? We believe Dodo Pizza will see this number in its annual turnover in 3–4...

Something is wrong at Dodo Pizza.

We set a challenging goal for ourselves to create the world’s most advanced IT system for a retail business.

We put together an IT team of sixty developers and analytics and gave them the freedom to follow any unorthodox development practices they deemed helpful.

They all worked like crazy and built an impressive large-scale IT product that now makes it possible to manage a chain of more than 300 pizza shops and process tens of thousands of orders every day.

Yet the people inside and around the company have become, to put it mildly, pretty frustrated...

A guest in Astrakhan found a piece of a finger nail in his pizza.

In Smolensk, a driver was drunk while making a delivery.

In Naberezhnye Chelny, a customer had to wait for his order for... eight hours.

I wish all that happened in places that didn’t provide their services under the name of Dodo Pizza. But they did. No point in hiding it.

Every person who tried to build a large-scale business knows that blunders are inevitable. When your organization performs thousands of operations a day, people sometimes mess up. Things happen.

The real problem appears when things happen, but you don't have...

It was a historic occurrence! Every Monday in the morning, all of our teams gather at our office for a half hour meetup. Usually, a few managers give speeches to bring everybody up to speed on the recent developments at the company. Sometimes, the floor is taken by our guests—usually our partners from other cities. But yesterday, we had the most unusual Monday meetup ever. For the first time in our history, our speaker gave his speech not in Russian, not even in English, but in German. It was Thomas Kochmann.

We’ve just opened our 300th pizza shop. Ta-da! To be honest, none of us can fully process this number. But we should—if we mean to stay in business.

Fast growth cannot be sustainable if you don’t evolve at an even faster pace and adapt to new challenges that present themselves when you get to the next level.

Our team has reached a landmark, and we have a feeling that the company now needs to revamp its strategy and rethink its principles.

Here is a recap of what we’re going to do differently in 2018.