How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

People often ask me how we’ve done it. We barged into a crowded market with a generic product. We didn't have any brand. We didn't spend oodles of money on advertising, coupons, and promotions, like our competitors were doing. And while usually in our industry others go out of business in six months or a year, we saw profit in the second month. A year and a half later, we are still in business—and expanding. In this post, I'll tell you how to market a restaurant without marketing it or at least how we did it—and how you can...

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"I'm not the only one who deals with such a mess." Doesn't this revelation help? Sometimes, when managing a restaurant, we need just that—to know that we're not alone. Sometimes, we seek guidance or inspiration. All that can be found online nowadays. Coming across useful pro resources, though, may be tricky in the abundance of websites made for those who simply love to eat. So in this post, we'd like to share a few of the best restaurant management blogs we find practical and inspiring—the ones we actually read despite being swamped in our daily routine.

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We started in 2016 with a radical idea of selling only seven pizzas. It worked much better than even our friends predicted. And we’ve been quite reserved in our menu development, having introduced only two new pizzas since our grand opening. But now the Dodo team’s going rogue, adding salads and milkshakes to the table in our second shop in Southaven. In this post, I want to explain the logic behind our revamped menu strategy and also open a conversation about how new dishes should be invented, tested, and launched by a restaurant team.

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The task of measuring employee engagement and satisfaction can sound like a total snooze—especially for those entrepreneurs who work shoulder to shoulder with their team and think they know what’s on everyone’s mind. Isn’t formally surveying your employees too much of a fuss for a small business, like a pizza shop or a burger joint? Actually, it’s not.

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