How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

"You could just as well take all your money, go straight to a casino and bet everything on numbers in the red—the chances to succeed would be the same." That's what we heard from one of our competitors recently. Some of them believe that the Dodo Pizza team is on a suicide mission in Oxford since we're cutting off our phone line.

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Launching a pizzeria, you have to do tons of different things. It's easy to forget that only one thing will matter in the end. You can rent the best location in town, come up with some smart IT solutions, and even use drones to make fast deliveries. But it won’t make any difference if your pizza tastes like a cheesy sock. Good taste is the ultimate goal. For the last few months, the Dodo Pizza team has been working hard to perfect our recipes and find the best ingredients. Of course, we wanted to make sure...

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We said we would bring the best ingredients to our kitchens in the US. We didn’t want to buy frozen mozzarella or pepperoni made with 35 different chemicals (and a little bit of beef), even though we understand why some pizzerias go that way. The best always costs the most. But that strategy can suck away all your profit. The average food cost in the industry is 20-23%. By aiming for the best ingredients on the market, we managed to make it 29%. And that was way too much.

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The story of a world-shaking innovative enterprise should start in a garage. The story of a flying pizza is no exception to this rule. One day in the spring of 2014, a police department in Syktyvkar, a city in Northwestern Russia, got a call from a concerned person who reported that a few suspicious young men occupied a garage in his neighborhood. They were making a lot of noise and were bothering all the respectable citizens living in the area.

When policemen arrived at the location, they did find a few people in the garage, although the crime scene looked somewhat...

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We said October. October was planned to be the month of the grand opening for Dodo Pizza in Oxford. The days passed by, and the date of the opening crept into November, then December. Now I have to admit that we won’t be able to open our first store in the USA this year. The construction work on the site has been initiated, though, and now we’re looking at late January 2016. A 4-month delay isn’t really a complete disaster considering the fact that we’re going through all this for the first time in the USA. But the pace of...

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