How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

I have been hovering in and around the pizza world for almost twenty years but believe it or not it’s taken me until now to find something truly amazing, Dodo Pizza.

Dodo is something extraordinary on several levels. Which is why I’ve left the world of consulting to join Dodo Pizza to develop the UK market.

Firstly, there is the product. Behind every pizza sold there is a quality control system that starts with product development and runs through to when the pie is placed in a box and given the Dodo seal of approval.

Secondly, the stores are bright with open kitchens where nothing is hidden and if you are not in the store you can log on and see your pizza being prepared with the Dodo kitchen cam…now that is an open kitchen!

Thirdly, the whole operation is controlled by one IT ecosystem called Dodo IS allowing the store owner to concentrate on making great pizzas and providing a great customer experience.

Finally, there is a whole new approach to franchising with the emphasis on store economics and innovative marketing enabling the franchisees to get a quicker return on capital and then open more stores.

I believe that Dodo has some truly innovative ideas in action that will redefine how pizza is experienced in the UK for consumers and business owners.

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We have closed our pizzeria in California.

In Los Angeles, Dodo Pizza worked for just three weeks. Overall, we’ve got more than 450 pizzerias in our chain already. Our company has been working for eight years now, and in all this time we’ve closed only three pizzerias. So what happened in California?

On our map, the Los Angeles pizzeria appeared as a surprise. We hadn’t built it from scratch. It was the result of our current guerilla tactics in the vast and complex US market. The Los Angeles pizzeria was there, and...

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A customer in Moscow ordered our pizza and specified that he wanted to pay on delivery with a credit card. Our courier delivered the pizza but forgot to bring a POS terminal with him. What did he do? He couldn’t accept payment, so he left and took a hot pizza with him, leaving a hungry and disappointed customer without it.

Is it the courier’s fault? He was polite and acted according to what his common sense told him; no payment, no pizza. I think, in those countries where the competition is really fierce, it’s hard to imagine such an incident, because common sense tells everybody, from a courier to a pizza maker, that losing a customer is much worse than losing a pizza.

So whose mistake was that? Ours. We haven’t instilled our principles into the courier. He didn’t know what to do in this situation (give the pizza to the customer, and then come back with a POS terminal). We have strict standards in our kitchens, but in our customer relationships, only principles, because relationships cannot be standardized. We trust our customers. They are always our first priority, and for us, in any dispute, a customer is always right, even if it’s a customer who’s made a mistake. We work for our customers.

So, what did we learn from this incident? That the principles of our company should be impressed on all our employees more clearly. It’s not that simple, because we already have more than 15,000 employees in our chain. And now I realize that we haven’t done it so well. We have our Dodo Book, that’s true, but currently we don’t have a clear and simple list of principles we should repeat over and over again, mantra-like, so it would be impossible not to know them. And we’re going to rectify that.

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The world is getting smaller. On Sunday, Marlon Huerta (photo: left) visited our pizzeria in Memphis, Tennessee. Marlon is a businessman and manager from Chile where he had built the world’s most successful Papa Johns master franchise. Then it was sold to a private equity fund, and he went on to work on Papa Johns pizzerias in Spain. Now Marlon and his partner are building a new and very hot fast casual pizza chain in Chile called Melt Pizza. The project was launched in May 2018, and they have opened 11 pizzerias already; eight more are awaiting approval from Chile official agencies. Now that’s what I call speed! 🦄 🍕 We’ve invited Marlon to visit us in Russia. Pizza connects people… #pizzabrothers

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