How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

For many people, traditional marketing—like advertising on TV, for example—still looks pretty straightforward.

If you have deep pockets, all you need to do is hire a fancy agency, shoot a nice commercial, buy some time slots on a few TV channels—and just enjoy the ride.

It’s not that simple anymore. We at Dodo Pizza learned that there is an untapped potential in mixing traditional marketing with digital channels that can significantly improve the performance of your ads. And we aren’t talking about integrated marketing campaigns here—we’re talking about adjusting your TV strategy and even buying using real-time digital data.

Our most significant...

Quick summary:

• Dodo Pizza is developing Dodo IS, its own IT system for managing a pizza delivery chain
• This cutting-edge ERP solution gives our franchise a competitive advantage in the market by enabling deep integration of our IT with our management system
• Dodo IS works as an online web application, which makes it accessible from any browser and provides management with real-time data
• In this text, we give 9 examples of how Dodo IS makes a difference for our customers, partners, and managers

Our first attempt to introduce sprint reviews at Dodo Pizza failed spectacularly. You would think, perhaps, that a pizza chain doesn’t need Scrum practices at all. However, strange as it may seem, one of the key advantages of Dodo Pizza is its own IT system that controls all the working processes of 430+ pizzerias in 11 countries.

More than 60 programmers and analysts work on our system now, and we’re planning to increase that number to more than 200. Like any fast-growing start-up, we are aiming for maximum efficiency, so we use Agile frameworks a lot, including Scrum, LeSS,...

While working in Merrill Lynch investment bank, Kirill Vyrypaev made a “wild” decision to become the chief financial officer of Dodo Pizza. At the time, our headquarters was still in Syktyvkar, a small town in northern Russia, so he moved there and had a first-hand experience of a severe northern winter. I guess he probably got a glimpse of the future then….

In two and a half years, Kirill did a lot for our company growth and development. We’ve raised $7.5 million in investment capital. That has allowed us to further expand our team, develop our own IT system, launch our first nationwide advertising campaign, open a commissary in Moscow, create a nationwide logistics network, and ultimately make our parent company profitable, all our investments in IT notwithstanding.

Nowadays, Kirill is not only our global CFO, but also the CEO of our Western division in charge of Dodo Pizza business in the EMEA region (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa). His team has already started working actively in Europe and the UK, and this year, he will return to London. So this is his path, from investment banking to a startup company, business, and entrepreneurship :-)

This will be a very interesting year. Our perspectives, new goals, and challenges that await us in Europe, Asia, Russia, and the rest of the world are breathtaking. After such a game, any movie will seem boring. Look into the future and join us. Dreamers know no boundaries. Drop me a line at fedor@dodopizza.com.

I’ve created a “founder’s channel” in our corporate Slack where I will write about our company principles and structure and gather feedback from my colleagues. Based on these notes, we will write a comprehensive memorandum on our organization and paradigm. Some of these notes will be published here as well. My first article is about Dodo’s general leadership principles.

What do I mean by that? Well, as far as I’m concerned, these are the key points of our philosophy on which our company leaders should act. I’ve spent a lot of time weighing my...