How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

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...

In 2018, our whole chain’s sales revenue amounted to 214 million dollars (13.6 billion rubles). That’s more than we had planned. Russian pizzerias have brought us 12.33 billion rubles, all other countries combined, 1.271 billion rubles. There was a time when we celebrated the first billion rubles in overall revenue, and now just the pizzerias outside Russia bring us more than that. For seven years, our pizza chain has doubled each year (+118% in 2018). And our question is, will we be able to repeat that again in this new year?

A New Year’s Day is a relative point, but it measures time. It’s good to take stock of what’s done and set new goals for the future. Today I’ve asked myself a simple question—what was the key moment for our company in 2018? Not an easy question. There are many answers, but what was the most important thing in terms of the long-range prospects of our business?

In 2018, our company has become profitable. We’ve been trying to achieve this for seven years. Dodo Pizza is a franchising company, so the parent...

Many smart people refrain from making public promises—we at Dodo Pizza revere them.

Openness is a huge motivator: when a goal is public, failure is not an option. That’s why every summer, during the company’s annual meetup, Dodo Pizza’s managers go on stage and announce five key projects they commit to pull off within the next 12 months.

Dodo is probably one of the world’s most agile retail companies with more than $150M in system-wide sales. We update our plans every other month reacting to the changes inside and outside of the company. Some...

Every summer, Dodo Pizza holds an event for its partners and managers where we sum up the results of the previous year, present new products, and set ambitious new goals. This year, around 1,400 people took part in the gathering. Here is a recap of what was said on stage by Fyodor Ovchinnikov, Dodo Pizza founder and CEO, about Dodo’s most significant achievements in the 2017/2018 season.

Having increased its sales by 131%, Dodo Pizza now has grounds to consider itself one of the fastest-growing pizza chains in the world.

91% of...