How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

Last Saturday happened to be a very tough day for our company. And this week is going to be even tougher.

We’ve been working on our first campaign on national TV for the whole year. It was a complex project involving every aspect of our business. We and our partners invested more $1.6 mln in it. And on Saturday, just when the sales got to their peak, a part of our system failed because of a too-high workload.

It led to a major meltdown in our business. Our website and mobile apps didn’t work for three hours. And most of...

Something is wrong at Dodo Pizza.

We set a challenging goal for ourselves to create the world’s most advanced IT system for a retail business.

We put together an IT team of sixty developers and analytics and gave them the freedom to follow any unorthodox development practices they deemed helpful.

They all worked like crazy and built an impressive large-scale IT product that now makes it possible to manage a chain of more than 300 pizza shops and process tens of thousands of orders every day.

Yet the people inside and around the company have become, to put it mildly, pretty frustrated...

A guest in Astrakhan found a piece of a finger nail in his pizza.

In Smolensk, a driver was drunk while making a delivery.

In Naberezhnye Chelny, a customer had to wait for his order for... eight hours.

I wish all that happened in places that didn’t provide their services under the name of Dodo Pizza. But they did. No point in hiding it.

Every person who tried to build a large-scale business knows that blunders are inevitable. When your organization performs thousands of operations a day, people sometimes mess up. Things happen.

The real problem appears when things happen, but you don't have...

These five habits I list off below distinguish people who fail. I’ve discovered these traits after watching dozens of our partners.

We at Dodo Pizza provide all our franchisees with an equal amount of support. They all undergo the same training. Everyone gets identical instruments for their business (management system, marketing guidelines, IT solutions).

Not everybody gets identical results.

You might think of a franchising business as a social experiment that can help you determine which strategies to avoid if you want to succeed.

Because those who don’t have a lot in common.

Fat lazy cats. The more successful you get, the more likely you will turn into one of them.