How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

In the very last days of December, the first Dodo Pizza in Los Angeles suddenly appeared :-)

Our American partner Alena Tikhova has reached an agreement with a local pizza delivery service, and now it takes the Dodo Pizza brand and passes under control of our team. Those who live in California will have a chance to try our American pizza in an LA suburb. Stay tuned!

By the end of 2018, we’ve had 440 pizzerias in our chain, though we had planned to reach 450. The figures are as follows:

In Russia, there are 383 pizzerias (20 of them are our own corporate pizzerias, not franchisees).
In Kazakhstan, 28.
In Belarus, 9.
In Romania, 6.
In the USA, 3.
In Lithuania, 3.
In Estonia, 2.
In Kyrgyzstan, 2.
In China, 2.
In the United Kingdom, 1.
And in Uzbekistan, 1.

Our first Belarusian pizzerias opened in October 2018, and by the end of the year Belarus has come out third in this rating. Now that’s what we call a good start :-)

Our forth pizzeria in Bucharest (and sixth in Romania) is on its way! Bolocan Sergiu and his team 💪

Meanwhile, last week, we opened our third Dodo Pizza in the US—in Memphis, Tennessee. Congrats to our second American partner, Andy Kirievskiy!

Looks like we kind of disrupted our market a bit.

A few months ago, we were totally f***ed up in Southaven. I wish I could say that we experienced an interesting management “problem” or faced a “challenge.” But in reality, we were simply screwed. Totally.

Southaven is a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee (and the location of our second American pizza shop). It’s one of the poorest American cities. Compared to Southaven, Oxford in Mississippi (where we opened our first American pizzeria) looks like heaven.

So I didn’t expect to find myself in such a bad situation: I couldn’t find enough members of the team to keep our pizza shop up and running. Even when by some miracle I managed to find somebody, they would leave after a few days. Just because they were offered 25 cents more an hour some other place.

Nobody cared about our mission, awesome product, or superb service. It was simply a question of money they could make an hour. And it’s worth mentioning that on average, we were paying as much as anybody else.

I would come to work knowing for sure that the general manager would come. Whether anybody else would show up was the big question.

We now receive requests for our franchise from all over the world—from Germany and Nigeria, Canada and Australia, Switzerland and the UAE….

These emails prove to us that people from different countries have started to see the same value in what we’re building (our cutting-edge IT system, up-to-date branding, and agile business culture based on radical transparency).

The question is: what should we do with these requests? The Dodo Pizza brand is already present in 10 countries, from the United States and China to Lithuania and Romania. And to an outsider, our choice...

So stupid of us: Americans love picking toppings and making their own pizzas, and we didn’t allow them to do that.

Why?