How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

For the last 12 months, Dodo Pizza Oxford’s average employee turnover rate was 75.3%. This is lower than the rates typical in the quick service industry, where exceeding 100% is considered critical but not unusual. We achieved these results not by chance, but through deliberate practice. In this post, I want to share a few things we do to secure employee retention at Dodo Pizza and make people stick with us.

Let’s admit it: we chickened out. Two years ago, our team came up with a business model for Dodo Pizza that awed us. We aimed to offer a much better product for delivery, but for the same price people usually pay. Just before the launch, we pulled the plug and raised our prices. Now, with opening a new pizzeria in Southaven, we’re giving our old spunky idea a second chance.

We said October. October was planned to be the month of the grand opening for Dodo Pizza in Oxford. The days passed by, and the date of the opening crept into November, then December. Now I have to admit that we won’t be able to open our first store in the USA this year. The construction work on the site has been initiated, though, and now we’re looking at late January 2016. A 4-month delay isn’t really a complete disaster considering the fact that we’re going through all this for the first time in the USA. But the pace of...

"We have a problem," I told my colleagues one day during our regular Skype call, which usually connects four people, three cities, and two continents to help us keep everyone on track with our Oxford project. "We rented a place for Dodo Pizza, but there is a fair chance that we won't get a permit to open a pizzeria there."

It was as bad and ridiculous as it sounds. In signing the deal for the Red House, we overlooked one detail that could potentially destroy all our hopes of opening a pizzeria in Oxford.

If you want to open a...