Adding Delivery to Dine-in/Carryout...HELP!

Pizza Shop Talk The Think Tank
1

Hey ya’ll,

I don’t post much on here, but have been a member for probably about 3 years and have gotten a lot of very useful information from The Think Tank. So now I turn to all of your brilliant pizza-biz minds for advice:

Background: I have hands down the absolute best pie in town. Our company has 2 units. We opened this 2nd one up just under a year ago, and sales have not met expectations. They have, in fact, fallen VERY short of expectations. We are located in a small town (approximately 13K residents), and I would say that half of the town is rural. There aren’t a [i]whole[i]lot of businesses here. A good part of our population lives here, but actually work in the town next to ours (50K pop…where our first unit is located). Our town more or less “shuts down” around 7:30-8:00pm; it is an uncommon occurrence for my phone to ring past 7:30. At present, we are dine-in/carryout only, and we are struggling. Every time that I hop in my vehicle, I pass at least 2 delivery vehicles from the “big 3”, and I want a piece of that market.

I have several different questions:

  1. Can anyone give me a ballpark figure on how much hired/non-owned insurance is per month?

  2. If anyone out there delivers without the help of a POS system, can you please PM me to make yourself available for some questions concerning the actual operations of a pizza kitchen without a POS system?

  3. Has anyone made this transition and succeeded?

I am open to any and all kinds of advice concerning this subject. We are at the point where something’s gotta give. Thank you all in advance for any help, suggestions, idea, answers, and encouragement that you may give.

Brian Gates

2

Hired and non-owned is hard to find. As a sitdown restaurant you will have a couple more choices though. Rates depend on volume, location and policies as well as on the resourcefullness of your agent. I would expect it to run about $300 per month. As a sit down restaurant not doing much delivery it might be somewhat less.

Bite bullet and get a POS. It will help in every aspect of your business.

3

My parents recently purchased a pizzeria that didn’t have a POS system and I’ve been slow putting one in. I help with all aspects of the office / phone support. I do just about everything except make the pizzas.

If you’d like to talk about how they did things I’d be happy to talk to you. But I wouldn’t recommend not using a POS system. Even those ours is in it’s infancy - it’s a huge help to have it computerized and I don’t ever want to go back to the paper slips!

Now just to get my mom comfortable using it!

Drop me a PM.