advice needed

Pizza Shop Talk The Think Tank
1

Hello, everyone.

I am looking for a little advice here. I own and operate a pizza place in a town of about 4500 people. We are grossing anywhere between $5500 and $7500 weekly, but seem to be having a hard time making ends meet. We do carryout, delievery, and dine-in, but the dine- in portion seems to be struggling considerably. We have a very wide variety on our menu and have a good repeat customer base. Payroll is somewhere around $1100 every two weeks. We do shared mail and radio ads as the majority of our advertising.

Anyone have any suggestions how to increase dine in sales, or even sales in general?

Thanks in advance for any responses.

2

Payroll at $1100 every 2 weeks? Under 10% labor and still struggleing to make ends meet? Whats your food cost and fixed cost percentages?

3

Yes I too would like to know the hard numbers on fixed costs and food.

But your struggles will invariably be attributable to one or more of the big three:

  1. Your expenses or costs are too high
  2. Your debt is too high
  3. Your cash flow is improper
4

giuseppe,

It’s not your sales. With a town of 4500 people and an average of 2.7 people per household you’ve got approximately 1667 households in your town. You said your sales averaged between $5.5k and $7.5k, so let’s take $6.5k as an average:

$6,500 / 1667 = $3.89 per household per week.

I’ll tell you right now those numbers are extremely close to maximum potential of your area. You might be able to squeeze another $1k per week out of the town but in my opinion, your sales aren’t the problem.

Knowing that you had a small town and an even smaller customer base to draw from I’m sure you understood before you opened that you weren’t about to operate a million dollar store. Knowing that this store had the greatest chance of being lower volume you must’ve budgeted and got into this thing as inexpensively as possible, right?

From what you’ve posted you would definitely need to look at the questions Red Baron and paul7979 have asked. They’re dead on with the questioning because at an average of $6,500/week and with Labor at 8.46% (I still don’t understand how it’s this low) you’ve got bigger issues to worry about other than sales. So, answer these questions and we’ll see if we can help you out here:

  1. Rent?
  2. Loan payment?
  3. Food $/week?
  4. Any other outrageous costs on your P&L’s?

-J_r0kk

5

Your numbers don’t jive. Something is majorly wrong. Your rent must be out of this world, your advertising must be triple what yo should be budgeting and you must be putting 2lbs. of cheese on every pizza.

We need more info on your shop. What is your food costs? What is your weekly ad’s costing and also what is your rent? Give us these numbers and we will be able to tell you exactly whats going on.

Something just isn’t adding up here.