Grand Opening Ideas

I am planning my grand opening in about a month and was wondering if anyone had any ideas that I could use to make it a good one?

Make postcards/flyers, then invite the mayor of your town/city and all his staff for a ribbon cutting ceremony and invite the local newspaper to take pictures and write up an article. Get a nice banner for the front too.

I’m gonna go the other way on this one…I wouldn’t do anything. Maybe a soft opening then a grand opening a little later. My reasons…

  1. Staff can be trained all day everyday but until the orders start flying in it really doesn’t mean much. I worked in a pizza place for 7 years before I opened mine and we still stumbled through the opening.
  2. you prolly arent done tweaking your Prep schedules, recipes, and Procedures…I don’t think you want to do this while weeded on a wed night.
    3)As an owner, Being the face of a business is very important…You don’t want to be running around like a madman getting orders together or possibly cooking yourself…

with all of that said maybe your location needs the advertising part but In my past experience(13 months ago) we were much better off just openening the doors and turning the signs on. We still avg. 8,000 our first month open without pushing it. Good luck with whatever you do the tt is always here to help

PS Invest in a pos system and record every customer that walks through that door, the ones you loose after your honeymoon period might be able to be captured when your operation tightens up

During our Grand Opening, we had a raffle with the grand prize being FREE PIZZA FOR A YEAR (Large 3 Topping Pizza twice a month). We had hundreds of entries (which were added to our database 8) ). We took pictures of the grand prize winner and put it up on our wall with the caption “Grand Opening Winner of Pizza for a Year”. People talked about it for months… “That sure would have been great to win that”

This is directly from my business plan I put together. It may be more than what you need, but at least its a start to somo ideas

Our marketing plan will be aggressive from the start, including the following timetable:
Opening week:

0-30 Days:
We will use soft opening marketing for the first 30 days of operation. This will include an opening night by invitation only for investors, guest, family and friends. We will use this time to perfect our operation skills and work out any bugs. We will include a fridge magnet (10,000 for $1,100), menu (10,000 for $1,000) and bounce back box toppers (10,000 for $300) with every dine-in and take out order. In addition we will start our grand opening drawing with every entry including the following; name, mailing address, phone, email, date of birth, kids and dates of birth. This information will vital for building a solid database and future marketing efforts. On a side note will look for a co-marketing partner to sponsor and pay for the box toppers allowing the partner space for their brand logo.

30-120 Days:
In addition to the above activities, a large banner display will be hung outside the store stating: Grand Opening – FREE pizza for a year. A mailer campaign will also be kicked off with an oversized postcard with FREE pizza for a year in large font sent to every deliverable address in Poulsbo, Kingston, Suquamish, and Bainbridge Island totaling 28,773 USPS residential deliveries. This mailer will including the details of the grand opening, prizes, location map and entry form with the noted information above. Approximately 2400 pieces of mail will be sent out every week during the campaign with an estimated cost of $10,000. Total cost of marketing plan for the first 120 days is estimated at $13,000 including purchase of drawing items.

Grand Opening Prize list:
• FREE Pizza for a year – 1 Lg. 1 topping pizza every week for 52 weeks
• Ipod touch
• Dinner and a movie – 1 Lg. 1 topping pizza, 4 drinks and 4 movie tickets
• Dinner date – 1 Sm. 1 topping pizza, 2 drinks and 2 movie tickets
• Itunes $15 music card (8 total)
• Medium 1 topping pizza (10 total)
• Regal movie ticket (10 total)
For the items that need to be purchased, we will look for sponsorship partners to cover the expense in exchange for company mention.

120 Days Forward:
Our goal from the aggressive grant opening campaign is a 10% return, or a total of 2,800 database contacts we can use for mailing and marketing. With the winners of the drawing being announced, a press release article will be submitted to our local papers for more publicity. With a successful grand opening and moving forward, we will continue of use of fridge magnets, menus and box toppers. In addition we will start a new campaign of database mailing of menus, emailing of “database specials”, sending “birthday coupons” and door hangers in the local community. Using direct mailing of our menu to every USPS deliverable address in Poulsbo will result in every home receiving our menu every 6 weeks with a fridge magnet including twice a year.

Good job Jon…Looks like you have all the bases covered…I especially like the part about fridge magnets…lol…

PS…Even though I am the “Magnet King” it is far more important to get menus and box toppers out…So I am glad you have them in the plan as well…