i agree w/ u totally fed up , people sometimes forget at 1 time they were at the bottom and either got lucky or scratched there way to the top. Dont forget were all human… :!:
i hear ya UP23. If i could get $12.24 for a 14inch 1 topping pizza, I’d be making a fortune like he is. My market just doesn’t support that price.
And just what is the point of a statement like this? You don’t know anything about the original poster on this thread to be making such hasty statements and ridiculing people you know nothing about. The Pizza industry is a tough industry and every owner must tackle numerous issues in retaining his/her business. What may seem common sense to you may actually not apply to others. We are all fish in a big pond, each one struggling to have their share of the pie, this site is not a place for be-littling or ridiculing people.
None taken. Got a thick skin these days 
One place or 10,000 places, it is a viable and legitimate motivation for opening a business. Granted, my wife and I have learned and posted a damned fine track record with the shop we are in, and the curve will come around where we are owner managers rather than owner-operators.
It just bears mentioning that the ROI of some places is a little longer than you Diamond Jim places out there with cushy markets that have 25,000 households within 6 miles . . . or god forbid an apartment complex or college within 20 miles.
Yeah, we are the very unusual circumstance, but our cheese melts in the oven like everyone elses 
I’m sorry but I HAVE to put in my two cents(mainly because I am one of the strugglers and that’s all I have right now 
anyway…for those who are gloating and think you have the world by the ass…I have only one warning PRIDE GOETH BEFORE THE FALL!!! Remember that, your world could come crashing down at any time and make you very humble indeed! As for you fed up, I truly wish you the best. I don’t know you but I can empathize and know it couldn’t have been an easy decision to give up the ghost. Good luck in all your endeavors!
True words spoken softly.
I know at times in our first year we were really struggling and my wife asked why don’t you sell out and go drive buses or drive trucks on the mines and make some real money.
I worked through it and now sales are growing nicely and I am finally taking a small wage (about 1/3 of what I thought I would get),
I spend so many hours a day working hard on ideas to keep growing the business and I think the light at the end of the tunnel that is getting bigger each day is no longer the train (I hope )
I never forget the hard times and struggles with staff, getting quality right and all the other obstacles there are out there.
I feel for you guys who have the guts to say I gave it my best and I can longer give any more. Just hope that you get out without losing everything.
Good luck to you and hope you find the future more finacially rewarding.
Dave
don’t mean 2 stir the hornets nest, but since I was pointed out…
never meant 2 “gloat” but too many people go into the pizza biz w/o the proper training or planing…
not saying the original poster was in that group…
you rarely see a major player leave in a yr…
most owners suffer from under capitalization, poor planing, poor marketing, poor execution etc.
no one questioned their hard work, but sometimes ya gotta think, if they put in that much hard work b4 opening, they would have been more successful…
in another thread, I mentioned an acquaintance that is closing down a shop he bought…he tried 2 “change” a reasonably successful shop - and now, because of the changes, its performing poorly…
He won’t listen to anyone and will loose $60K in less than 6 months…
Its guys like this I scratch my head about…
Always gonna be an emotional thread when we get to talking about the “deceased business” and whether “business owners are yutzes” in the same post. Even if the two statements are not intended to be connected. Patriot’s, I get the feeling that your was indeed a case of just putting two things into the same post, and not intending to call FedUp a loser.
It will always rouse the sleeping giant when someone starts wailing on about how small businesses that struggle and don’t take baths in $100 bills should never have started in the business to begin with (exaggeration for effect). Yours cam eon the heels of one of those . . . and I believe you were referring to people who go in ill prepared, execute poorly and never learn that they were the problem to begin with.
Always gonna be a message poorly received by someone when the discussion is about a guy who just tossed in the towel to find a different line of work.
Nobody is gloating Fed-Up. I would never gloat when someone is talking about their struggles. NEVER. If you mistook it for that, I apologize.
My point is simple, 90% (or whatever it is) of small businesses fail for a reason. Whether it be poor planning, poor capitalization, or whatever, the reason is very rarely outside of the owner’s control. The vast majority of the time a business goes down, it goes down because of some form of lack of planning. I am not trying to gloat when I point that out. I am trying to send a message to those that read this board who are thinking of owning their own place.
If a fortune is what you wanted, you shouldn’t have entered the pizza business in your market if it won’t support what it would take to get there.
If a fortune is not what you wanted, then nothing in this thread applies to you.
I don’t know Scott, and I can say with absolute certainty that I will never meet him. But, if he is successful, the chances are very high that he was not lucky.
Those that make it in this business are rarely lucky. They set themselves up for success by planning and watch those that fail think that the only things that set themselves apart from the succeeders is luck.
I was not belittling anyone. I don’t need to know this poster to know where they went wrong. His business did not succeed because he did not plan accordingly. The success rate for well planned businesses is very high. Sure, there are scenarios where a well thought out business can fail, but that is very far from the norm.
We are all fish in a big pond. If you don’t have the common business sense to succeed, wouldn’t it be wiser to jump into a pond where you won’t get eaten alive? I assure you, I do not possess any knowledge that anyone here could not obtain without an ounce of effort.
If my world does come crashing down, it will be because I did a horrible job of planning. That’s all I am saying. My worse case scenario, is that my next few ventures fail and that I go back to the corporate world, with a significant amount of my savings intact and my family’s future still very secure. My worse case scenario really isn’t that bad, and that is because I planned it out.
There is simply no way I will end up deep in debt and broke. I won’t allow my pride to get in the way of my overall success. If a business is failing, I will cut ties with it before I become a failure with it.
I know the message will be unpopular on a board like this, but it is an important message. Like it or not, threads like this are going to get a lot of views from people looking to start their own place (at least they should). I am trying to reach those people. If a few people’s feelings get hurt, but I am able to reach just one person who now makes sure he plans accordingly and speaks to an accountant and all that before opening, then I could care less that a few people think I am a jerk because I pointed out why someone else failed.
This is a tough world people. Instead of getting defensive why don’t you think about what Patriot and I are saying. This business is not rocket science. It is NEVER about how hard you work, rather about how smart you work.
For those that are preaching planning, planning and yet more planning, how about giving those of us that are currently in the planning phase some insider tips.
I am constantly looking at my business plan, projection numbers, expense numbers etc trying to figure out are they good, do they need to be changed, will this business work with this or that or a little change over here on the labor side and so on.
At the end of the day I truely understand the headaches behind the planning but the importance. I also understand this step is vital for success prior to spend a buck to open the doors. All too often I think others think “how hard can it be, open the doors, cook a pizza and make a buck”
Everyday I keep thinking I should just throw in the towel and call it quits after looking at the numbers all day long. However the next day I pick it back up and take a few more steps towards (hoepfully) success.
How do you know when you have planned enough, when your projections are in line with reality, your expenses are true to form and you have not forgetten some hidden cost that will sink your ship?
Gives us (well at least me) your insight so I can do it right the first time. Thank you.
Early in my life as a beginner sales rep for a grocery supply company I was told by my manager “If you fail to plan then you plan to fail”. I never forgot this and I used it every day and went on to become a state sales manager, and higher. I instilled this in every one of my reps and they reaped the rewards from their successes, as I did up until the company made us all redundant - oops, I didn’t plan for that to happen.
The same saying is crucial for businesses of any size from smal one person operations to multi-national corporations.
I think this is what DFW is saying. If you don’t plan then the chances are you will fail. Some people fall on their feet, but these are few and far between.
Many posts have been on business plans and how important they are PRIOR to starting up in a busines. Planning one in real terms scanario and not doing it with rose tinted glasses on what you think will happen is critical to future success or failure.
I think too many people go in with unrealistic expectations based on poor planning and research and find that in the real cruel hard world of dog eat dog retail (pizza in particular) that the rewards do not always match the effort.
With all my experience and wisdom (or lack of) I paid a hefty “fool’s tax” and am now only seeing a little bit of the rewards that I envisaged, and boy did I plan hard and long.
So in the end of the day it comes down to just like DFW is saying.
Still it hurts bad for those who fail and we do empathise in your dilema.
Dave
You are doing exactly what you need to be doing.
You want to know a good idea how to figure out if your projections are realistic? Post them, along with complete demographic info, on a thread here. There will be plenty of experienced people who will tell you.
At the end of the day, expenses are rather easy to project. Sure they may change some as things like cheese spike, but the general framework is simple.
Sales is the difficult thing because there are so many factors. At the end of the day, it will come down to market size, the price points for your market, the product your market wants, and how well you sell your product to them.
Caesar’s had a great marketing campaign in Chicago back in the day, but no matter what, cheap pizza does not sell there. Caesar’s all but left the area.
Here in DFW, in the areas I am in, a mid priced pizza is what people want. They do not want $5 pizza, but they are not willing to spend $20 like they are in Chicago. Most of my large one toppings are at $10.99. I know my market, I know what they are willing to pay, I know the product they want (around here it is mostly NY style), now I just have to create the right advertising. That is actually the easy part.
So my advice, stop analyzing spreadsheets. Learn your market. Study foot traffic at local pizzerias, which ones do well? Why? Analyze their price points. Compare quality. What sells at what price?
That will give you the baseline for where you should be with pizza. In most markets, and I am guessing WA is one, the highly successful pizzerias do a significant amount of sales in other items. Wings, cheese nuggets, nacho stix (a local favorite here), whatever. That you play with until you get it right. Make your living off of pizza, retire off of the right side item. That is the key.
Thanks DFW, this forum has been a huge help. Big shout out to J_r0kk, Nickspizza and several others for all the help.
Best bet is to drop me a quick email at pazzodipizza at yahoo dot com and I will attach the files.
Here is a link to our demographics and comments from J_r0kk
http://www.pmq.com/tt/viewtopic.php?p=1 … ght=#17092
I’d like to post a comment. This comment goes to all pizzeria operators that view this forum who are struggling:
It saddens me to see this happen to you fedup. I was in your place once before, not with an indy, but with a Domino’s Pizza store. Even the big name like Domino’s couldn’t save me because I had no idea what I was getting myself into. It was a humbling experience and a learning experience as well. I stored away all the hurt, the pain, and the reasons behind my failure and was determined not to let that happen to me again if I ever decided to open another shop. Well now, 12 years later, I’ve managed to open an indy and have been relatively successful. Because of this newfound lease on life, I’ve decided to help in any way possible to prevent my past experiences from happening to anyone else.
So, if you are an operator or a future operator please read the following paragraph:
All I ask is if you have a question, post it. If you feel overwhelmed with a problem in your store, post it. If you need marketing advice, post it. If you are struggling to find a location that fits your operation, post it. Any question you may have and don’t know the answer for, post it. Chances are, I’ll see it and respond. If I don’t, there are at least a dozen very intelligent operators in this forum that can (and most often, do) give better advice than me on a particular subject.
Nobody is in this forum for the money, because there’s none to be made in here. We’re here because one way or another we genuinely care about what happens to good people in bad situations, and in a way, it’s satisfying to know we’ve contributed something to help someone through a problem they’re too overwhelmed to fix themselves. We’ve all struggled at one time or another, in one way or another and a few of us have managed to make it to the other side. Take advantage of the knowledge we’ve gained because we give it away, free of charge, to anyone who asks. Just please don’t ask after it’s too late because we can’t perform miracles. What we can do, is offer sound advice to help put you in a better situation if the problem is caught fast enough.
-J_r0kk
Let the people say, “Amen.” I got a lot from j_r0kk and the many others so far. Mostly I have hope that I can fight through and see daylight someday like in the movie “Poseidon Adventure”. GobPile Pizza is a success story (so far) of the power of collaberation and hard work from the forum and even more from the pizzeria owners themselves. The thread we had with them is at
http://www.pmq.com/tt/viewtopic.php?t=1487&start=0
They ain’t rolling in cash yet, but they sure are surviving when they once we ready to pack up and sell. 10,000+ views of that thread and 70 posts. Lots of work from Gobpile owners and they started turning slowly around.