Anyone still remembers their weekly sales when they just opened? And is willing to share? I am very curios how fast/slow did you experience the growth. Is there any benchmark data available? Thanks anyone for sharing.
My first year, 2011 to 2012, was very slow, and heartbreaking. I kept doing what I could confined to my 4 walls, work 16 hour days, 7 days a week, and did a part time job to make ends meet. I don’t remember the exact sales for a year, but it was less than $100,000.
My sales are still not stellar, and a lot of that is due to mistakes I have made along the way, but we should be between $350,000 to $400,000 by the end of the year. If you have questions, comments, concerns, I would be more than happy to share with you more of my experience relating to anything specific.
Also, we are in Florida, so our costs are significantly lower. Keep that in mind as well for gauging.
Thanks for a great reply! We opened about 7 weeks ago. I just had first few days when labor cost was below our sales! Yesterday we got to 56%. YAY. We had a lot of days where I paid much more in labor than we got in sales (200%). Training new people. Horrible productivity. Slow sales. So I keep wondering when can I expect to break even. 6 months, a year… That was my original intent to ask how long it took to build enough business.
When we first opened it was rough. Just my brother and I working open to close 7 days a week. Some days we would have less than $100 in sales so it was a grind for sure. Our sales increased about $1-2k monthly in the beginning, and after a year, we were about doubling the monthly sales of the previous year.
Thanks for sharing!
First full year was around 325K if I remember right. It was 20 years ago. Grew pretty nicely for a couple of years and then leveled out before the recession 10 years ago. Dropped back to 325 during the recession and grew slowly again from there.
First year sales were about $250,00 in 2012
Me my brother and a driver.
It was the worst, 98 hr work weeks no light at the end of the tunnel. Relationships down the drain.
Slowly it got better- we do 4x that now now and its alot easier.
Volume really does solve alot of problems.
$180,000 so far. surely I will break 200. And I barley pay the bills. At the first of December I raised prices 5%, dropped wings from the menu, due to high food cost, and dropped grubhub and eatstreet. Lets see if that works.
@sparrowspizza You need to put those wings back on the menu. Yes, they are high food costs (50% in our case), but they have a high net profit contribution and drive a much larger average ticket. At the end of the day, it’s more money in the bank and in your pocket.
The good ole days. Took over a shop in a college town, in the summer 
I would worked all day every day to make maybe 50-90 dollars. I had no experience and would literally be sweating bullets if someone ordered a pizza and a cheesesteak at the same time. sales improved, i improved. I found that business gets easier then harder then easier and over and over as you grow. Sometimes the next step in being busy you actually make less money because of staffing /purchasing for the extra business that isnt always there consistently
Pizzoun, just curious to know how things are going. I can remember when I started my store (most deliveries to a military base) back in 2006, I made sure I had “now open” signage and streamers in the parking lot to draw attention to the location. At first I had all employees park in the back to make room for the customers, but I didn’t get heavy traffic at the onset. Because of that, I actually had my employees park in front of the store so that we looked busier than we were. Those two ideas combined somehow worked. Walk in customers started to increase. I got pretty aggressive with print advertising after the first few weeks. Sales steadily increased from there until the bottom dropped out in 2008. At the beginning, weekly sales were in the $5k range. If I remember correctly, my highest weekly average was around $12k-$13k.
It’s a different world now. Looks like the entire business has shifted from print to digital. I could imagine this saves a ton of money, for sure. Hope it’s all working out for you. Keep us posted…
-J_r0kk
Looks like he closed about 10 months ago.