Briefly about my experience
At the beginning of the description of all the steps and actions I would like to share my story, which may motivate you to take the first step towards your dream.
About a year ago, I finally moved to my apartment on the outskirts of town in the newly built high-rise buildings.
- The neighborhood could be called a sleeping area if it wasn't for the gardens (SNT and HOA) that surrounded the new housing estate and private houses. The road to the city center takes about 30-40 minutes by car (if you go without traffic jams).
Despite the fact that my neighborhood is quite large, there is an acute problem of fast food delivery - pizza, sushi, burgers, etc. Large urban players do not bring food here yet, or rather, the area of their delivery only reaches the beginning of the gardens. Delivery in smaller services takes quite a lot of time (more than 90 minutes) and is characterized by a low level of service. I will say right away that I personally ordered delivery from many of them and the fastest courier arrived in 90 minutes with a cold pizza.
Having conducted a survey in the group of my LCD, I realized that such a problem concerns 90% of neighbors. After that, I had the idea of opening my own pizza delivery.
Looking ahead, I would like to say that we should not blindly believe the surveys of neighbors and hurry to start a business. Just because they want to order pizza at home doesn't mean they will. In the first month, neighbors were actively placing orders, but later someone switched to sushi, someone to burgers, and someone just stopped ordering pizzas. As a result, I had to expand the delivery area to get into the plus side.
For those who doubt their power and change the field of activity I will answer - I myself worked as a website designer, so the sphere of delivery was completely new and unknown to me. Like most people, I helped Google to look for any information on this issue. Fortunately, this business is not an innovative activity suitable only for Skolkovo, but a very popular occupation, so there are a lot of cases, business plans, franchises.
To be honest, I was afraid... I was afraid that the pizzeria simply "will not go".
I was not afraid to spend money on good equipment, hire chefs with work experience and demand from them to observe the rules of the institution and the quality of pizza preparation. I was not afraid to ask for advice or help from partner institutions and competitors. I was just afraid I wouldn't be able to cover my kitchen and shipping costs.
According to preliminary estimates, I had to sell about 1000 pizzas a month at an average price of 500 rubles to work "in plus". And this is given the fact that the delivery itself will not work in the whole city, but on its small territory, on the outskirts, where other popular services do not work.
I understood perfectly well that in my case it is necessary not so much to attract new clients as to work with current ones, pushing them to re-purchase. There are no office buildings where orders for Friday parties or corporate parties can go; nor are there any other
"Open delivery and don't screw up."
Special infrastructure such as gyms, swimming pools, beauty salons or something like that. There are no educational institutions either. The only exception is a couple of supermarkets, which, in fact, are the center of attraction for residents of the area.
Cool neighborhood, huh? And here I opened the delivery.
The first two weeks of work I spent on forming my own understanding of how to sharpen the processes in the pizzeria: how to take orders, what to answer customers' questions, how to collect pizza products, how to make dough and roll it out.
- Later on, there are a lot of questions and problems that you start to realize only when the process has already started.
I spent hours surfing the Internet looking for the perfect recipe for the dough, then making a variety of mixes on almost every kind of flour I could find in the city.
- When I sent the pizza to the oven, I squeezed the stopwatch and kept looking through the oven window to see if it was ready. About 15 pizzas were spoiled in those two days before the optimum temperature and cooking time were found.