Times Square Hot Dogs with Goodfella's Pizza Founders

Avoid wasting all your Pizza Marketing dollars.

Now that you have spent thousands of your hard earned dollars on a successful marketing campaign will let poor service waste it? Sadly this goes on in the restaurant world much more often than we like to admit. Even the big boys with national franchise chains suffer from this on occasion. Speaking from practical experience from the original  Goodfella's Pizza on Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island NY I can you several costly instances that were easy to avoid if I had known about it.

So, there was an Interview on NBC with Ralph Penza featuring a couple of people and places in NYC from each of the five boroughs. This was an interview with Miss New York and then with me at Goodfella's for about 10 minutes featuring Staten Island New York. Little did we know that when it aired we would have the busiest 2 weeks in our history.  Now you must be thinking, how can this possibly be a bad thing? Well we thought it was just a little blip but they aired the whole interview and featured a whole about the place and the brick oven pizza which was a novelty at the time.  From the minute we walked in till the minute we closed it was non-stop customers and phone calls for delivery. At some point,s during the first couple of days, we ran out of dough since we didn't think the rush would last. Many times I had to tell customer's we ran out of dough or could not possibly take any more delivery orders. Now the amount of promotion and marketing we did prior to this news event was huge and ranged from attending all sorts of events and contests to radio, TV and newspaper ads and stories. Had we been prepared and had enough staff, raw materials, and prepped food it would have also been the biggest profit weeks in our history.

Then there was a hugely successful "Family Deal" special that had the phones ring off the hook for a lot of big orders that involved items like pizza, pasta, entre's, salad, desserts, and beverages. Some of these items were very varied in cook times and we had no idea of what the inventory should have been. This was another costly lesson in lost revenue and customer relations.

Another time there was a barter book we had taken an ad in several months prior and forgotten about. This had a similar result of a deeply discounted prefix menu that we just did not prep enough for since we forgot we advertised it and didn't expect such a return on the offer.

The moral of this story is that there are several things that can you avoid such a waste of marketing dollars. First and foremost: Have a calendar to track all your marketing efforts and normally busy times of the year. This will ensure you are not short staffed and that you are fully prepped for the influx of customers. Second, if you don't already have a par list of wat you should have on hand for normal traffic and high traffic days and holidays it is highly recommended to do so.

The next and I think most important thing to do is to have your staff hatted and drilled as to what are the priorities in the kitchen, prep, and dining room and to be confident in the knowledge of what is expected of them. For instance-handle dining room tickets 2-1 over pick tickets. This is highly variable depending on your set up and business but would be as easy to implement as having your expediter mark the deliveries with a red line and place one in the kitchen make line after every 2 dining room orders. Another thing you could do is instruct you hostess, waiters, managers and busboys to greet every single guest that comes in and let them know they will be taken care of shortly. There is nothing more frustrating than being ignored when you walk into a new place.

I am sure you can think of many of your own examples of what you have encountered such being told a delivery will be there shortly when you know it will be 2 hours. Better to be honest and lose a sale for the night than the customer for life who will learn that he has to call 2 hours prior on a busy Saturday night.

I hope this is helpful and makes your life a little easier as a restaurant operator. Happy Pizza to you!