Scaling Your Business: Lessons from Local Pizzerias

Want to grab a slice?

You’ll find there are two basic options:

• Franchises: With franchises, just about anyone can use their smartphone, click a few buttons, and expect a hot pizza at their door.
• Neighborhood Pizzerias: You can head down to your local eatery for the hometown experience—but if you try to order via smartphone…good luck.

The local pizzerias might have credibility within their neighborhoods, but when it comes to growing revenue and offering the convenience of the “big guys,” they feel stuck.

I founded Slice in 2010 (formerly called MyPizza) with the goal of growing local pizza into something that could compete with the big guys.

Since then, we’ve partnered with over 10,000 pizzerias to help grow their businesses.

Along the way, I learned how to make the same principles work for Slice.

The Disadvantages of Being the Local Eatery

Few businesses embrace their local charm more than the local pizza shops do.

It’s their selling point. It’s their advantage over the big chains.

The bad news: It’s often their only selling point.

Domino’s, Pizza Hut, and Papa John’s have the power of scaling on their side.

They make it cheap and convenient to order online.

We see that in the numbers: while the worldwide pizza market grows, the number of pizzerias in the U.S. is on the decline.

Even today’s innovations like Uber Eats and other services can charge high fees of up to 35% per order, making it too cost-prohibitive for local eateries to compete with the chains and successful franchise businesses.

To make growth possible for the local restaurants, Slice asked local pizzerias to change that with a few strategies:

• A stronger online presence. Yes, even local eateries should want to look like the big chains on their websites. We helped restaurants expand their online presence with easy-to-find menus, vivid photography, and efficient online ordering to allow for easy pick up and pizza delivery to customers.
• Online ordering. Billy’s Pizza & Pasta in Brooklyn used to struggle with restauruant online ordering companies charging 20% fees or more. After partnering with Slice and embracing a new ordering system, they’ve averaged 50% growth per year.
• Embracing the economy of scale. Slice helped pizza shops band together to buy supplies like pizza boxes at discount.

Slice’s goal and business model has always been to help these local eateries earn more market share. But we’ve had similar issues to our own customers.

Scaling a start-up from the ground up without capital is difficult.

Here’s how we did it.

How to Think Big Without Losing What Makes You Great

For over five years, Slice was a bootstrap business.

It grew not because we were flush with capital, but because we built it from the ground up.

We did it the right way.

And growing as a bootstrapped business is great. But it can also lead to issues when you want to scale:

• Getting stuck in your ways. It takes courage to move away from a formula that works. Until 2015, I had several years of growth I could point to, saying—“See? What we’re doing is working! We don’t need anything else.” But I didn’t.
• Holding too tightly to success. It’s a bit like struggling to swim when you could simply stand above the water line with both legs. We hold on so tightly to the old way of doing things that we become blind to better options.
• Failing to pause and evaluate. Hit the pause button. Look at some components of your business that aren’t working and ask yourself: Am I in the way? Is it really so bad if we try something else?

One of the keys to our success at Slice was hiring great talent to help grow the business.

Sounds simple, right?

You’d be surprised at the internal resistance you can encounter along the way.

When you’ve run your own company for five years, you think you have the best handle on its day-to-day operations.

But there might be a COO out there who’s not only better at it than you—they might even have experience doing this for several businesses of your size.

Focus on the core of what makes you great. Be open to changing the rest.