Webinar – Scaling your restaurant chain – New York Pizza’s successful journey to 350+ stores

Do you want to increase revenue, grow your store network or simply be prepared for a potential recession in 2023?

In our webinar with Philippe Vorst, CEO and founder of New York Pizza, he shared the secrets behind scaling the largest pizza franchise business in the Netherlands.

Philippe grew his chain by 100% after implementing our omnichannel solution! As of today, consumers can order their New York-styled pizzas from more than 350 + stores across the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium.

What was the webinar about?

Philippe Vorst brings an understanding of the importance of marketing strategies, headquarter – franchisee relations, and technological innovation for quick-service restaurant chains.

In the webinar, he shared with us:

• The strong foundation of a rapidly growing restaurant chain
• The key decisions and actions that lead to sustainable growth in his journey
• The contribution of technology and data provided by S4D to driving revenue growth
• The importance of a strong team in building and maintaining a brand

The industry leader navigates his franchise successfully through changing economic times and consumer demands.

Speaker 1- Philippe Vorst
Speaker 2- Daan Bakker

 

Speaker 2

So yeah, before going into this, feel free to drop a question in the Q&A, and at the end of the webinar, we will answer them. But feel free to ask the questions and we filter them and the questions that are relevant for everyone we will answer in the end. And I would like to introduce myself because we’re gonna listen to Philippe. But then you know who I am. So I’m the host of this webinar. Philip is the guest I’m going to ask him some questions upcoming 45 minutes an hour max. So I’m Daan Bakker. I work now for 10 years for different SaaS platforms, and consumer apps, and now with S4D I’m quite of kind of excited already about the new logo. We just recently did the rebranding and I’m in charge of marketing, sales, and partnerships. Yeah, I’m actually loving the quick-service restaurant industry and I would like to. Welcome, Philip Vorst. A very experienced guy in the quick service restaurant industry with New York Pizza. Could you maybe quickly introduce yourself?

Speaker 1

I’m Philippe Vorst. I’m the CEO of New York Pizza. In April, for 30 years. So we started with one restaurant and at that time we didn’t even know the word CEO and that was like pizza sales guy and now and over the years they’ve grown to the size we are now.

Speaker 2

OK, so maybe diving into that and like how do you develop a scalable business model? Why did you start New York pizza? You were a student or…?

Speaker 1

I was in university doing economics at the UvA in Amsterdam and I was almost finished with my education I needed the subject for my thesis and then my brother came up with the idea: why don’t you write it to set up a pizza chain in the Netherlands as we’ve seen in the US? I wrote my thesis and got really enthusiastic about the whole plan, but there was no objective to start the business. But while I was writing the thesis all the long-term foresight looked really well and then actually we said why don’t we start and so we started.

Speaker 2

So how did you start that?

Speaker 1

Ohh, it’s quite complicated. I can take like half an hour to tell…

Speaker 2

The short version.

Speaker 1

Basically, you don’t know anything. And to start out, we started out with the pizza by the slice shop, yeah, in Amsterdam and you need to invent everything. Even the word pizza slice did not exist in the Dutch language. So how do we call it the pizza punt or pizza slice? We decided to use the word pizza slice, which is now a common word in the Dutch language. And so the brand, the branding, the routing in the stores. trying to avoid this is actually a large part of my career: not to invent the wheel. Not to invent the wheel, but to copy, paste, and improve, or combine. And so I looked a lot at the different chains in the US.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and we copied a lot. We copied different systems. From different chains. Yeah, and we combined it into ours. Own, but the branding we did ourselves.

Speaker 2

OK, so in that let’s call it like a growth strategy so. Ah, what was key? In that growth strategy because you started with one shop. In Amsterdam, right? Yeah, and now you’re about how many shops?

Speaker 1

300 and…. 50?

Speaker 2

II read a bit more, there were some recent openings, almost 360, but what was it like in that journey? Like? What were some key?

Speaker 1

OK OK

Speaker 2

To get to this, maybe you can split it from zero to 50-100.

Speaker 1

There is, there’s we when we are starting the business. We wanted to have the best quality pizza and we were trying to source dough. We are trying to source tomato sauce and it was just not available in the American way. In the Netherlands, you could not buy doubles. You could not buy three baked crusts. You could not buy a ready-made pizza sauce. Yeah, so we started importing a full container of tomato sauce.

Speaker 2

How does that look?

Speaker 1

Like a lot, yeah, I think it’s  16 pellets or something. I don’t know. It’s quite a lot. Which is like four or five years to store it for one shop. So we had to resell it to other ones we could not find.

Speaker 2

So you bought too much actually.

Speaker 1

Yes, I knew because that was the minimum amount I could. Then I said if I needed other people to need it too. So I started reselling it. Yeah, and that’s actually the foundation of our wholesale. And when I started reselling the Tomato sauce people said, how do you get your dough? Yeah, I said we make it ourselves. Said can we buy that OK, we buy that too. So basically in the beginning it was not in my thesis. I later on I wrote it in my thesis. I mean the original plan was to buy the goods. But if you make one leap 30 years forward, we have a manufacturing facility where we make doubles. We make approximately 2,000,000 doubles per week. And we exported to 25 countries.

Speaker 2

So, but is that own supply was that key from the growth from zero?

Speaker 1

To fix it, it’s a strategic wise decision, but it actually started selling the dough and the tomato sauce before we opened for a shop because we had the supplies and we had everything ready in the preparation.

Speaker 1

The shop was not yet ready so basically. One major very important decision that was made after the thesis before the opening of the sub is to set up our own supply chain. Yeah and to start producing dough and also selling dough to third parties. That is a major thing. Then three years after the start, we found out that the slice business was in some places extremely successful in some other places very difficult, so we had to reorganize ourselves at the same time we saw from all the customers of the dough. And the tomato sauce, who were doing who were active in the delivery business that we should actually start working together with these customers and started New York Pizza delivery.

Speaker 2

Ah, so it first was. Fly shops and then later the…

Speaker 1

Delivery yeah, and that was in 1996. And so by now  from all these stores we only have 9 slide shops left, and they’re doing great business.

Speaker

OK.

Speaker 2

So what is key to the slide shop to be successful? Maybe that’s interesting, for people to understand.

Speaker 1

OK, there are hardly any locations available where you have traffic during the day in the evening. And at night.

Speaker 2

You need the three moments.

Speaker 1

Actually, you need the three moments if you miss one, you need two moments you need during the day and at night, yeah, and preferably night. And if you have all three.

Speaker 2

Because people had a beer and…

Speaker 1

They come and. Eat at 2:00 o’clock three o’clock 4. O’clock eat again.

Speaker 2

They don’t care how much it costs.

Speaker 1

The same price that during the day, but they have, they have another heat moments, yeah. And so if you have 3/8 moments you have big business, but they’re very rare places. We have 3 heat moments who have the license to do the food business. And an affordable rent.

Speaker 2

OK, but this is a bit more early in the journey yes. And then let’s say.

Speaker 1

And now if I leap forward from where we are now. It is now at this moment we have a wholesale business. Yeah, a pizza manufacturing business and the delivery business based in the Netherlands, which is the majority. We will open our 300 store. We are now 270 something in the Netherlands and we will go to 300 stores. This year in the Netherlands in Germany we have about 70 stores. We are organizing it. We just started two years ago there and it’s we did some acquisitions there and that’s ahard work. And some 10 stores by the end of the year in Belgium.

Speaker 2
OK, that’s nice, and so we looked at the start of the beginning right to like 50 stores and now. But I’m looking a bit for the middle part. What is the key? Because a lot of chains that I speak with they say like first goal is 50 and then 100.

Speaker 1

Ohh my first goal was 5-5 and then it just happened because I like to grow.

Speaker 2

OK.

Speaker 1

And actually there are a lot of stages in between and you get the most difficult part is at a certain moment you have to let people take responsibility out of your own scope. And leave them and do that on themselves.

Speaker 2

But we dive into how to set up a team in the end. So don’t go into that, maybe just zooming in a bit and like how do you what?

Speaker 1

OK.

Speaker 2

How do you handle the challenges of scaling like quick-service restaurant chains such as managing supply chain and maintaining consistent quality? Like how did you do that because? In the beginning. You could oversee everything yourself.

Speaker 1

All get back you wanna change the the the the topics in the proceedings but it all comes back of having a great team and good people. OK, and every time if you don’t, if something goes wrong you need to organize things. You need to structure things you need to make manuals. You need to. Do a good actually. It’s really simple. You need to do efficient marketing. Yeah growth sales restore.

Speaker 2

And that’s what you need to do.

Speaker 1

Yourself, you need a department or you do it yourself. Depends where your qualities are. You need a good finance administration. Yeah, it’s really stupid and boring, but if you don’t have it, you go bankrupt without even knowing it will happen.

 

 

Speaker 1

But for a lot of entrepreneurs that’s not….  it’s nobody’s passion.

Speaker 1

But if you don’t take care of it, you don’t know where you stand and  especially when you do a franchise business, you need to take care of the finance of your franchisees too, yeah? Because you only can prosper if they can earn money, then you can earn money. Yeah, and and so you should be focused on the success of your business partners and if their successful  you earn money. Franchise support, franchise training, openings training, pre-opening training, setting standards and controlling. If the standards are met by the franchisees. So basically you can do a lot until you have 25 or 50 shops yourselves. But at a certain moment you need a head office. Yeah, but you also need a growth department. Yeah, how to grow, how to spread your geographical footprint? Yeah, you need more locations so so you need to…

Speaker 2

Find franchisees.

Speaker 1

Yeah, that’s the growth department. They need locations and they have to recruit franchisees and basically gradually, you will need  more specialists in your business who do a full-time job. Yeah, or they have two jobs. They divide. They have two activities, but if you want to be scalable you need to organize.

Speaker 2

So let’s say when you were like 50 stores headquarters, what was the headcount then?

Speaker 1

I don’t know. Probably like 18.

Speaker 2

18 and 100th, like double or.

Speaker 1

No, it doesn’t work that way. If you want to make the next step, for example, 2015 we had..

Speaker 2

OK, that’s a question.

Speaker 1

I don’t know…130 shops, yeah? And now this year we have 300 jobs. So if you want to open 30 shops annually, you either need like an Einstein talent to recruit franchisees and to build stores and to to acquire the stores. Or you need a professional team of, let’s say eight people or nine people, or 10 people.

Speaker 2

With clear processes.

Speaker 1

Well with a clear process and responsibilities and so then you don’t need the best people in the whole world if they are responsible for only one topic.

Speaker 2

Yeah, yeah, but that’s what you mean with.

Speaker 1

The specialists yes. Because then they can. They can excel in their job. But they don’t need to be…

Speaker 1

The spider with eight legs.

Speaker 2

Yeah yeah, yeah true.

Speaker 1

True and that’s actually the case, so. If you are young. And with the 50 shops you can do five six different things per person, but if you get to a certain level you need specialists. For example, we never had a quality manager in a dough manufacturing place, so we are really quite big and even now sometimes we need a specialist or we have a human resource manager, people and culture manager we call her.. and we only have her for half a year. And if you get to a considerable size, you need to support all your employees and arrange for communication within. So every moment you get different requirements and if you excel in a certain field, then you need less people to do the job. But basically, to run a really good organization, you need to be really good.

Speaker 2

Awesome, let’s go to the next topic. Like how do you overcome challenges? Right now you’re 30 years in the business yet economical uptime, the low time we had, for example, COVID, right? So could you maybe. Yeah, share like how was COVID for you guys. How did you experience that? And maybe go back to that first week.

Speaker 1

OK, the first week. Actually sometimes if you’re a great organization and you get into a crisis, yeah, lot of crisis and urgent matters will come at the end to the desk of the CEO. Yeah, for example, when the first week of COVID hit.

Speaker 2

With the lockdown yeah.

Speaker 1

Are we entitled or allowed to stay open by government regulation because we are not a restaurant that closed down? We are delivery business. Can we stay open? Second question, how dangerous is covid? Can we afford to bring our people at risk by staying open and in the end franchisees? They got scared they wanted to close down their shops. Some wanted to stay open. Our management team is quite young and very talented. And they got a lot of pressure from the field what to do. And then it came to my desk. What are you? Are we going to close shops? Are we going to stay open for delivery? How dangerous disease and and they look at me? And I learned one thing. Really important decisions, you should not take in a hurry.

Speaker 2

Take your time over think it..

Speaker 1

I sleep over it at night and so I say I don’t make the decision. I sleep over that and at night I started calling. I started calling. What are the government regulations? Are we able to stay open? Are we allowed to close? What should we do so in the end it turned out that the government regulations were quite simple. Delivery business can stay open. It was not clear whether we could stay open for takeout or not. So open is open, no clearity. So I said let’s stay open. What happens if some employees got contaminated? Then that was from that I followed government regulations and I said then you have to take the temperature of all your employees. Yeah, and everybody with a higher temperature you sent home but stay open. Don’t close the shop because the government also said people need to eat and some people don’t dare to go out so delivery needs to stay open. But that was not clear in the first three days, and so we decided to stay open and we followed the government regulations. But other chains closed down for takeout for weeks. They lost a lot of sales. Some other chains closed down completely in some countries, so it was a quite a challenging week.

Speaker 2

And after that week, how, how, how?

Speaker 1

Then we said open. Then it’s really funny, but I heard it from everybody the first days after lockdown, we expected to have a wave of orders. But the volume went down really hard. We didn’t understand it. And then after three, four or five days, the volume started to grow really hard and what turned out later on Dutch people, they tend to not to waste their food and they all run to the supermarkets. When the lockdown was there. They filled the fridges, and when the fridges were getting empty, they started ordering again.

Speaker 2

Funny OK. And then if you look now back over to couple of years, I think two years ago already like did that change the industry?

Speaker 1

Yes, it speeded it up. There’s a huge growth in the delivery business. Yeah, in the pizza business and especially the delivery business, people tend to cook less. Youth, they like to have an easy life. It’s more important. Food is getting more important in lifestyle than ever before, so they like good food. But they also like the good life and they like to cook, but not too often. Yeah, and they used to spend more money on clothing and everybody, every teenager wanted to have a car. That disappeared. Teenager don’t want to have a car anymore. They take a bicycle or electric bicycle or public transport, but that has changed. But they spend more on food and food. Three, but that all speeded up two years. Look down helped and now we are getting back to normal economy. Yeah, so we see some volume decrease but then I think maybe Covid has speeded up…

Speaker 2

The digitalization.

Speaker 1

Also the digitalization but has speeded up the growth of the market, maybe with a couple of years.

Speaker 2

Ah, things like. Also, for example, what would?

Speaker 1

You would have done if it would. Have happened anyway. Yeah, but it accelerated maybe two years, one year, three years I.

Speaker 2

If you look at the current economic times, right? I don’t have the answer but maybe you have your view on it. Like we had COVID, the government supported the businesses and the people. Now I’m not. Sure, maybe are we in recession or not, but do you have a view on that?

Speaker 1

And I’m quite positive if you look at the macroeconomic figures of Germany and the Netherlands, it looks like we are not in recession.

Speaker 2

A recession no, it looks like, but on the. Other hands, sometimes it looks like it, right?

Speaker 1

I think it’s quite simple. When the energy prices continue to drop and they don’t, and winter’s finished and they then they don’t go up again for a while and then people are not afraid of their electricity and gas bill anymore and they start living back to normal. People forget Can you imagine? Can you remember the lockdown? How bad it was really welll. Or is it forgotten?

Speaker 2

I kind of forgot it to be honest.

Speaker 1

So if the electricity and gas bill goes down, they forgot the fear of the high electricity and gas bill immediately. And people start acting their normal life and there will be some changes. Maybe people with some more and green energy. Sources in their house? Yeah, so the electricity use will go down anyway that people will continue to invest in, I think in the green energy, but life is back to normal tomorrow.

Speaker 2

And how do you see the future in the coming 2-3 years, you see? Like stabilization after COVID goes. Up or or? What are some? What do you think is going to change?

Speaker 1

All the research says that the delivery market will continue to grow until 2030. Yeah, and I. I see a lot that that that the geographical spread there’s. A lot of. Places in the world where you have very little competition on the delivery. Market, yeah, so there’s a lot of possibilities. For example, take the Netherlands. If you take Domino’s and us together, it is by the end of the year. It’s probably 650 stores, yeah? Maybe even more. If you multiply that by five. Yeah is a 3250 store. If you look at the total chain concentration in Germany. If you take all chains together, there’s not even 1000 and the country is 5 times more inhabitants. So compare 3250 with 1000 in Germany with five times more people. So there’s a lot of growth.

Speaker 2

In Germany.

Speaker 1

In the Netherlands is still growth. But in Germany. It’s huge growth and  I think if you look at the US UK they are very well-developed countries in the delivery business. The Netherlands is I think in mainland Europe. The most developed but not even close as developed as the UK and the US.

Speaker 2

You see also much more delivery chains active in the UK.

Speaker 1

And yeah, so that will happen in Netherlands too. And the whole mainland of Europe it will happen too. But take some time.

Speaker 2

I think to hear that you think that Holland is 1. Of the forefront.

Speaker 1

It was in my thesis in 1993. That the pizza business was huge in the US. It was. Quite big in the UK and it did not exist in the Netherlands, so in these 30 years if you really go into some figures and some deeper background they said one day. The out-of-home spend of the Americans, yeah, for food will be 50% and at that time it was 30%. And I think two years ago it reached $0.50 for each dollar the American consumers spend out of home, not at home. And in the Netherlands it was when we started out. It was like 14% yeah and now it’s like 30% but it will grow to 50.

Speaker

OK.

Speaker 2

Percent, I must say, growing up. My parents never ordered food. And now you do so easily.

Speaker 1

So if that is happening in Europe too, then there is in the Netherlands still a growth of from 30% for each euro cent to 50%, which is a market growth of 70%.

Speaker 2

That’s crazy, so it’s still a huge opportunity.

Speaker 1

The things happened the same like happened in the US, UK and the Netherlands. Then there’s another 70% of..And then the. I think Germany yeah, it’s half of the Netherlands. It’s $0.15 of the euro on out of growth.

Speaker 1

Interesting, so let’s dive into the.And then the.

Speaker 2

Home so out of. Home do you think in Germany is like huge?

Speaker 1

Half the volume per capita from the Netherlands. But it. Needs it takes time on another.

Speaker 2

Note it’s also like geographically much.

Speaker 1

No, it’s it’s a matter of. Time, maybe it will not grow as big, but it will go to that direction anyway.

Speaker 2

OK, so let’s dive into the next topic like how can you leverage technology and data to drive revenue and growth. And we spoke about it also in the past. The speed of change is a big thing in general. Could you elaborate on that maybe?

Speaker 1

OK, if I go back like seven years ago, yeah we were working. I go a little bit more into S4D now and and and and. And the the. The problems we face in 2000, 2015. Yeah, OK, we had a very good ecom platform. But we had a very poor. POS system and operational system in a computer system. In the shops. And I asked an advisor. I asked an advisor, David Deetist, to what is our biggest threat on the digital route? And then he said the speed of change of your current POS supplier. I had no idea what he meant. But it was. It sounded really intellectual. So I thought about it and it took me quite a while to figure out that if you want to compete with the best, yeah? You need to be able to integrate external software external machines, for example what is happening now with S4D.

Speaker 2

So you looking for partner?

Speaker 1

Finally, after 20 years we have the integration with one of the big platform. So it saves us a lot of mistakes. A lot of work and it makes life a lot easier on our content management department. Yeah, so because there are no mistakes anymore. What we do on content management is automatically in the platform integrated.

Speaker 2

And then the platform in like website app platforms.

Speaker 1

Takeaway.com Yeah, OK, clear. But at that moment we had a lot of simple things like doing a double tasty pizza, doing on the web, implementing a new product, but it took a while to be able to sell that to customers because there was no connection between the POS system and the E Comm which worked affluent.

Speaker 2

One question before we go into into the figure that we’re showing like let me ask. You this question do. You believe that new your pizza is a pizza chain that has a website or do you believe you’re an e-commerce company. That sells pizza.

Speaker 1

I believe we are a company who sells the best possible pizza, but we cannot do that without being data-driven and doing it in a very efficient technology environment.

Speaker 2

OK, OK, so maybe just to

Speaker 1

We are a pizza company, but to be able to compete with the best and to be able to grow your business, you need data you need an ideal customer journey. An ideal franchise customer journey. How to run their business, how to control their food cost? How to control their labor cost? And how to know which couriers are doing a great job and which are not? So review tools, everything integrated cool actually to do it in a professional way. It’s the same story again, like how you organize your head office. Yeah, you should actually have all departments involved also in your technology journey.

Speaker 2

OK.

Speaker 1

Marketing finance Management information Operations you need all departments fully integrated on one system.

Speaker 2

So maybe if we just look at the figure that we’re showing now, so delivery management? How is that? How do you tackle that and how? How do?

Speaker 1

You do. It is one of the most difficult things over delivery chain is to manage your couriers.

Speaker

OK.

Speaker 1

Yes, so you need to know how many drives, what sales, what reviews each individual career has to manage your fleet. Well yeah, so.

Speaker 2

And there’s also some competition, right?

Speaker 1

There’s competition. There’s a lot of you.

Speaker 2

The drivers.

Speaker 1

Give prizes away. Reviews not in speed. But on quality yeah. And the main thing is if you want to run that. In an efficient way, you need to have access to the data of every store. And to centralise it and to be able to advise your franchisees whether they do it well or not. And S4D enables actually to share this data transparently with all franchisees.

Speaker 2

And and how does that? For example, how does that data help your franchise consultant instead of saying like? Yeah, yeah, you’re not performing.

Speaker 1

I I give you a very simple idea, like 8 years ago or 10 years ago, we started to have in a different system than S4D. We had a kind of a little bit old fashioned, but we shared the delivery times with all the franchisees. Actually the out of door times from the moment when it comes in until the pizza goes out of the shop, yeah. And because we shared it with a ranking with all our franchisees and everybody had access to the same data  our out the door time went down 7 minutes per order nationwide. We made the whole competition. That’s huge, that’s unbelievable, and so our delivery times went down because it was his competition and every employee could see the ranking of his shop. Yeah? So then nobody wants to be at the 150th position of the 151 shops.

Speaker 2

No, definitely not.

Speaker 1

So they it it it was through transparency. We decreased delivery times by sharing the data and real time every 3 minutes it was renewed. You create with technology and competition and if we look now. We share sales per worked hour. So you can control your labor cost. Productivity per hour per employee. We share the review tools with the NPS scores.

Speaker 2

Wait one SEC. What is NPS score?

Speaker 1

NPS score is actually to to make it really simple. It’s a rating. The consumer rating and you can only give us the rating if you have ordered and you cannot as nobody is can even touch this data. We share that with our franchisees and share that also with all franchisees on all store. Which, so if you have the NPS data, it’s called the Net Promoter score. It actually gives you a rating and to cut it out if you are negative, you better close your shop if you are positive it might be well, but if you have a Net Promoter score for over 40 it is married with sales growth.

Speaker 2

So you can predict based on the NPS score, how much revenue comes to stores.

Speaker 1

Yes, unless  there’s also some low revenue stores who don’t do marketing, and they do a perfect operation, so it has also to do with volume, but basically if your NPS scores over 40 your business grows. So basically our NPSs score before we shared it with all franchisees transparent it was like 29 average. Yeah it took us some years before they really knew and felt it and now I think 43 so the average is 43. It went down up 50%, so technology helps and transparency helps to run the business and the same happened with product quality. It went up a lot because of a lot of training, a lot of support of the head office, but also transparency.

Speaker 2

True and then of course you also have like your own website, your own consumer app. Yeah, and that’s also to get like more direct customers instead of fewer platforms, right?

Speaker 1

Yes, but also you have the integration with the platform, but if you have a good website and good app. The cost. There’s some cost involved, of course for the franchisees, but are much lower than through an aggregator. Yeah, so it saves if you have a strong position and you do, for example, 30% through an aggregator and 70% on your own platforms. It saves a lot of money for the franchisees and you earn a lot more money for your franchisees.

Speaker 2

And how is that? How that? Yeah, yeah you need to have a conversation with the franchisees about. I think that could maybe be the. Yeah, an interesting one.

Speaker 1

Of what conversation?

Speaker 2

That they need to invest in like new technology.

Speaker 1

Yes, but the franchisees tend to be careful with change. Yeah, so it’s the responsibility of the head office and the chains to help them to make the good decisions. And sometimes it gives some friction. And then you know you do either something stupid or you do something really good. Frictions franchisees are not stupid so if you do something which is it give some friction it can be really bad for you or it can be really good and that’s up to the management to decide whether you do it. If you want to implement a certain product and the franchisees don’t want to do it because it ruinstheir efficiency in the kitchen. Then they have a point, but with technology and in ecom they don’t have a choice. You need to do these steps. Because other changes are making these steps yeah and forward, and if you don’t do it.

Speaker 2

You stay behind and headquarter needs to make the. Strategy, that’s that’s what I’m. Oh, definitely so if if I’m sum up summing up this, uh, the figure that. We’re showing us we I would yeah.

Speaker 1

Well, I’ll give you one. More example if you. Have a standard fee with an aggregate of 14%. And you do that, obviously.

Speaker 2

That’s already a good negotiation, I think, yeah.

Speaker 1

But no, no if you. Deliver yourself OK. Then it’s a standard fee in the Netherlands and Germany. If you do 80% over the platform, then you pay over 80% of your sales 14% and for example if you pay  2% over your own platform and you are able to change the 70% over the platform to like 50 or 40% your franchisees have a saving of 30% times 12 percent, 14 – 2. Yeah, and then it doesn’t matter what you pay for the technology to do it over in annual sales.

Speaker 2

That’s a, that’s a good point, so let me summarize this thing and. Yeah, so with us for the we we have also new your pizza with delivery management with the with the driver App Kitchen display system so everything is paperless POS sometimes also called an order, intake or management reported to get all the data and make the so the decisions and then of course our own consumer app and websites in the own brand and then yeah. So self order kiosk so we can move away the image but self order kiosk. I’m just curious how do you view that to the future?

Speaker 1

I don’t want to make. In Dutch we have a saying. Don’t ask a butcher how good his own meat is, and that is and and and if you look at my LinkedIn account.

Speaker 1

I’m also on the board of S4D. Yeah, and if we get back to try it, it’s it’s not something that I’m preaching from my own. Businesses, but we implemented the cell phone and kiosk in some shops with New York pizza and we see two things. It’s a higher average spend and it’s less labor so we see how it develops, but it looks like a very valuable asset. Yeah, and before S4D was implemented we had some kiosks in some shops as well, and then you pay a percentage over the sales to the delivery guy of the kiosk and you have two times content management and you don’t have a direct integration, so you need to have much better people in the head office who are very punctual to take care of these different systems. And second, you pay a higher price. OK, So what I like a lot about S4D. And that is bringing me back why we have S4D? It took away a lot of knowledge in our head Office of Technology, we didn’t need it anymore, so it saved us on employee cost for people are very difficult to get like technical people. People, so we need a less intelligent head office on technical issues, not on the broad thing, it’s not I I.

Speaker 2

Good one.

Speaker 1

You have more attention to the sales and to the online marketing. But but also. You don’t have 3/4 systems to run. There’s only one point of contact, yeah, and that saves so much time and energy and hassle. And also you don’t need. You can put your whole technical. Problem in one hand and if you trust the hand as we do. Then it’s good.

Speaker 2

OK, that’s good.

Speaker 1

If you pick up the wrong. Partner, it is a nightmare.

Speaker 2

So maybe just looking back at your pizza again, like I think the last couple of years you you grew with 100. Percent yeah yeah. What was key to having that growth of 100%?

Speaker 1

There’s no key. You need a good product. You need good operations. Yes, you need a high-quality of pizza. You need good delivery types. You need a good brand. But also you need to know what’s cooking for example, if you do a product introduction, you don’t have the data available and now we have all data real-time available. We can questions with it, which took us three days to get the answer, takes us now 3 seconds. We implemented with New York Pizza a very powerful power BI tool. Which is connected directly to the database of S4D. So if all the S4D has very organized data structure, so it’s very easy that all data, customer data, product data, sales data marketing data, operational data, they are all open to power ID. So if you implement a BI function. And you do that well, you have all data real time available to everybody who who needs.

Speaker 2

It OK, that’s interesting. So if we just.

Speaker 1

And for example, we also some review data. Yeah is integrated in S4D and and and so you can share.

Speaker 2

Now you can also see that the source.

Speaker 1

To whom you want when you want all. Data that’s cool and analyze it.

Speaker 2

So maybe if we go back to that yeah building and officially managing a strong team. Yeah, yeah, you’re the largest pizza chain in islands. What help you to build such a strong brand but also look better to the team? I passed you. In the beginning about that. But how do you build a good team and also with the franchisees? So if the headquarter.

Speaker 1

You need to be an attractive employer.

Speaker 2

Yeah, how do you do that?

Speaker 1

By it’s not money you have to pay good money, but you have to give them also a very interesting job and a nice and safe environment. And we at we are here at the industrial area. It’s not the the center of Amsterdam with these beautiful houses. Yeah so we. We give them a great lunch. We have a great gym. We try to make a nice environment for everybody, but especially nice colleagues and also a lot of responsibility as low as possible in the business. So it’s a very attractive job.

Speaker 2

OK that, but that’s a bit more from headquarter connected. Also for the stores.

Speaker 1

Actually goes up for everybody if you go to the stores, you need to have good franchisees. If you have a good franchisee he creates a nice atmosphere in the shop and people come there for their colleagues. Some franchisees excel in this. In this creation of Nice culture, safe culture then people then they don’t have employee problems. Today I heard that aggregates how much they pay per hour for couriers. And there’s no franchisee who pays that kind of money to his employees. But because there is a nice group. Of young people. Girls, boys, they go out together, they hang out together and they come back all the time after they drive to their own shop where they know everybody. So it’s a very social and cultural thing.

Speaker 2

Interesting, interesting. OK so when I almost 45 minutes. So if we need to sum up what we discussed now quickly, I think it’s key for scalable business to have good processes in place and also hire the right people for the right moment in the journey. So in the beginning a bit more generalist and later a bit more specialist. When you grow as.

Speaker 1

Yes, and also you sometimes you get into position.

Speaker 2

1/2 order

Speaker 1

You don’t know where. To be at because then you get people who have been with you for so long who can? Who don’t like the technology part or don’t want to learn in or cannot learn it so it it comes with all difficult moments? True, So what?

Speaker 2

Before summing up, I still have one more question. What is the difference between like an HQ and franchisees with short-term long term? I think you have maybe also. A vision of that.

Speaker 1

So yeah, you can give that answer too. The franchisee has got his own shop and worries about today. And tomorrow, yeah, but not that much about next year. And it’s the responsibility for a headquarter to think three years ahead. Sometimes that goes fine together and sometimes you have some short term things which give some friction to keep up the long term goals.

Speaker 2

OK, awesome, so if I’m summing it up, you need to have that delicate. Relationship with franchisees or headquarter?

Speaker 1

They’re independent entrepreneurs, so it’s a balancing act.

Speaker 2

So balancing that, and I think also what you said like have like 1 partner that takes part of the whole digital so you have one place to talk to and grow together. Yeah would you? Am I missing something?

Speaker 1

Yeah, you could say that I can say that we make the right decision with S4D because it really helps us. We went to Germany. We would not have gone to Germany and I don’t say it was a perfect right. It all went smooth immediately. No, that’s not true, but we are there now and we have a very good system in place which helps us to gtow.

Speaker 2

So before going into the Q&A questions some some visitors ask some questions. I want to tell you about the next webinar we’re doing on May 10th. I’m dropping a link in the chat where you can already. Sign up to it so we will do a webinar with the CTO of  Apache Pizza Jordan Pendleton and he will share. How how about the journey for bunch of pizza and also share with you? Yeah the secret to the success. So just drop the link so feel. Free to sign up. And then I want to go into the Q&A. I don’t have the names of the people where they now ask the questions, but anyway, we gather them and we’ve got a lot of questions, but we we’re picking out a couple so. How are you attempting to increase direct users to your own consumer App rather than going through those Thuisbezorgd and Uber eats?

Speaker 1

At this moment we have. I have only campaign running which says second pizza for free. App only and it had only app only app.

Speaker 2

Only app, not that person.

Speaker 1

You have to download the app and it’s a big success now.

Speaker 2

And what I can have from my perspective, having worked for a lot of consumer apps like when. When the consumer has your app, it’s your consumer and order via those absorbed take away or Uber eats. It’s just an order, right? Because you don’t have the.

Speaker 1

Data from them and we have all the delivery addresses we have. We, uh, we we’ve new feature. We use aggregated but we only use with. Them with our own careers.

Speaker 2

So you do always deliver yourself, we’ve never.

Speaker 1

Done one delivery with an aggregated Courier.

Speaker 2

So that’s also maybe key, and So what I’m hearing is do your own delivery right?

Speaker 1

Yeah, so we have all data apart from the the apart from the telephone number and the e-mail address.

Speaker 2

OK, and so you have the do you own delivery but you also need to make sure that your platform. Is as good as Uber eats?

Speaker 1

Right, yes, if it’s really bad and not converting. Well you you better stay home cool.

Speaker

OK.

Speaker 2

I have a question here. From I go a guy I know pretty. Well, Brandon Alexander. What’s the basis? Used to enter new international market choice of country and on the ground. Of partners like.

Speaker 1

And we started working on our international expansion in 2018. We hired the management consultancy firm to research the whole web. European market blah blah blah blah. In the end. The outcome was really simple and where the connected the the countries next to us. But we looked very broad to come to a very logical thing, but we also see a lot of challenges in these other markets. So take your time and do nothing.

Speaker 2

But is that? I think 1 of what what? I’m also hearing a bit in this question is. Like is it that you’re in the lead or you’re finding like a partner or a master franchisee?

Speaker 1

We’ve always been contacted to go to this exotic countries. Yeah, and start a business there and I’ve never done that because. It doesn’t appeal to me.

Speaker 2

And why not?

Speaker 1

Because there there are so many cultural differences between the African continent, Eastern Europe, continent, even the Nordics. It’s also cultural fit and I think we fit very well with the Anglo section countries. But there these markets are greatly developed, so why start? Working in better developed markets with very well professional. Competition here we compete for 30 years with Domino’s, which is the number one in the world. And we are really able to compete. But if we bring it to a success in Belgium and Germany. Then I think we we have the system also to bring it to other markets, but it’s also you cannot do focus in your strategy support. If you want to do it proper, we have 40 people in the head office. In Germany now. OK, that’s quite a lot to support it professionally.

Speaker 2

Definitely so. And how many stores.

Speaker 1

Is that in Germany now?

Speaker 2

72 So it’s a big handle for us compared to. The amount of. Another question which tech developments are you foreseeing that will play an important role in the food delivery domain in the upcoming years?

Speaker 1

Is are you a are you? Is your infrastructure able to withstand the pressure of the aggregators? And if you look at the brand awareness with the aggregators, the big ones who dominate the market it’s so strong then then. That to with withstand that you need to go technology and the good marketing department so it it it it it it? What do I see on technology? I’m not a tech. Nation so I so I I don’t know about that, but I think.

Speaker 2

I know.

Speaker 1

If you look. Really long ahead, then there’s one technology which will change the shake up. The whole market is with robot delivery, but it’s really far away and there’s no legislation and there is no product yet in the market which can do. It there’s a lot of testing. But, and there’s a lot of. VR value around it. But we are absolutely not there, but that will be the big game changer. I think when you have your self driving cars and coats on the cars and you can just deliver 80% of consumer automatically.

Speaker 2

We’re not there yet. Sure, sure sure. OK, interesting, so do you think it will? Come before you retire or not.

Speaker 1

The robots don’t think that will be even with EU regulation. Will like decade. I hope. I hope it will come after my visit.

Speaker 2

Funny OK. How did New York pizza grow so fast compared to other chains?

Speaker 1

We invested heavily in growth, big growth team. We a lot of financial support, very attractive offers to the growth for franchisees. We we really put. A lot of energy, money and support in it.

Speaker

OK.

Speaker 2

Data that it also. Play a big role.

Speaker 1

No, not in the growth. Maybe where to grow, but that’s a different technology. We have that in place, but that’s a different technology that’s really not helping us in that field. That is more geographic development and and location technology, but but basically.

Speaker 2

I I know that also like.

Speaker 1

And then your and that and no no.

Speaker 2

On website when people search.

Speaker 1

And that will not be possible without the date of SVD. But the different technology we use for that and that is only possible with the data from. As for the true.

Speaker 2

OK, what advice do you have? Or other quick service restaurant owners looking to grow their business. Ohh think about your early journey. Maybe if someone has now 12345 location.

Speaker 1

Good location, good franchisees no. Acceptance of people you. You doubt if they will be real entrepreneurs.

Speaker 2

Umm, so you need to find.

Speaker 1

The day it’s a balance act part. It all comes back again to good people. OK, if you hire good people or work with good people, good people will bring you success.

Speaker 2

So if I ask another question and. Which actions would you recommend for smaller cues are changed? You go then again back to. The people.

Speaker 1

Yeah, if you can rely and and lean on good people you’re working with, you have time to grow your business.

Speaker 2

And and then I got here another question. What’s the main challenge to take in the near future, one to three years from now and how will it change the way you are working on the customer journey and with the customers?

Speaker 1

There are some like the self ordering kiosk might work. Maybe make it more, maybe voice driven data. People can just shout in their in their phone and and get the order what they want. There’s a lot of recognition, but I don’t see that coming really fast. It was a big promise. Like 2-3 years ago, but it did. It did not. It did not materialize yet yeah, but you see some people start using it it that will be slow.

Speaker 2

Already five years ago I thought that some.

Speaker 1

I think my main challenge is to get Germany up and running and open 50 stores annually. There are 25 stores that that is my personal big challenge, but from technology point of view I think it the big steps are taken it it’s. Hundreds of small steps and and maybe the lock in with loyalty programs. That is something to work on really well in in the in the next coming years. There’s a big. Big big big white spot to fill.

Speaker 2

But something actually we didn’t address there. So what is your view on loyalty and how do you do it now?

Speaker 1

We do it. We have a loyalty saving program with ESRD. Again, we have a lock in. We have a lot of data. We play a little bit with it, but I think if you excel in that field. Marketing wise and technology wise you can make the difference. I think there’s a lot. There’s a a nice road map for us to to fill. There’s some, but we can develop that to the highest level in the next coming years.

Speaker 2

OK, I think we answered some questions. We’re now up to the hour some final words. You want to say.

Speaker 1

No, I’m I’m. You asked a lot of questions and I think I I I hope I informed the people on the webinar in a way that I did, that they had a useful hour.

Speaker 2

Cool and maybe we could show the slide for the next webinar. And yeah, feel free to sign up. And hopefully see you next time and we get a story from another uh chain in their journey.

Speaker 1

And then I will listen.

Speaker 2

Listen, then you will listen. I keep you up to that, thank you for watching and yeah check out.