Our American launch was a matter of survival. When you don’t have any resources, you’ve got but one choice-work hard, be original, and be flexible. Nowadays, there are more Dodo Pizzas in Russia than Papa John’s and Domino’s pizzerias combined. In just eight years, in an old and crowded market, without resources, based in a small town in northern Russia, we’ve built a large pizza chain, leaving behind all our international competitors who had been working for 20 years already in this market. Learning our story, business school graduates asked me, “Wait, you could do that?” Our unconventional business attitude is the very thing that allowed our company to achieve everything we have done. You might say, perhaps, that this is not a serious attitude, but then, Dodo Pizza is kind of a not-so-serious company. You might be surprised, perhaps, that a big pizza chain doesn’t have an exact business strategy, and in fact makes use of chance opportunities trying to crack the most complex pizza market. We will certainly return there in the future. But undoubtedly, that was only the first chapter. So that seems to be the end of our California story. But whatever happens, we are going to continue trusting people, because only through trust can we achieve outstanding results. However, every mistake is a step forward. John and Alena shook hands and parted on good terms.īusiness is not only about triumphs, it is also about mistakes and defeats. We had discussed all possible solutions, and Alena made a decision to close the pizzeria. I was coming to California to meet John, but when we did meet, he suggested I buy the pizzeria out or find investors who could do that in my stead. Their attitudes towards marketing were different. It turned out, John was having trouble trusting Alena and giving up everyday operational control. Unfortunately, Alena’s partnership with John was not going so well. Promptly, Alena moved to California, organized ingredient delivery, put together a team, and the pizzeria made a good start. In accordance to their agreement, John’s pizzeria took the Dodo Pizza brand name, Alena became its manager, and John remained the business owner. Alena came to California, and they agreed on a partnership. Currently, our company doesn’t focus on expansion in America, so I declined but recommended him to contact Alena Tikhova, our franchisee and the owner of two Dodo Pizzas in Mississippi and Tennessee. When yet another employee hadn’t come to work, John wrote to me and suggested we buy or manage his pizzeria. By the second month, it occurred to John that pizza delivery was a complicated business, and he didn’t want it after all. He even began to design his own Dodo IS counterpart because he planned to build his own pizza chain in the future. Preparing for the opening, John had found out about our company and got interested. He designed a concept, created a trademark, and invented recipes. He had some spare capital, and a pizzeria was kind of a venture project for him. One day, an American entrepreneur named John decided to open a pizzeria in Torrance, Los Angeles County. The Los Angeles pizzeria was there, and then, in a blink of an eye, it was not. It was the result of our current guerilla tactics in the vast and complex US market. On our map, the Los Angeles pizzeria appeared as a surprise. Our company has been working for eight years now, and in all this time we’ve closed only three pizzerias. Overall, we’ve got more than 450 pizzerias in our chain already. In Los Angeles, Dodo Pizza worked for just three weeks. We have closed our pizzeria in California.
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