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Your growth equation will never be complete if you simply rely on acquiring new geographical areas. You also need to take a look at what you’re offering and if there are better ways to offer more value to your customers.
Though you might strive to stay devoted to your core product or service offering, a new opportunity can get your company’s foot through some very important doors. It’s something DiZio learned firsthand when some of his franchisees began pressuring him to broaden the menu at Philly Pretzel Factory.
“A few years ago, our product mix was pretzels and soda,” DiZio says. “That was the entire menu. There was no other version, just pretzels out of the oven. But as we moved along, I started to get feedback from franchisees who wanted to bring new ideas to the table, like sandwich pretzels. I shot them down for a long time, because I didn’t like the idea of sandwich pretzels, and I couldn’t envision each store making these sandwich pretzels and keeping them consistent.”
Some dialogue between DiZio and the franchisees resulted in a middle ground that took the sandwich pretzel concept and simplified it, making it a better fit for DiZio’s business model. The sandwich idea paved the way for party trays, opening up a new and highly successful element of DiZio’s business.
“That whole idea is what created a lunch business for us, and it has been a key to success for us,” he says. “That’s why, as a leader, you have to be able to make decisions quickly, but you also have to be flexible enough to make a decision to try something new. You can’t be so rigid that you can’t try something.”
By DiZio’s own admission, he sometimes misses on an idea from down the ladder that turns out to be a hit in the end. It has taught him to listen to the employees and franchisees under the Philly Pretzel Factory umbrella and give them latitude to try new things when appropriate.
Some ideas, like menu choices, can’t be planned and executed on a store level. Any business needs to have consistent standards and product offerings to customers. But DiZio puts a great deal of marketing in the hands of his franchisees and store operators.
Marketing is one area where he wants to see his store-level people try new things and report back on the success or failure of the idea.
“We want them to run with their ideas, because we learn from those and share those ideas with other franchisees,” he says. “We have round-table discussions where we talk about what has worked for various franchisees. Obviously, every idea won’t work for every franchisee due to differences in the markets. But if it does, we’ll take it and run with it.”
DiZio focuses on the importance of intimacy with a narrowly focused group of customers. Though a given location might attract youth soccer parents buying pretzels for a tournament that is miles away, each store is really focused on building a customer base within a five-mile radius.
“You want to build a presence in a given market if you’re going to enter it,” DiZio says. “It doesn’t really do any good to only have one store in a market. You’d think if you put more locations in a market, they’d take away from each other. But then you realize that the more locations you have in a market, the more business they all do. It’s the effect of brand recognition.”
