Pizza Today - December 2021 - 29

Busting the Myths in Your Pizzeria
Starting
with the two most important
systems every pizzeria business
should be using, you can bust these
myths in your pizzeria. You need a budget
and recipe costing cards. Both systems
require a lot of hours to create and
it's ongoing meaning it's work that's
never done. Most independent pizzeria
owners just fly by the seat of their pants
and guess what their numbers should
be instead of basing their operations off
the real numbers. This is why it's so easy
to blame the distributor.
The first step is to create a budget.
Then, using the numbers in your
budget, determine what solutions/procedures/systems
you are going to put
in place, how quickly you will put them
in place and how quickly you will see
the results. A great place to start is with
checklists, portion controls, Key Item
Tracker, Waste Tracker and the Restaurant
Checkbook Guardian, a purchase
allotment system (I offer a complete
breakdown of these systems on my
YouTube channel or on my blog).
After a month or two of training and
implementing your chosen systems,
then you get to measure the plan.
Every time you get that profit and loss
statement, you get your budget and put
them side by side. Look where you hit
and where you missed. If you missed
your number, the next step is to inspect
the systems you have in place and see
if your managers are using them or
not. Hold them accountable if they're
not using them or put more systems in
place if the systems you're using aren't
doing enough.
Remember I told you the two most
important systems are budgets and
recipe costing cards? That's the next
step. Start working on recipe costing
cards in month one of your new budget.
But because you're busy, and we know
it takes 40, 60, 100-man hours to get
done, you're going to say it's going to
take you three months. In month one
you start the process. Months two and
three you're working on them, and you
finish in month four. Then you can do
something called the Menu Profitability
Monitor where you find out where
your ideal food cost is. And then you're
going to menu engineer for profit and
bring your food costs down.
You go through all this rigamarole
such as raising prices on certain items,
changing products, etc. until you can
create a menu through menu engineering
that produces your targeted food
cost numbers. This means you have line
checklists and portion controls, and
you're using the Key Item Tracker to
reduce theft, the Waste Tracker to stop
mistakes and the Restaurant Checkbook
Guardian to order on budget.
You're doing lots and lots of things to
make sure you can bring that gap from
seven to nine points down to about two.
Then in month five, you put the new
menu on the table and bring that food
cost down closer to your target food
cost. You can't just snap your fingers
and say, " We've got to lower our food
costs, " and then it happens. You have to
create a plan for success.
Your budget is your proactive plan for
success. You decide what systems you're
DECEMBER 2021 / PIZZATODAY.COM / 29
going to put in place, how quickly you
can put them in place and what your
expected results are. And ultimately, you
create your plan so that at the end of
12 months, you know how much money
you're going to make or lose. Stop
believing the myths that are hamstringing
your success and recovery. Your
pizzeria is not average, and you should
not be using averages to determine your
pizzeria's success. You are in control of
your pizzeria's present and future. n
DAVID SCOTT PETERS is an author,
restaurant coach and speaker who teaches
restaurant operators how to take control of their
businesses and finally realize their full potential.
His first book, Restaurant Prosperity Formula:
What Successful Restaurateurs Do, teaches the
systems and traits to develop to run a profitable
restaurant. Thousands of restaurants have worked
with Peters to transform their businesses. Get his
three principles to restaurant success at https://
dsp.coach/three-key-principles.
http://https:// http://www.PIZZATODAY.COM
Pizza Today - December 2021

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