Pizza Today - March 2020 - 122

Mike's Monthly Tip
MIKE BAUSCH

was getting annihilated on social media
from people who had long wait times.
One person called it a scam and that we
were ill-prepared. Well, we were. But at
five times preparation I thought we were
set. People who called in to order mostly
got a busy signal because our lines were
jammed, so they thought we stopped
answering the phone.

The Glorious Mea Culpa
How I righted a wrong

I

messed up huge. I over-promoted an
event. I didn't even know that was
possible. Our 15th anniversary for
Andolini's Pizzeria was on January 8th of
this year. Typically, our anniversary goes off
with little to no fanfare. As a fun one-day
promo, I decided to have a 20-inch pizza
(San Marzano and fresh mozzarella with
basil) and an order of garlic knots, typically
over $30 value, for $15. One day only, pick
up and dine-in. That's the promotion.
I do promotions like this pretty regularly.
Not that deeply discounted or with that
small of a timeframe - but nothing that's
too dissimilar - for the Super Bowl or
Halloween. I sent out an e-mail one week
ahead of time and followed it up with
another e-mail the day before to my
35,000 followers for my five main brickand-mortar Andolini's locations in the
Tulsa metro area. Along with that, we ran it
on Facebook as a promoted post a few days
ahead of time.
The day was going pretty standard until
people started to call in to reserve their

1 2 2 / P I Z Z AT O D AY. C O M / M A R C H 2 0 2 0

$15 pizza. I didn't think much of this at
the time, but that's never happened before.
In my experience, people don't typically
reserve a discount in advance. Come 4:45,
every Andolini's location started to get
annihilated. By 6:00 pm, it was on, and we
were in full nonstop pizza mode at every
location with a crowd that looked like a
grunge-era mosh pit.
Now to put this in perspective, I
expected three to four times the regular sale
of that one particular pizza that was only
available for this promotion. What
occurred is we sold 25 times what's typical
for that pizza. I'm not saying that to be
braggy. I'm saying that because we pissed a
lot of people off.
At the location where I was making
pizzas, I paused to communicate with my
other managers via text streams and coordinated re-supplies to each site. That meant
San Marzano tomatoes, more basil, more
fresh mozzarella ... every item beyond
dough had to be restocked.
Once it started to settle, I could see I

What seems like a catastrophe
was the birthday gift I didn't expect
and absolutely loved. All of my staff
came together on a sleepy Wednesday in
our slowest month of the year. Everyone
was running on adrenaline, stoked about
where they worked, and the customers
were a part of a scene. A scene that was
super annoying, but a scene nonetheless.
The second I could pull away, I went
and wrote this response to my customer base and sent it out via Facebook.
I explained the situation clearly and
rationally and told people to e-mail me if
they ran into problems. The ones that did
e-mail me, I sent them a certificate in the
mail for a completely free pizza on me for
any style to use whenever they wanted. I
wrote over 150 direct e-mails to customers. That's not counting all the social
media exchanges or review responses.
What we do in this business is capitalize on opportunities. This crap scenario
gave me my largest opportunity ever to
go wow factor on hundreds of people and
build brand awareness and tap emotional
heartstrings. I did my mea culpa, but the
extra thing that people want and love is
the comeback. That's where the win is.
I dealt with the situation head-on,
took my punches and turned a bunch of
angry customers into ecstatic customers.
Andolini's had enough press off the event
that the news wanted to run a story on it
because it dominated social media that
day. Fifteen years down, however many
more to go, and I love this industry for
moments like these. Q
MIKE BAUSCH is the owner of Andolini's
Pizzeria in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
http://www.PIZZATODAY.COM
Pizza Today - March 2020

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