Pizza Chef Gourmet Pizza provides food for
the Doc and Eddy's Plaza, a 30,000 sq. ft.
entertainment venue.
It takes a lot of guts to invest your life savings in an ailing business: But that’s exactly what 22-year-old Kevin Gordon did in July 2005 when he purchased Pizza Chef Gourmet Pizza.
Two years earlier, Kevin had worked at the local pizza shop for a six-month stint. But over time, mismanagement and inconsistencies had weakened sales. “I knew it was a proven business with an established customer base,” Kevin says. “Since the numbers were so low, I was able to purchase the business pretty much for the price of the equipment.”
“When I bought the place,” Kevin recalls, “sales were erratic. We were located downtown near the hospital. The restaurant was too small for dine-in, and I didn’t have the resources to push delivery. So we focused on serving the hospital crowd and things just started going from there.”
Even though he had seven years of food service experience under his belt, the going was tough for the rookie owner. “The first 6 months, there was a huge learning curve,” Kevin says. “I made mistakes, buying things I shouldn’t and putting money where I shouldn’t. But I also did a lot of self-education, reading books, reading articles online, using all the resources that are out there.”
Sales Tracking Key to Growth
Right from the beginning, I knew that having a POS system would help me manage more efficiently,” Kevin notes. “We were doing everything by hand: all the tickets were hung by hand, and all the bookkeeping. The amount of work it took was ridiculous.”
A year into the venture, the business stabilized and sales were up. Kevin took a second plunge, negotiating a lease to install a SpeedLine POS in his restaurant. He chose the system for its ability to track sales and give him more control.
“I had gone from managing and supervising other people to being the one watching the numbers and signing the checks,” Kevin says. “As an owner, I needed to track the forecasts and see what was going on with sales and use the information I got from the reports. You can get any POS system to send an order to the kitchen, but the tracking is what is valuable.”
“With SpeedLine, I don’t need to load any back-up disks,” he explains. “I can go in and just look to see what I need to find. I’m able to pull up a specific day or a snapshot of this week last year and see exactly what my sales were. It makes it really easy for me to see what needs to be changed or adjusted.”
"There was a time when we were running 35 to 40% labor on average. I was able to find out exactly when labor was out of hand and cut back in the right places."
"Using a sales forecast to manage his business improved Kevin’s bottom line right away. Sales increased by 20%. He was also able to cut his labor costs. “There was a time when we were running 35 to 40% labor on average,” Kevin says. “With SpeedLine, I was able to find out exactly when labor was out of hand and cut back in the right places.”
All in all, the system paid for itself within a year.
“I can’t imagine ever going back,” Kevin says. “I used to take my daily receipts and punch them into my computer. Then I would go through and crunch the numbers with my calculator. Trying to track my sales that way was not only time consuming, but it was not very accurate either. I would make a lot of mistakes. One simple mistake could cost me five hours trying to figure it out.”
“It would take forever to go through and check the accuracy of the tills every day,” Kevin says. “It would take at least half an hour to close a till. If there were mistakes, it was nearly impossible to track with handwritten tickets. Now with SpeedLine, if there is a mistake, I can go through and find what time it happened, who did it, and what exactly was done.”
"I went from 25-30 hours of paperwork a week to less than five. This is invaluable as far as my time is concerned. Now I can concentrate on being successful and making sales go higher. "
“I went from 25 to 30 hours of paperwork a week to less than 5,” Kevin comments. “This is invaluable as far as my time is concerned. Now I can concentrate on being successful and making sales go higher.”
New Digs
Always on the lookout for growth opportunities, Kevin moved his restaurant to a bigger location at Doc and Eddy’s Plaza in March 2007. The 30,000 sq. ft. remodeled plaza positions itself as the largest entertainment complex in the State. In addition to Pizza Chef Gourmet, it features a sports bar, casino rooms, a Vegas-style lounge, a dance floor, a liquor store, and a micro brewery.
“Our kitchen is 1700 sq. ft.,” Kevin enthuses. “I lease the space from the plaza owners, and I provide food for the entire building. There’s live music every Friday and Saturday night. We work in partnership with the brewery to service the dine-in area. It’s all non-smoking, so we can have families in there during the day. At night, it turns into a pub atmosphere. Our menu is set up like a pub-style menu with pizza added.”
Live entertainment at the plaza increases traffic in the restaurant. “Once a month, they bring in a comedy group that stages a big show,” Kevin says. “Recently, 500 people attended the event. With appetizers and pizza alone, we did almost a thousand in a few hours. And that was a small group for this kind of event.”
In three short years, the young entrepreneur has transformed an under-performing pizzeria into a thriving business. “I never set out to be a restaurant owner,” Kevin says. “I will turn 26 in August, but a shock wave still goes over people when I go to the bank to set corporate accounts. I have to show them the numbers on paper so they’ll believe what I’ve done!”