How one pizzeria operator increased sales on slow days at his restaurant

Uncle G’s Pizza crushes sales on Fridays and Saturdays in Birmingham, Alabama. What about the rest of the week? Owner George Gilliam faced a common pizza restaurant issue, the slow days.

Slow days create domino effects for pizzerias. They still require a significant staff. If you go too lean on staffing, customer service is impacted. Waste can increase when product must be prepped and not sold. Potential revenue is not being captured as consumers decide on dining options every day of the week.

Birmingham, Alabama-based Uncle G’s Pizza creates aggressive daily specials strategy to rebound slow sales days

Instead of chalking it up as a loss and focusing on weekends, Gilliam set a strategy into motion to turn his slowest days into high-volume sales days. He focused on increasing sales with daily specials one slow day at a time until he covered the entire week. “This kind of aggressive weekday programming has brought in the traffic and revenue we needed on nights that used to be dead,” he says. “I’ve built out a weekly schedule that gives people a clear reason to visit every single day.”

Let’s examine how Gilliam approached each day and the order he tackled them.

Wednesdays

“I first wanted to crack Wednesdays, and I just came out of the gate with a buy one, get one half off deal,” he says. “It just wasn’t quite enough to get people to really care.” So he went BOGO on whole pan pies. The deal focused on Detroit-style pies only, though the pizzeria is also known for its New York-style pizza. The BOGO deal worked. “What used to be sub-$1,000 sales days are now consistently hitting $2,500 to $3,000.”

Gilliam moved onto another day that he wanted to boost sales.

Tuesdays

Gilliam rolled out a 90-percent off an appetizer with the purchase of a whole pie. With Uncle G’s limited appetizer menu, attaching an app promo was feasible for a Tuesday.

Recently, Gilliam added a Singo musical trivia event to Tuesday evening, which also increased beer sales.

Thursdays

Courtesy of George Gilliam.

Uncle G’s Pizza launched a Thursdays-only all-you-can-eat buffet for $14.99 and 11.99 for children 12 and under. He says, it’s aggressive pricing but being priced in the sub $15 range tipped the scales for customers. “We’ve seen those slow Thursdays double or even triple in sales.” Uncle G. resides in a former CiCi’s Pizza so retrofitting the restaurant to operate lunch and dinner buffets with a midday shutdown worked in the space and for the team.

Sundays

Sundays promotion became a Build Your Own New York-style pizza starting at $9.99 for a small and $16.99 for a large. “Sundays before that deal, we were doing like maybe averaging $1,200 in sales in the restaurant, and I think now we’re averaging around $1,800 to $2,000 with that deal,” he says.

Mondays  

Then Monday was added to the schedule with a 20 percent off Detroit-style pizzas. Gilliam says Mondays are still challenging so he added Trivia to mix.

Gilliam reiterates that these aren’t new ideas. But he took a step back and evaluated strategies that will work for his restaurant, not overwhelm his kitchen and will drive Uncle G’s bottom line up.

The key to launching promotional strategies, Gilliam says, is having a limited and focused menu and pricing it so the promotional days can be absorbed.

Going with grassroots marketing has been essential to strategies success. Uncle G’s promotes the days through its social accounts, e-mail and in store. It’s designed as weekly programming that Gilliam says people can build into their routines. “It takes time, and it takes really consistent messaging to get a new thing out to people and to make people understand it and have it be part of their routine.” Gilliam is playing the long game with the strategy.

Dive deeper into Gilliam’s Slow Days conversation on The Hot Slice Podcast. Thursday, July 31, Gilliam goes one-on-one with Executive Editor Denise Greer about his slow days strategies and his thoughts and approach to AI in the pizza business. Go to podcasts.