Rascal House

Cleveland, Ohio

Concept:

Rascal House is an elevated quick service restaurant featuring all of America’s favorite foods. At Rascal House you can get pizzas featuring pizza by the slice, a burger, chicken sandwich, wings, fries and milkshakes.

Pizza Style:

Our pizza is a traditional pan pizza. Not thin and not deep with a soft body and crisp crust. Dough is made fresh daily with our own recipes of dough and pizza sauce. We use 100 percent provolone cheese instead of the more commonly used mozzarella, which is cheaper and not as rich tasting.

With six locations, how have you been able to keep staff?

Short answer is engaged leadership and vision for the future. It’s important for us to share where the brand is going and how each of our team members can be a part of an exciting future with Rascal House. We’ve had our challenges with identifying the right hires but we’re fortunate to also have very committed and tenured team members.

Your growth plan includes franchising. Why franchise?

Franchising done right allows new owners and entrepreneurs to individually grow an exciting business of their own while also benefiting when the overall brand expands and is successful. There are economies of scale which make franchising very powerful as a model. Also, the opportunity to bring other owners into the brand who share their passion, expertise and a common vision to see their brand grow is a very powerful part of franchising.

What was the process like to prepare the pizza company to be available as a franchise?

It does require a lot of work — mostly in planning, support infrastructure and learning about how successful franchising works. Partnering with subject matter experts and good franchise consultants who’ve helped build other successful brands is very important. There are a lot of moving parts that if done well, require deliberate planning and decision making around what type of franchise company model you want to follow. There are many great ones and many not so good ones. We are striving to be a world class brand with a world class system.

With a full menu, how have your offerings shifted in the wake of supply price increases? How have you approached current operational increases?

While we do have a diverse menu, it is also a simple menu. For example, we have pizza but we don’t have multiple crusts. We offer a burger. It’s oversized, but we don’t have mushroom burgers, lots of cheese options, etc. Our simplicity has helped us with supply chain issues. However, we’ve not been immune to supply shortages and having to pivot to find similar products which are acceptable to our standards. With regards to price increases, we’ve had to increase price in the product categories that have seen the most inflation. Wings have been an example where the costs were so high that we had to decide to either raise prices high enough to cover costs or remove them from the menu. We opted to raise prices knowing that some customers would not buy and some who truly wanted the product would buy. We also closely monitored what others in the industry were doing with pricing, which informed us as to what customers were experiencing with other brands.