A growing number of my customers use credit cards, but the fees are killing me. Anything I can do? A: I feel your pain! If the fees are killing you, then the sales are saving you! We can no longer live without accepting credit cards, because almost e...

I’m sure you’re familiar with the phrase, “Luck favors the well prepared.” I believe pretty strongly in that. Sure, there is such a thing as dumb luck. But, for the most part, you can make your own luck — i.e. success &m...

Three big pizza-consuming days are about to roll around. New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day and Super Bowl Sunday each present opportunities for pizzeria operators across the country. Don’t let them go unnoticed in your community. And d...

One of my first assignments as a consultant was to implement a turnaround for a group of pizzerias. They were hanging on by a thread. They had cashed in all of their CDs, 401ks and charged their credit cards to the max. I had made seve...

Right behind food cost is your second most expensive controllable expense: labor. Labor cost, or L/C, is usually referred to as a percentage of gross sales. I stayed on top of hourly labor like a hawk. My point of sale system served as my time clock ...

Did you ever get the feeling you were being overcharged for cheese? How does your supplier set the weekly price of cheese? How do the big chains buy their cheese? What does Block Plus stand for? Why does my cheese seem to be soft and wet sometimes an...

Independent operators get a failing grade on a huge issue: they do not have readable financial statements. For the moment, I won’t even consider the problem of getting information too late to be of any real help. Some operators just rely on the...

History tends to repeat itself. Ten years ago, I wrote an article regarding my personal experiences dealing with soaring delivery costs and associated expenses. Big Dave’s Pizza had a sales mix that approximately half dine-in and half delivery....

Big Dave’s delivered a lot of orders. I’m convinced that one of the biggest reasons we dominated the delivery market in my area was that we measured the amount of time that elapsed from the phone call, in the oven, time out the door and time to t...

Big Dave Ostrander Crunch Time Remedy Cross training covers all your bases By Big Dave Ostrander Its late afternoon Friday. Within an hour, the phones will be ringing off the wall. Your best crew is checking and double checking stock levels and ...

The more your crew can do, the better your operation will run. In baseball, triple threats — players who can hit, field and run brilliantly — are rare gems. Entertainers who can sing, dance and act are called triple threats. In our world,...

It was a hot summer night. I was cruising with my friends. We were a carload of young guys, fresh out of high school, approaching a college campus, looking for a good time. The driver pulled into a drive thru burger place. He said “these burger...