How to Open a Financially Successful Pizza & Sub Restaurant

by Douglas R. Brown, Shri L. Henkel

The explosive growth of the pizza and sub shops across the country has been phenomenal. Take a look at these Americans eat approximately 100 acres of pizza each day, or about 350 slices per second. Pizza is a $32+ billion per year industry. Pizza restaurant growth continues to outpace overall restaurant growth. Pizzerias represent 17 percent of all restaurants. Pizza accounts for more that 10 percent of all food service sales. Here is the manual you need to cash in on this highly profitable segment of the food service industry. This new book is a comprehensive and detailed study of the business side of the restaurant. This superb manual should be studied by anyone investigating the opportunities of opening a pizza or sub restaurant. It will arm you with everything you need including sample business forms, leases, and contracts; worksheets and checklists for planning, opening, and running day-to-day operations; sample menus; inventory lists; plans and layouts; and dozens of other valuable, time-saving tools of the trade that no restaurant entrepreneur should be without. While providing detailed instruction and examples, the author leads you through finding a location that will bring success, learn how to draw up a winning business plan (The companion CD-ROM has the actual pizza restaurant business plan that you can use in MS Word), basic cost-control systems, profitable menu planning, successful kitchen management, equipment layout and planning, food safety and HACCP, successful beverage management, legal concerns, sales and marketing techniques, pricing formulas, learn how to set up computer systems to save time and money, learn how to hire and keep a qualified professional staff, new IRS tip-reporting requirements, managing and training employees, generate high-profile public relations and publicity, learn low-cost internal marketing ideas, low and no-cost ways to satisfy customers and build sales, and learn how to keep bringing customers back.

496 pages, Paperback

First published August 10, 2006

Reviews

[Wolfgang Sulk · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are looking to open a pizza shop at the turn of the century this is the book for you kind of

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shri Henkel and Douglas R. Brown, How to Open a Financially Successful Pizza and Sub Restaurant (Atlantic Publishing, 2007)

I find myself torn about this book. First off, it took me three years to finish it (when I first had it out in 2007, I ran out of renews and had to send it back to the library; every time I went to take stuff out for the next two and a half years, something was atop it on the priority list), and that tells me something in itself. Second, a number of the criticisms of the book already registered by other reviewers are spot-on; the information to be found here is basic in the extreme, there's way, way too much brand-consciousness going on (to the point where I wondered a time or two if some companies hadn't paid for product placement), the recipe section seems entirely out of place in a book like this. And yeah, Henkel and Brown spend more time talking about taking over an existing joint than setting one up from scratch, though I don't necessarily see that as a drawback (lord knows it's going to be a lot cheaper to walk into a place that's already set up). But that doesn't mean there's nothing in here of worth, or that it's not of worth for the rank amateur in the entrepreneurial game. In fact, it's best for the rank amateur, though I'm sure those who have been around a while will find at least a nugget or two in these five hundred pages that they could use as a refresher course. The only problem is, you have to wade through five hundred pages to find them.

Get it from the library first to make sure you want a copy permanently. ***