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Arriving at work by 8 a.m. every morning, Scott would fire up the ovens, rotate and inventory his freezer for the day’s incoming deliveries, and spend the rest of the morning reading the newspaper and developing new concepts to help increase his pizzeria’s business.
After the mall closed, Scott rolled the dice by choosing a location where four previous pizzerias had gone out of business. Other than being across the street from the local community college, Scott’s new location was not in a busy part of town.
Riding a brisk lunch crowd, thanks mostly to college students and instructors from across the street, Scott was in search of ways to beef up business during non-peak hours.
As Scott sat in his shop each morning, focusing his attention on how best to build the take-out and delivery aspect of his business, he started by targeting the large population of schools and students.
“We had always done pizza days once a week or so with schools and day care centers,” Scott said. “I started thinking about how we could do school lunches every day. So I started working on a daily school lunch program. I found a way to not only make it profitable for my store, but more cost efficient for the schools.”
Anxious to expand his weekly ‘pizza day’ business, Scott developed a strategy to provide daily lunches to local private schools and day care centers.
He developed a menu that included items outside of his restaurant’s regular menu, adding fare such as tacos, hot dogs, corn dogs, hamburgers, chicken nuggets, grilled cheese sandwiches and fish sticks to his shop’s menu of pizza, spaghetti, garlic knots and wings.
Scott typed his proposal, created his own marketing presentation and personally met with local private schools and day care centers in an effort to secure their business.
“I came up with a plan that was a win-win situation for everyone concerned,” Scott said. “For us, it was about a potential new revenue stream, but for them it was about eliminating the hassle and expense of hiring in-house cooks, shopping for groceries, preparing meals and kitchen clean-up. By preparing the lunches and delivering them every day, I was able to provide an affordable alternative to what they were already doing.”
Suddenly, Scott found less free time in his morning schedule. He began bringing employees into work earlier to help open the store as he prepared lunches to be delivered by 11 a.m., just before the onset of the daily lunch rush. Scott used his regular drivers to deliver the lunches, compensating them by paying them per delivery in lieu of tips.
A program that started with the delivery of pizza once a week to about five schools has blossomed into a daily lunch program consisting of more than a dozen schools. And his bottom line showed the results. Scott has seen his monthly sales grow from about $1,100 a month to more than $15,000 a month as a direct result of the school lunch program.
A former high school athlete, the 6-foot-4, 260-pound Scott turned his attention to the thousands of local kids who were playing sports in high school and local youth leagues. He started by contacting high school football and basketball coaches about preparing pre-game meals.
“My sons have always been active in soccer, basketball and football,” Van Duzer said. “We’ve always had the occasional team gathering at the shop, but again I wanted to find a way to incorporate the delivery aspect so as to keep the limited seating I have in the shop open during peak hours while finding another stream of revenue. Also, I figured it provided some convenience for the coaches to have the food delivered to the schools prior to games. A lot of high school teams stay after school to prepare for their games that night, so I thought it was a good fit.” Again, he was right.
Van Duzer began preparing pre-game meals for area high school football teams. He later added basketball teams to his list of pre-game customers.
But the big step came a few years ago when Van Duzer ran into the owner of a local baseball camp who brings high school and college baseball teams from cold-weather states to Florida for one-week training sessions in February and March.
“This guy comes in to order pizzas for these baseball teams and asks if we can deliver them to the hotel,” Van Duzer said. “So we start talking and I tell him we should feed the kids here in the restaurant. So we start swapping numbers and a week later I give him a proposal. Again, I found a way to make it beneficial for both sides. Because he was guaranteeing me his business, I was able to cut his costs a bit. So it actually cost him less to serve sit-down dinners to his teams than it did to call in orders from the hotel.”
Van Duzer put together a program to provide dinner for each of the teams throughout the week, scheduling sit-down dinners during non-peak hours and offering a buffet-style dinner. He even set up banquet tables on one side of his restaurant so entire teams could dine together.
Again the results were evident as the baseball camp boosted the store’s revenue by an extra $50,000 in just eight weeks.
Ten years later, Van Duzer’s Big Apple Pizza franchise is thriving in a location where others before him failed. He has become a staple in the community, hosting fund-raisers for fallen police officers and local families who suffer personal hardships.
“We’ve made ourselves relevant within the community and in doing so we not only built additional streams of revenue, we built future business by serving the youngest demographic in our market,” Scott said. “As a result we’ve built a base of loyal customers who remember us from back when we served them pre-game meals or school lunches. Now, they bring their families in for dinner or order take-out on a regular basis. Who would have thought all this would come as a result of trying to kill a few hours in the morning after taking my kids to school? It’s pretty amazing.”
