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A WINNING QUALITY: JOHNNY PROVOLONE'S OVERCOMES TROUBLE FROM THE GET-GO
By Jim Dees
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What do you do when there is a Pizza Hut with annual sales of $4 million right down the street from your pizzeria? If you’re Brandon Lowe and his five brothers, you work around the clock to seize your share of the market. That’s just what the Lowe brothers have done in Crawfordsville, Ind. (pop. 13,000) with their 60-seat restaurant, Johnny Provolone’s. None of them even knew how to make a pizza and learned through trial and error - mostly error, according to Brandon.
“If you had eaten one of our early pizzas you wouldn’t have been happy,” he chuckles. One might ask, why would you start a pizza place if you don’t know how to make pizza?
“We had made an agreement with a popular pizza chain here in Indiana,” Brandon recalls. “We were going to be a franchise. At the eleventh hour, they pulled out. We had signed a lease on a building and put up a deposit, so we figured we’d better learn how to make pizza pretty fast.”
Brandon says he and his brothers mastered the art of pizza making (and selling) by asking for help and listening.
Worst to First
“One of our suppliers is Delco out of Indianapolis,” Brandon says. “Their driver was very helpful in not only getting supplies to us, but also recommending recipes and educating us on products. They also got us a subscription to PMQ.” After trying variations of different crust styles and sauce recipes, Brandon says he and his brothers believe they found their niche.
“We decided that maybe we can’t be the cheapest pizza, but maybe we can be the best tasting pizza,” he declares. The citizens of Crawfordsville apparently agree. Johnny Provolone’s has been voted the best pizza in town, two of the last four years by the local newspaper, The Paper of Montgomery County. Last year, the Crawfordsville Chamber of Commerce named the restaurant, ‘Best Small Business of the Year.’
How did the brothers go from zero to hero in just four years? The answer is good pizza and savvy marketing. First the pizza. Their standard pizza philosophy is thin crust, authentic Chicago-style pizza, but they also developed signature concoctions. One such pizza they developed is a baked potato pizza. This unique favorite is made with the dough rolled out thinly and stuffed with cheese, bacon and potato chips.
“It’s an extremely low cost item, so we get a good return on it,” Brandon notes. Other favorites include a 28-inch pizza, (with one topping, $35) a Supreme with seven toppings, and a specialty pizza (one of 16 offered) called “Chicken Bacon Ranch.” Then there’s the Mobster. Brandon says this pizza came about because of mistaken identity.
“When we first opened and came to Crawfordsville, because we’re six brothers, all with dark hair and making pizza, a lot of townspeople thought we might be Italian and maybe we were in the Mafia,” he says, shaking his head. “So we thought we’d have fun with that by naming one of our specialty pizzas the ‘Mobster.’ I even perpetuated it by growing a mustache. It became fun for people to eat here.” Brandon says the Mobster, a seven topping, supreme-type pizza ($16.35) has become his biggest seller.
As for marketing, Brandon says he and his brothers came up with a promotion that has proven extremely popular. On Monday nights (their slowest) they offer a special deal to any charitable organization.
“From 5-8pm, we let any fund-raising group come in and wait tables and they get 20% of anything that comes in. That’s become so popular that now Monday nights can be as busy as some Friday nights.”
Honing on Hoosiers
Brandon says those early, undesirable pizzas he and his brother turned out brought complaints from customers.
“After people tried those initial pizzas the phone rang off the hook and my wife caught the brunt of it. We knew it was going to be difficult to get people to try us again.” Brandon said the six brothers fanned out across town and gave out pizzas at factories, doctors’ offices, realtors, the barbershop, car dealerships, and other businesses around town. They also relied on the human touch.
“We talked to people one-on-one,” Brandon exclaims. “All six of us went out and struck up numerous personal relationships constantly. If you talk to people often enough, soon they feel like they’re ordering from friends rather just a pizza place.”
Mark says rather than three or four pizzas, the Lowe brothers would descend on a factory with a stack of 20 pizzas. Did he ever worry that maybe the brothers were over-doing it?
“It was a gamble, giving away so much pizza,” Brandon reflects, “but it paid off. Now certain factories are loyal to us and we have set up house accounts for them. We did the same thing at our local college here, Wabash College. The house accounts have been enormous for us. They pay about once a month. The college pays for all the frat houses or when they have an event or speaker.”
Such efforts have led to a continual surge in sales. Johnny Provolone’s had their best year last year with $650,000 in sales. In November of 2006, the brothers opened a second store in Plainfield, Ind, 50 miles away, on the southern outskirts of Indianapolis. Brandon reports that store already equals the Crawfordsville store in daily sales.
Currently the brothers employ 25 people, all shifts included, at their main store. They run a single delivery driver on weeknights, three on weekends. The drivers are paid minimum wage (plus tips) as well as a $1 delivery charge. A typical at-store shift would involve a counter person, a phone person, an oven person who runs the four deck ovens (“We prefer those deck ovens, there’s something about placing it on that stone. We like that crispiness underneath.”) and two other kitchen employees. Brandon says his labor cost is around 20% and the same amount on food costs.
“We’re militaristic about food costs,” Brandon says defiantly. “We’re here every day watching very closely. Our supplier delivers twice a week so we can only keep so much here.”
Heart and Soul
Achieving success against a $4 million gorilla right down the road, requires advertising and marketing and Brandon says they’ve tried them all.
“The local cable company offered us a TV spot which seemed to do nothing for us, and we tried radio and it was even worse. We received limited response from newspaper inserts,” he recalled. “We spent $1,000 on printing and the actual insertion. If we did it every month, we didn’t see good results. If we only do it twice a year, we felt like we get a good spend.” (Brandon says the local paper gave him what was probably a good deal: 5,000 copies, the printing, $500, the insertion, another $500). Brandon says he and his brothers, with their close eye on expenditures, came up with a do-it-yourself-style of advertising.
“We felt like we could get good response by printing up some discount offer coupons on our computer and then pounding the pavement and handing them out ourselves. The only printing cost was buying the printing paper.”
Brandon says the coupons are worded in such a way as to sound more like an invitation than a business proposition, (“You are cordially invited to enjoy 10% off a pizza at Johnny Provolone’s”). “It makes people feel more like it’s a personal invitation,” Brandon concludes. He also feels it’s important to include an expiration date on any coupons to add a sense of urgency.
Second Store?
It’s a question every successful operator eventually asks him/herself: Should I open a second store? After three years of running Johnny Provolone’s, Brandon says he and his brothers confronted the question head-on and decided the answer was yes.
“Opening the second one didn’t have the scary feeling that opening the first one did,” Brandon recalls. “We always knew if the second one failed, we could fall back on the first one. We’ve already gotten great response to the second store. It was a little tense at first, as it is any time you put up a big chunk of money. It still wasn’t as scary as opening the first one.” The Plainfield store seats 90 and is across from a Super Wal-Mart and mall.
“A really hopping area,” Brandon says.
The success of the Crawfordsville and Plainfield stores has given the brothers the confidence in their brand to begin licensing the name. A licensed, though independently owned, store under the Johnny Provolone name recently opened in Frankfurt, Ind. The brothers made sure to include in the contract their right to make inspections of the store to ensure it is up to their operational standards.
Brandon says he and his brothers will continue to explore licensing agreements and continue to maintain quality at their home store. Through it all, it’s still a family business. All the brothers work and their dad, now retired, comes in the morning to make dough. Brandon credits their father early on with giving the brothers the incentive to be successful. Their dad put up a sizable portion of the money for the first store – back when they didn’t know how to make a pizza.
“That was another reason we had to learn the business,” Brandon confides. “If we had blown it, Dad would have no retirement.”