The Impos­si­ble? No Problemo!

Hi Folks,

I said I’d give you the tri­als & tribu­la­tions of noSh-​it! Wood-​Fired Pizza, warts ‘n all, didn’t I?

Ok! Well strap your­self in for some inter­est­ing news along with a cou­ple o’ warts

Never give up, Never surrender!

Inter­est­ing News

noSh-​it! Wood-​Fired Pizza is now reg­is­tered to trade in NSW.…well, so close to it any­way. I have my NSW Food Busi­ness Noti­fi­ca­tion Cer­tifi­cate and I’ve sent my NSW Busi­ness Name Reg­is­tra­tion stuff in…just wait­ing to receive the certificate…should arrive this week.

But before you reach for the phone to book me for your next School Fete in Bro­ken Hill, I would like to empha­sise the following:

IMPOR­TANT ADAPTATION:

I’ve con­tin­ued work­ing toward the refo­cus­ing of my busi­ness. I spoke about this in an ear­lier post — The Rock Star Strategy…

As this is devel­op­ing, the empha­sis of the busi­ness is shift­ing more toward whole­sal­ing piz­zas than retail­ing. Why?

Own­ing my limitations

My out­door trad­ing expe­ri­ence to date has taught me one inescapable truth — I’m one per­son. Pro­vid­ing such high qual­ity piz­zas, I’m sim­ply not fast enough to gen­er­ate the turn-​over needed doing ONLY EVENTS and doing them by myself…and I have no inten­tion of sac­ri­fic­ing the qual­ity of either my prod­ucts or my ser­vice. And with­out proper/​adequate busi­ness financ­ing, I’m not in a posi­tion to hire any­one else at this point. Take home mes­sage — Don’t start this kind of busi­ness by your­self. Oh! And don’t rely on Banks who say they “Sup­port Small Business”!

The Great Big Upside

By sup­ply­ing to retail out­lets I can gen­er­ate the turn-​over I need to get the busi­ness on its feet. Once this occurs, I can then get the assis­tance I need to be able to back-​up the whole­sale side of the busi­ness with live per­for­mances. This could be at local events…it could be a pro­mo­tional activ­ity for your business…anything is pos­si­ble. The great big upside is, that by whole­sal­ing to retail out­lets the busi­ness has an improved short-​term via­bil­ity, will then be able to sup­port retail­ing at events, and a lot more peo­ple will be able to get deli­cious noSh-​it! Wood-​Fired Piz­zas on their tables in a lot more places.

Can I take Orders Now?

Yes I can! Can I process them imme­di­ately? It depends on the size of the order. My cur­rent capac­ity is 300 piz­zas per week. I could prob­a­bly stretch that to 500, though I would be reluc­tant to do so imme­di­ately with­out at least prop­erly inform­ing poten­tial cus­tomers that:

1. Pack­ag­ing — needs to be tested to find the opti­mum cost effec­tive method. Espe­cially if large orders over long distances;



Sample/​Draft Sticker for Whole­sale Piz­zas — Feed­back wel­come

2. Stor­age - logis­tics to sup­port this capac­ity need to be adapted;

3. Cash Flow — I don’t have any. This means that I would require at least part pay­ment up front.

That said, if I received orders for up to 500 piz­zas per week, I could then take those orders to the bank and raise the cap­i­tal I need to ser­vice them quickly.

And don’t worry, I wouldn’t expect any­one to order any noSh-​it! Wood-​Fired Piz­zas for their cus­tomers, with­out try­ing them first.

So if you’re keen, just give me a yell and I’ll send you a sam­ple. So far my sam­ples, even to the few local folks I have spo­ken with, are deliv­ered cold for re-​heating, so that you get exactly what your cus­tomers will be getting.

So! Can I ser­vice the orders that are placed?

Yes. How­ever it is impor­tant that you under­stand that I’m work­ing with what I’ve got. For those intre­pid folks that would love to pro­vide top qual­ity organic wood-​fired piz­zas to their cus­tomers and sup­port noSh-​it! Wood-​Fired Pizza towards becom­ing a fully-​fledged organic wood-​fired pizza provider, a lit­tle patience would be required to estab­lish a reli­able and sus­tain­able rhythm.

Say if you rang me and wanted to explore order­ing. I’d send you a sam­ple. You’d try it, love it and want to make them avail­able to your cus­tomers. This might mean tri­al­ing a small order. That’s not a prob­lem. I could get a trial order of say 20 piz­zas to you within 3 days (same for 100 piz­zas by the way ). 3 DAYS!??? Yes! You want gen­uine qual­ity and gen­uine fresh­ness? This is how it happens:

Day1 — You order your 20 pizza trial (at this stage you’ll have to pay up front);

Day 1 still — I process the order to deter­mine what ingre­di­ents I’ll need. I pre­pare the fresh organic stone-​ground dough;

Day 2 — I go and get all the fresh yummy ingre­di­ents, and pre­pare them. I cook the piz­zas and let them cool;

Day 2 still — your noSh-​it– Wood-​Fired Piz­zas are indi­vid­u­ally pack­aged and pre­pared for shipping;

Day 3 — Your piz­zas are shipped and/​or per­son­ally deliv­ered if local.

The Warts

If you have been fol­low­ing the baby-​steps of noSh-​it! Wood-​Fired Pizza, via it’s var­i­ous web-​based venues (i.e. here, Paul Hassing’s Small Busi­ness Owner Blog and My Twit­ter ), then you’ll know I’ve faced my fair share of chal­lenges along the way…as do most nubile small busi­nesses. For­tu­nately, on a chal­lenge by chal­lenge account, I have pre­vailed. How­ever, cumu­la­tively, these chal­lenges have taken their toll. The busi­ness has been severely dam­aged and just between you and me, real­is­ti­cally, I’m won­der­ing whether or not it will survive…the next month is pretty much do or die. No! This doesn’t mean I’m giv­ing up…not by a long shot! I’m just say­ing it how it is.

Hope­fully, in a month or 2, I’ll be regal­ing yet another tri­umphant return from the abyss and doing guest speak­ing appear­ances at Lion’s Club con­ven­tions, telling folks how to sur­vive the impos­si­ble

More Inter­est­ing News

I’ll be sell­ing noSh-​it! Wood-​Fired Piz­zas at the South­ern Farm­ers Mar­ket at the Can­berra Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy (CIT), Woden ACT from Sun­day 08 Novem­ber. As the mar­ket runs from 8.00am-12.00Midday, I’ve opted for sell­ing cold noSh-​it! Wood-​Fired Piz­zas, so folks can take them home. Hope to see you there.

Any­way, that’s the cur­rent state of play…The impos­si­ble? No prob­lemo! I’m off to cook my next batch of sam­ple piz­zas to show off my wares to poten­tial whole­sale customers.

Never give up, Never Surrender! :- )

Cheers

Stephen G