You know what we do: we make pizza. Damn good pizza at that. 

But like any business, we have to do a lot of ground work to ensure that we can continue to provide a quality product and positive workplace. Before the pizza gets made, we have to hire the pizza makers and sellers, train them, and buy ingredients. And as we mentioned in a previous blog post, there’s a lot of ways to sell pizza nowadays—in one of our stores, through our website, over the phone, or on one of many third-party delivery or catering platforms. 

Even after we’ve sold the pizza, we have to keep track of how much we’ve sold, and of what. Then we have to crunch a bunch of numbers, make decisions about what to do next, and repeat the process all over again.

So how do we do it? How do we talk to each other, keep track of things, and stay focused? Here’s a little insight into the tools and tricks we use not just to operate, but to allow ourselves to focus less on minutiae and more on the big picture. 

1. DIMS

DIMS is our hardworking, humble website. We designed it not just to list our locations and menu options, but also to house a powerful ordering system. Rather than using a third party to house our ordering system (like Square, for example), we elected to create our own. Using a house delivery platform also cuts out the middleman. As we’ve seen, when a customer needs to reach us (or vice versa) about an order on our own delivery service, their experience is more seamless. 

That choice gave us greater freedom over the way our product is displayed and the experience that you have while ordering on the site. It also allows us to easily view our own sales metrics and choose how they are displayed and what is recorded.

We are constantly thinking about our site, its functionality, and any innovations we can implement to improve both the customer experience and the backend experience of the site. We want our site to be the primary ordering platform for our company, so that you can be confident in ordering from Dimo’s without the additional hassle of dealing with a third party.

2. Google Drive

Google Drive is our storage locker, community bulletin board, and archive boxes. It holds years and years of data which we have organized into shared, easily searchable folders with codified file names. That was the hard part. The easy part is pulling up exactly the information we need when we need it, and turning that information into action. 

We use Google Drive to enter and compare data across platforms. We keep our inventory records there. We share information with our team from Google Drive. And the best part is, it’s with us wherever we go. If our brand photographer is away on vacation, they don’t need to download a bunch of photos from their laptop to a thumb drive and leave it in our office. They can use free airport WiFi to load those photos onto the drive, and everyone who needs to can access them—without bothering our photographer, who’s blissfully unaware.

3. Slack

Slack is a business messaging app. You may have seen it advertised in a train car or between episodes of your favorite show. At first it may seem a little odd that a restaurant has chosen this white-collar oriented app to connect its team members. But the Slack development team has created something uniquely useful to our business model. 

It’s pretty difficult to get our whole team in one place. Not only are we spread between two locations in the city, but we’re open the majority of the hours that exist in a day—and when we’re not open, there are often team members in the locations getting ready for the day or cleaning up after it. So how does an important message or a team rallying cry reach everyone effectively?

Enter Slack. We have embraced the app as our primary messaging tool for team communication because it’s simple and intuitive. It allows us to quickly share information about equipment malfunction, ingredient shortages, or anything else that everyone needs to know. Then, we can brainstorm solutions in real-time, online. We can also celebrate with each other! 

4. Toast

Toast is our in-store Point of Sale system. We enter sales from all of our many avenues—DIMS, in-store purchases, third-party platforms—into this system. Toast then allows us to check on our sales goals in real time and make adjustments to our daily plan. We can also make comparisons to sales from one month ago, one year ago, etc. with ease and simplicity. This allows us to predict business trends with remarkable accuracy. 

Having such a predictive and searchable tool allows us to schedule our team more efficiently, so that their time is not wasted and you receive the service you should, no matter how busy we are. We can also look back on which products have done well, and which avenues dominate our daily sales, so that we can stock up on what you want where you want it, and have it ready for you before you’re even ready for it. 

5. Trello

Trello is our to-do list. This powerful little app is a recent addition, but we’ve already seen lots of benefits from implementing it. It’s essentially a project planner, but it allows us to collaborate on projects without repeating tasks and while adhering to deadlines. 

Trello keeps track of deadlines for us, so that we can see at a glance where we need to focus our time and energy. It also allows us to brainstorm project ideas in the app, keeping all the relevant information for one project in one place so we don’t have to go looking anywhere else when we need it. Finally, it allows us to assign homework and track progress, which rewards our monkey brains with green check marks and a warm fuzzy feeling. 

And many more!

We’re always looking for cool new applications and technologies to improve our efficiency and quality of work and service. If we find something new and exciting to use, we’ll be sure to share it!