Flanco Pizza: From pandemic pain to a mouth-watering slice of food truck success

Flanco Pizza is a organization born from the pandemic.

After losing their jobs, Eliot Prince and his company spouse and girlfriend Courtney Flanagan utilised their expertise and creativity to set up a profitable Sussex-based mobile catering business serving delicious Neapolitan pizza.

Eliot tells us the Flanco Pizza tale and gives us a sneak peek into what it can take to build your cellular catering organization.

Here’s what he addresses:

From ski careers to pandemic ache

It all started off at the commencing of coronavirus in March 2020.

The two myself and Courtney had been working in the French Alps.

Courtney was working in a ski shop and carrying out freelance graphic design, which she examined at college, on the aspect. I experienced been in and out of the Alps for about seven decades, undertaking freelance digital marketing for ski companies.

We viewed coronavirus unfold from the Alps, and in essence France shut a several months right before the United kingdom.

Courtney’s boss rang her up and instructed her she didn’t have a job any longer, though all of my freelance clientele turned close to and mentioned they were closed as very well.

We arrived back to the British isles to check out and work out what to do.

A new begin

It was my father who began us off.

He mentioned: “If I experienced to go out and generate revenue tomorrow or within just a 7 days, what would I do? I’d start out a pizza van and park it at the conclusion of the street.”

It was his desire, as he had more of a catering track record. He booked us to glimpse at this van—I noticed a excellent chance as Courtney and I did not have any other work opportunities likely.

We made a decision to go for it.

We did not have a vehicle, a licence to tow, or the know-how to make pizza. But we said allow us bounce in and see how it goes.

We received the van, rebranded it, fastened a few bits ourselves to carry it up to how we desired.

In 48 several hours, we went from not acquiring any catering practical experience to getting a pizza van and commencing a organization.

With food stuff vehicles, you can go in two means.

You can have an straightforward-to-manage transit van that you can generate around promptly or go down the route of possessing a trailer.

We made the very first determination to go with a horse trailer for the reason that it is far more appealing for private situations and is more of a conversing point—something amazing, anything distinct.

It is significantly less manoeuvrable, but men and women like it.

Being a graphic designer, Courtney was responsible for the preliminary branding and the UFO spaceship style and design on the facet of the van—we assumed it was artistic, distinct, and stood out.

The strategy was that people would get their pizza, stand below the spaceship and appear like they are staying beamed up.

It is a little something silly, a speaking stage that grabs your attention and which you cannot aid give a 2nd search.

It presents you a wonderful hook to commence a dialogue with customers and passers-by.

Making an outstanding pizza solution

We perfected the pizza by generating it each and every day.

There was a good deal of demo and error, finding out from what was excellent and what wasn’t, and built lots of problems.

One particular of the significant issues we acquired when we established up our van was that Brighton’s bought to be a person of the most saturated marketplaces for substantial-good quality Neapolitan pizza.

Wanting back, it was most likely a dumb concept to begin a pizza organization there mainly because it is these a saturated market, but it made us function more difficult at the product for the reason that we’re hunting about at all the wonderful levels of competition.

We had to bring our merchandise up to that normal. I don’t think we would have pushed so significantly with sleepless evenings, tweaks to our recipes, and a motivation to make it better each day if the competitors was not there.

If you’re the only pizza guy in town, you’re likely to sell pizza no matter the quality.

But the competitors has designed us a hundred instances improved than I feel we would’ve believed at the commence of it all.

It is all about the pizza dough.

A person of the sizeable difficulties of acquiring a mobile pizza business enterprise is that you’re not doing work in a controlled setting for your pizza dough.

We really do not have a proofing box or aircon to preserve our air temperature at the same humidity and temperature.

This means that the pizza dough alterations throughout the 12 months, for illustration, wherever we park with the van or irrespective of whether the solar is out. That is one particular of the substantial stresses that nonetheless receives us.

Dealing with the finances

We acquired a tiny business bank loan to begin up, to pay for the original fees of the van, a vehicle, and anything else to get us going. I think it was about £11,000.

Even so, it is pretty much a income organization, so you could start out earning and building earnings speedily to get up and jogging, investing in the organization to purchase factors like dough mixers.

You mature as you expand—the busier you get, the much more bits and bobs you have, which suggests you have more output.

I do all the funds myself. I had been self-utilized, so I experienced a great grasp of controlling my funds and own income.

I’ve designed a slip-up right before with freelance or self-employed cash flow in spending what will come in the door straight absent, rather than offering myself a set wage.

If you established a wage that you spend on your own on the similar day each individual month, you can set a spending plan for your private life and the small business.

I also promptly established up immediate pension payments, cash for tax, and other preserving quantities.

When you’re self-used, you never get all the gains of operating for a company, this kind of as pension payments and holiday getaway shell out, so you have to established it up yourself.

Which is a incredibly challenging stage, in particular when your profits is up and down.

How substantially you work dictates how much you gain.

It’s about using treatment of your present and long run selves with your funds, as properly as your enterprise, which is yet another ball recreation.

We never use an accountant because it’s rather uncomplicated after you know the ins and outs of the money.

We are a partnership rather than a minimal corporation mainly because it is the least complicated and lowest priced way to get likely.

The fantastic thing about a food items truck business enterprise is there’s confined publicity to issues. I really don’t sense you require a minimal firm mainly because there are not quite a few liabilities.

Making use of technology to help save time and revenue

Know-how is important.

It will make daily life so much easier when you can automate duties and get rid of points that you never require to be doing to concentration on the small business at hand.

In phrases of my accounting, I do all of it from my phone.

Snap receipts, balancing the textbooks, building payments—you can do anything by mobile phone applications.

We operate our payment programs on a little handheld terminal and phone application.

Wherever I am in the earth with our van, I can just take a payment, send out a payment to shell out a wholesaler, balance the books, and pay my taxes.

Incredibly, I can operate my complete business off my phone.

I don’t do any enterprise from my office environment except to place a paper bill from a wholesaler into a filing cupboard, which is a redundant thing to do as I file all my receipts on the web by my cellular phone and accounting software that sits on the cloud.

The know-how cuts out so substantially time from my working day simply because I can do anything on the go in genuine time and not have to sit and go via every thing from a week’s buying and selling.

It’s all automatic by the tech on my cell phone, which is extraordinary.

The attractiveness of it is how efficient and inexpensive the know-how is. I never want to devote a day of my week balancing and checking all the payments that have absent by means of almost everything. It’s all automatic and sends me a little notification.

It saves me so considerably time.

It presents me more time to concentrate on the enjoyable stuff like the advertising and the pizza product—not sitting in the place of work heading through paperwork.

I never even need to spend an accountant simply because the technology like Sage builds does all the things for you.

When I’m about to do my tax return at the stop of the calendar year, I have to click a couple of buttons, and it’s all fairly a lot done.

In instances of uncertainty, occur up with new profits streams

We have split our money streams for the reason that of the pandemic.

You can not depend only on weddings, functions or festivals any longer, which I did not want to do anyway, because it is a lot of legwork and cost to take care of personal gatherings.

So, what we do all through the week, involving Tuesday and Friday, is have weekly pizza night time slots in modest towns and villages.

You have regular, nearly guaranteed trading income from avenue trading spots or do the job with area parish councils. You can pitch up in spots just about every week without the need of imagining about it too much.

Because we have organization for 4 times a week, we have a good deal of revenue to pay out the rent, pay out ourselves, and spend in the business.

We can use weekends or bank holidays for personal events like weddings and birthday parties, or even have time to kick back and rest a bit if it’s a little bit quieter.

Our normal evenings support us get personal activities.

We get a good deal of referral business now, which means we really don’t have to drive as well really hard on marketing and advertising for personal functions.

Instagrammable foodstuff merchandise are less complicated to current market

I’m from a electronic marketing qualifications, and Courtney is a graphic designer, so we converse to our clients and get our business on-line.

We incredibly hardly ever do any offline advertising things now.

Internet marketing is most likely the little bit of the small business we get pleasure from the most. Courtney can use her graphic design and style expertise to hand-paint the van and generate social media designs for Instagram.

It pays off if you work tough at it.

We have a excellent products due to the fact we have labored so really hard on it—the pizza, dough and everything—to get it where by it is. We can shout about it on-line, and which is fairly highly effective.

Other enterprises could possibly struggle to have content mainly because their product is not so Instagram-pleasant.

Eliot’s a few cell pizza takeaways to get you started

1. Continue to keep experimenting

If you want to make a good foods solution, you have to have to continue to keep earning it, experimenting, and generating blunders, perfecting your product or service by making it a minor bit much better every single day.

2. Put hard cash apart for taxes

With a foodstuff truck, you can get started earning and producing profits rapidly.

In contrast to normal total-time employment, you’re controlling the finances. So make sure you set aside cash for where it is essential, whether for taxes, financial investment, pensions, or particular use.

3. Get fantastic with social media

With a cellular foods business enterprise, considerably of your internet marketing will be on-line.

This signifies you require to understand the social media channels that would work for you, what sort of content you need to have to write-up, and how to engage nicely with consumers, each aged and new.