The footprints of a smart wood fired pizza entrepreneur

Being a smart and successful wood fired Pizza entrepreneur, is a rigorous, fast-paced program designed to enable future food industry leaders to identify and define pressing challenges and unmet needs in the broader food system and develop market-based, entrepreneurial ventures to solve them. 

• Knowledgeable 
• Confident 
• Hard worker 
• Consistent 

Knowledgeable - Should be well informed about the product. The art of wood fired pizza making was introduced by The Italians in Italy, they are masters in this craft. A good craftsmanship is required: a qualified and experienced chef, or have learnt from The Italians. 
Marketing concentrated - He does not waste his money in expensive and broad marketing but  focuses on narrow and specific media  marketing to engage the right customers. 

Hard worker - He does the hard work for the customer i.e interacting with each one of them and making sure that they get an amazing experience of hand tossed pizzas. 
Starts with limited budget - He uses intelligence to get the best of the business by investing less money but maintaining the quality and originality of the product he offers and the satisfaction level of customers. 

Confident - He has the courage of introducing an authentic product and sticks to it even after the customers, who want Indianized crunchy pizza complaints and by doing that he creates a great customer base. A confident entrepreneur knows his product thoroughly. 
He is a trend setter  - The one who introduces that particular kind of pizza in that particular market tent to becomes successful. Anyone who decides to follow in the steps of this trendsetter cannot be as successful as them. 

Consistent - He spends a lot of his time in his Pizzeria to make sure that the quality and the experience is consistent or better. 

The conventional Pizza entrepreneur: 

The majority of pizza places serve low quality international pizza or indianized wood fired pizza, typically is thin n crispy. The owners follow trends and market response (misconception: the pizza slice has to stay stiff when u grab it) 
Sometime in good faith, but more often with the idea to run a commercial business. They are customer driven and sell products already available in the market, with no effort to develop an exceptional product, they just hire pizza makers and start to sell pizzas. 
In terms of returns, the sales can be high or low depending on location, marketing and other factors. For instance, bars and breweries  have been able to have high pizza sales because their footfall  is already great for reasons that don't depend on the pizza ( events. beverage packages, etc) .. Many owners get confused thinking that being customer driven is the key for high sales and profit. 
First issue, everyone is competing or getting their share of market on that product and are very hard to stand out (because everyone else is also customer driven). Consequently, it is difficult to create a good customer base and is difficult to have a clear increment in pizza sales . In fact pizza sales in those places are typically 1 pizza every table (3-5 persons) 
Secondly, low returns on investments because it is difficult to sell  that product on a higher price because of the competition. Plus the increment in the sales or high sales are generally a by product of large invesment or cost. Prime locations have a higher per head cost and marketing becomes less effective because everyone else  sells similar products at similar prices with similar marketing strategy. Consequently the marketing cost has to be increased to have some benefits. 

The sales from a smart pizza entrepreneur are generating better profits and ROI (return on investment), since he has a usp i.e authenticity which enables him to charge premium rates. Being  conventional is advisable, only if the niche has potential customers that are not knowledgeable. Hence, they will not be open to accept innovation Or for the ones who want to add pizza as their side business or who are not willing to innovate, specialize or perfect themselves on the art of  pizza making.