Amici’S East Coast Pizzeria Case Assessment Answer

Key Topics

• 1. Amici’s business model
• 2. Key drivers of Amici’s success
• 3. Strategy for further growth of Amici’s
• 4. References
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Answer the questions of Amici's case study.

1. Amici’s business model

Founded and co-founded by Peter Cooperstein and Mike Forter respectively, Amici’s East Coast Pizzeria ranked No. 1 independent pizza chain in the US. It offers a high-quality, authentic east coast style pizza with an extremely fine customer friendly service. Initially, Amici’s started by serving transplanted East Coasters but gradually started catering to the people residing in attractive and high population regions.

Amici’s has an effective mechanism for communication and distribution of its products resulting in establishing a healthy relationship with its clients. It uses high-temperature ovens at 700 degrees and high-quality mozzarella cheese along with properly fermented dough. The work philosophy of Amici’s includes top-quality service, careful and steady growth and hard work. It is also successfully managing three areas- dine-in, delivery, and carry-out.

2. Key drivers of Amici’s success

Amici’s success can largely be credited to the genuine work ethics that it followed. However, there were other few important drivers that proved to be instrumental in this regard. The 7S framework has been used (Burke, 1992). They are:

• Strategy: Its strategy was to serve high quality and authentic east coast pizza in an efficiently run restaurant with best customer service. The ingredients used to prepare the pizza are of better quality than the other ones, for example, milk mozzarella cheese, self-cooked sauce, and extra fermented dough, when baked in a 700 degrees heated oven, gives it an outstanding flavor. Moreover, as articulated by Peter Cooperstein, Amici’s believes in excellent customer service – utilizing fast kitchens only helps them serving the pizzas in no time. Amici’s success also depended upon careful and steady growth.
• Structure: According to the founders, it is the work culture of Amici’s that has been a key driver of its success. It comprises of three main managers- a general manager, a kitchen manager and a driver manager. They work round the clock to ensure every employee performs his/her task properly. Amici’s has enough delivery drivers and a well-organized distribution channel.
• Systems: Amici’s retains high-quality employees by paying 20 % premium, and it doesn’t offer bonuses on labor costs, food costs and sales. They are proud to have kitchen managers with 20+ years of experience who once were dishwashers in Amici’s itself.
• Skills: all the employees of Amici’s are extremely hardworking and customer friendly. Its managers have developed the skills of effectively managing the system as they were given an opportunity for having their say in decision making. They maintain that some of their best systems and innovations have been developed by ordinary dishwashers and servers.
• Style: the working style of the managers of Amici’s is to treat everyone well with respect. They have been paying their employees higher than the other restaurants and well in time. Also, there is a provision for internal promotion. 
• Staff: Amici’s is in the business for the last 25 years and has over 300 employees from 12 reasonable sized Francisco Bay Area restaurants with managers being put in every department so as to manage it perfectly.
• Shared values: apart from strategies mentioned above, Amici’s has always focused on value systems and work ethics. They believe in hard work, fair treatment of every employee, careful and steady growth, effective teamwork and best quality customer service.

3. Strategy for further growth of Amici’s

Apart from the successful strategies of Amici’s discussed above, there is no dearth of more effective strategies and working ideas. So, below are a few such ideas that could be worth taking into account:

• Going international: The world being a global village now, every successful brand has a definite propensity to be able to reciprocate its success in different parts of the world. So, Amici’s will surely find a good customer base if it goes global (Van Ryssen and Godar, 2000).
• New innovative products: Once a brand gets established and starts doing well, it creates an opportunity and space to introduce the new and innovative line of products (innovative products, 2008). In the case of Amici’s, pastas, sandwiches and other pizzas can be introduced with different flavors.
• Better marketing: An effective marketing strategy is often very helpful for any brand to grow more and to reach out to more customers. As an example, extraordinary punch lines, well-crafted ad films and promotional activities may serve well in this regard (better marketing insights, 2015).

4. References

Better marketing insights. (2015). BDJ, 218(4), pp.252-252.

Burke, W. (1992). A Causal Model of Organizational Performance and Change. Journal of Management, 18(3), pp.523-545.

Van Ryssen, S. and Godar, S. (2000). Going international without going international. Journal of International Management, 6(1), pp.49-60.