Smart For Pizzas

Adrian and I moved to Torbay from Wilshire two and a half years ago and bought two pizza takeaway businesses, one in Torquay and one in Paignton. Both were up and running as mainly “take away” with a few deliveries being made in the owner’s car or when busy they employed a driver with his own car.

We immediately decided the potential for the growth of the business was to increase the delivery trade and to that end we looked around for some cheap cars that we could use for delivering pizzas. Budget was tight and we ended up buying three white Nissan Micras. They were quite old (all L reg) but they looked good once we had them sign written and customers noticed them and they certainly brought in a lot of new trade.

After running them for over a year and ploughing money into them, (never a week seemed to go by without spending some serious money on new clutch, gear box, tyres, brakes etc. etc.). They seemed like a black hole; that we just had to keep pouring money into it just to keep them on the road. We decided it was time now that we had got the business going to take some time to have a serious look at the cost-effectiveness of having ageing cars – a decision had to be reached. MOT’s were looming for two of the Micras and we knew from experience that it was going to be costly.[pay]

We looked around for something that would be reasonable to insure, cheap to run and would not cost the earth. We looked at mopeds but we could not see us keeping our drivers if we made the change from cars to mopeds. We had made the decision when we had first bought the business that was not the way we wanted to go. Our aim was for quality and dripping wet drivers taking pizzas out of hot bags on the doorstep was not an image we wanted to portray!

I remembered that just before I had left Wiltshire a work colleague and his wife had bought a new Smart Car, she had brought it in to work to show us and it had made a huge impression on me. How could such a small car feel so big when you sat in it? The usual jokes had been made about it being like Dr Who’s Tardis – small on the outside – spacious interior!! It wasn’t cheap and tacky; the interior was classy. She loved it and I must say I remember thinking one day I would like one.

This got me thinking whether it would be a practical car for pizza delivery, so I went on the Internet and found out all about them.

Last July we went to Bristol and picked up our two brand new Black and Cream Pure Smarts. We loved them and set about getting them sign written. (We had inherited the name of Panda Pizza when we bought the business and although we had often thought of a name change we had built a good reputation and the name was well known locally, so we kept it). We changed our company signage to match the colours. When we started using the Smart cars to deliver Pizzas we got some great reactions from customers – love it or hate it (and most loved it) they always smiled!! My husband delivers and he is 6ft 4 inches – even he had plenty of legroom and a bit of headroom. We have in the past had big cars with less headroom!!

Our two Smart cars have traveled around 12000 miles each since last July and the only money spent on them has been fuel and replacement of two light bulbs. The money we now spend on fuel has almost halved and the saving has been tremendous. We often quip that the money we save on fuel is paying off one of the Smart cars!!

We now have the two Smarts and one Nissan Micra – we are planning on replacing the Micra for our third Smart later on this year and we can’t wait.[/pay]

Related Articles

• No Related Articles.