Say CHEESE Midwest – Toppers is Bubbling Out of Wisconsin

The biggest advantage of how we have grown in Wisconsin is the buzz that we have built in terms of brand awareness. By starting on college campuses we have built a loyal cult like following. Our customers are fanatical about our products. These fanatics help us create new fanatics by telling them about Toppers. When we showed up 5 years later in Milwaukee people would say I loved you while I was in college at Whitewater, Stevens Point, Madison, etc.

How we be able to sustain that fanatical following as we progress outside of Wisconsin, is the million dollar question. We need to do a great job of educating people on the awesome tasty goodness of our core products – Topperstix & House Pizzas. We intend on strategically growing one market at a time much like we did in Wisconsin. Our primary targets are major college campus markets in the Upper Midwest. By developing the brand in these influential markets first this will allow us develop a loyal following that will help carry us as we enter other major metro areas such as Minneapolis, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati. To accomplish our growth goals we need to continue to align ourselves with great single unit and area developer franchisees.

We are getting franchising interest from people all across the country. However, the majority of our leads are from people who already know the Toppers brand. Most of them are customers or friends of employees or franchisees. We get the most leads from the places where we already have open Toppers stores.

In 2010, we are going to be making an aggressive push to attracting new franchise prospects. As of today we are right on our pace of hitting 100 stores by the end of 2013. We currently have 26 stores open with another 18 under contract to open in the next 24 months. In the coming year we are planning on taking more advantage of our social media outlets as a lead generating tool.