Dial-a-Dino’s rise and fall … a supreme story with the lot

SA businessman Richard Wescombe, the man behind Dino&#039s Dial-a-Pizza, which later became Dial-a-Dino’s to avoid a copyright claim.

Just about every night, the minimal yellow Daihatsus, with huge purple, illuminated mobile phone handsets on the roofs, could be seen racing all over metropolis streets, delivering piping-hot pizza in what was the forerunner of today’s huge rapidly-foodstuff delivery industry.

“The concept at first arrived from an episode of the Television exhibit Depart it to Beaver,” Wescombe claims. “Watching an episode of the exhibit just one night I saw that they requested pizza in.

“I really don’t know if it was a specific car that introduced it but it just tripped a little something in my mind. And that’s how it all begun.

“I was now included in Bertie’s Pancake Kitchen at the time and went off to Queensland to look at a corporation named Sylvio’s Dial a Pizza.

“They had a special concept wherever they have been delivering pizzas and they had these humorous-searching items on the roof of their cars and trucks, like a mobile phone with spotlights on them. So it was not so much a new concept it was extra just an improvement on an old concept.

“I arrived back to Adelaide and I begun carrying out a good little bit of function. I intended the mobile phone that was internally lit and that was a huge component of the achievements of Dial-a-Dino’s, the recognition of individuals cars and trucks seriously drove the business in the early days.

“Whatever new marketplace we went into, individuals minimal telephones on best of the cars and trucks have been pure gold in receiving attention.”

I reminded Wescombe of the story I’d as soon as listened to of him staying locked absent in a resort place for a week, creating the business plan for his new company.

He had been dealing with some individuals who have been advising him on franchising and they told him he desired to commit to creating a business plan and a strategies guide.

“So I used a week in a Sydney resort locked absent, just creating non-quit,” Wescombe claims.

“And that was in advance of the days of phrase processors and personal computers. I wrote it all by hand, arrived back household and had another person type it all up.”

The first Dino’s Dial-a-Pizza opened in November 1984, at St Peters (it shortly adjusted its title to Dial-a-Dino’s to stay clear of a clash with a Victorian pizza business).

The start was a important media party compered by nicely-acknowledged Adelaide radio temperament (the late) Big Bob Francis, with reside music and, of system, loads of no cost pizza.

Dick Frankel’s Jazz Disciples played and the shiny new delivery vehicles have been parked out front for all people to see.

The new enterprise was an rapid achievements and promptly expanded, opening branches in other suburbs.

“There was a fantastic spirit within just the corporation,” Wescombe remembers. “I consider it was mainly because we have been new and it had a wonderful experience about the imagery.

“We drove family values and the team liked that. A ton of the workforce have been little ones studying at college and this was a little bit of social exercise for them as nicely. A ton went on to be productive in their picked out discipline but labored for Dino’s for a several many years.”

Based on the runaway achievements of the Adelaide enterprise, about the future five many years Wescombe embarked on an aggressive expansion application.

He travelled all over the country, developing franchises in all states as nicely as abroad, and in 1988, the SA Terrific committee named him just one of that year’s 6 Terrific South Australians. By 1989, there have been 120 stores in Australia, sixteen in New Zealand, 8 in Japan and 6 in the British isles.

“It was an enormously interesting time but a little bit like keeping a tiger by the tail we just had to continue to keep going,” Wescombe claims.

“I really won an award from Ansett Airlines mainly because I flew extra than anybody else in Australia in 1998. I was just making an attempt to continue to keep up with it all.”

By the mid-nineteen eighties, Pizza Hut, the American cafe chain and intercontinental franchise, was beginning to develop, specially in the larger marketplaces of Sydney and Melbourne.

“We have been now fairly huge in each cities and they considered they could improve that component of their business a ton a lot quicker if they acquired us and that’s when they knocked on our doorway,” Wescombe claims.

“It took about twelve months of negotiations to get it throughout the line. We had a ton of franchisees in the business who have been seriously just like individual keep entrepreneurs, and we had condition sub-franchisors searching soon after the franchisees.

“We had to get them all to concur to the deal with PepsiCo, the entrepreneurs of Pizza Hut.

“But inevitably it was finished (in 1989) and they adjusted the title to Pizza Hut and Dial-a-Dino’s was absent it just instantly didn’t exist any extra.”

“Looking back on individuals many years now, it was just loads of exciting. I keep in mind in the early days at St Peters, we’d near at two o’clock on a Saturday morning soon after performing flat out from early on a Friday night,” Wescombe adds.

“At the end of the change we have been even now pumped up and all people from all the other stores would meet in a put named Jewels nightclub in the metropolis (now the The Woolshed on Hindley Street). Frequently we’d be there until eventually 4am in the morning just laughing and talking.

“We’d continue to keep coming up with new ideas all the time on how to market the business, and then improve them for the future new ideas a thirty day period or two later. Folks preferred to see improve. It was all so interesting at the time, staying in a corporation like that.”

We check five of Australia’s favourite rapidly foodstuff fixes for nutrition: KFC, Domino’s, McDonald’s, Zambrero and Subway. The effects may possibly shock you.

Wescombe moved on and, soon after Dial-a-Dino’s, bought Stanford Mowers, which he owned and operated for a limited time in advance of venturing out into his new company, Snowys Outside, in which he is even now included.

Bob Byrne is the creator of Adelaide Try to remember When and posts memories each day on fb.com/adelaiderememberwhen