La Mia Mamma saves over £20k a year with Dojo

How integrated payments boosted business

When Daniele Raicaldo joined La Mia Mamma as Operations Manager, he was keen to hit the ground running. With 6 restaurants in London, there was a lot to think about.

They have 3 restaurants run by real Italian mothers creating tasty homemade dishes. They’re in high demand and recently featured on Stanley Tucci's Searching for Italy on BBC TWO. The other half of their restaurants are part of their sister brand 'Made in Italy' – a group of popular pizzerias serving authentic Italian cuisine.

But behind the mouthwatering food and drink, Daniele was sure he could make La Mia Mamma an even better experience for everyone.

He noticed that staff sometimes made errors when manually inputting totals, and customers often had to wait a long time to settle their bills. Plus, cashing up was time-consuming and repetitive.

Taking the pain (and cost) out of reconciliation

"I observed how the restaurants functioned and saw first-hand how problematic it was for staff to take payments manually, rely on their maths skills to split bills, and then walk back to the point of sale terminals to close the tables manually. And that's before you consider how long it takes to reconcile all of those manual payments." Daniele says.

So he decided to try Dojo in one of their restaurants. The owners were amazed at how much time was saved with integrated payments. They rolled it out across all their branches, and the results were incredible. 

It made transactions more efficient and ensured customers were charged correctly. Staff could take payments at the table, so they could settle up faster and serve more customers.

"It’s enhanced the experience on the restaurant floor and we've achieved significant time and cost savings. Previously, reconciling payments meant our managers going through each receipt and our back-office teams and CFO verifying those numbers. After observing the new system for the last 14 months, we estimate that it saves our restaurants around 20 hours a week. Regarding staffing costs, that's around £800 a month, which will increase as costs go up each year."

Switching to Dojo across the group's 6 restaurants saves them almost £22,000 a year. "That is an incredible amount of time and money for the business, and Dojo has made it very simple to achieve," says Daniele.

Millions in turnover. Big savings on fees.

"Our standard card fees – which make up the bulk of digital payments – by a few fractions, compared with our previous provider. That might not initially sound like a lot, but it becomes significant when you're turning over millions a year. That reduction has saved the organisation around £12,000 a year," says Daniele.

Dojo is a partner, not a vendor.

"More than anything, Dojo has proved its worth to the business through its actions. When a card machine broke, a replacement was there 24 hours later. I cannot speak highly enough about Dojo. We know we can trust and rely on them – I can't see why we'd use anybody else."