Pizza Rossa are famous at Crowdcube. They have raised £600k in two tranches, won the 2013 Crowdcube Best Start Up Award, promised the world and to date delivered nothing. But are things about to change?
Rossa pitched on CC with a promise to sell their square slices to the City on Saturdays. This was back in 2013 when we were posting Q's on the CC forum. We asked them how they intended to sell 15% of their turnover to a city that was all but closed at weekends. They told us we didnt know anything. Shortly after opening their second unit, they had closed it and pulled back the original unit to a 5 day week. These guys won a business plan competition at LBS for gods sake.
In the 2015 pitch, PR stated this - and it was sanctioned by the FCA regulated Crowdcube -
Our second outlet opened on the 20th of November on London Wall (London EC2M) and it is already a success story.
So why did it close? Even the 2015 projections have been shown to be complete BS. You might have thought they would have learnt a little from 2013. The product seems well received.
Since, they have achieved little apart from burning all the money invested. Now in 2017, with only 1 unit open, they have taken to home delivery. Why has that taken 4 years to work out?
Anyway the penny has eventually dropped and from the accounts for YE Nov 2016, they may just have saved themselves from the brink - a relatively small loss seems to have ended the haemorrhaging - although the patient is still critical. Naturally the Crowdcube projections used to sell the equity are long gone - as ever, pure fantasy. Now its a question of how little can they manage to lose each year. They raised a small amount of extra cash in 2017 and now promote themselves as almost exclusively on line. Time will tell but a sloth might be a better CEO than the current one.
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