Enga Sandfield was sitting across from a frustrated restaurant owner last week when he said the words she had heard dozens of times before: ‘My sales are stuck.’ His numbers were not collapsing. They were just stubbornly, maddingly flat. Enga knew exactly what that felt like, because she and her husband Matt had inherited a single location losing money every month before turning it around and scaling Matangos Pizzeria in San Antonio to seven locations and more than $7 million in annual sales. Now doing over a million dollars in profit a year and aiming for 20 locations, she had a clear answer for him, and it started with one uncomfortable truth: flat sales are not caused by one big mistake. They are caused by five quiet, fixable ones.
When a 75-cent dip cup becomes a trust problem
The first and most corrosive reason sales stall is inconsistency. Enga put it plainly: ‘Even if things are great 80% of the time, that 20% they don’t know what they’re going to get from your restaurant.’ At Matangos, the proof showed up in the reviews for one underperforming location. Customers were ordering dip cups priced at 75 cents each, and sometimes those cups arrived with their order, and sometimes they simply did not. A missing 75-cent item sounds trivial. But repeated enough, it quietly erodes the trust that drives return visits.
Her fix is a three-step system she calls set it, train it, enforce it. At Matangos, ‘set it’ means every team member knows the 10-20-30 rule: 10 minutes for dine-in, 20 minutes for pick-up, and 30 minutes out the door for delivery. ‘Train it’ means running actual time trials, testing whether staff can stretch a 16-inch dough in under 30 seconds and top a pizza in under one minute. ‘Enforce it’ means checking those numbers weekly in manager meetings, and if a location misses the standard for three consecutive weeks, the store captain receives formal documentation.
The 5-mile radius and 250 strangers a week
The second and third reasons she identified, being passive about returning customers and ignoring the local community, both come down to the same mistake: waiting for people to find you. Enga is direct on this point: ‘Obscurity is your greatest enemy and discounts will not solve that.’
For email, Matangos sends eight touchpoints every week, two emails and two text messages, each one including photos of the team with food, community donations, or a hiring announcement. For the community, her team visits five local establishments every single day, including churches, schools, and local businesses, handing out food samples and a flyer with a QR code linking to the menu. At 25 visits a week with roughly 10 people per stop, that approach puts 1,000 new faces in front of the brand every month. The first five years, Matangos also entered every local parade it could find, from the 4th of July to Veterans Day, for an entry fee of between $50 and $100.
The fourth and fifth reasons are closely linked: forgettable service and forgettable marketing. For service, she teaches her team a framework called FORM, standing for Family, Occupation, Recreation, and Message, a structure for having genuine two-to-three minute conversations with customers that connect the restaurant to whatever actually matters to that person sitting at the table. For marketing, the instruction is blunter: if there is nothing new going on, there is nothing to talk about. She advises owners to treat new dishes and seasonal decorations as low-risk experiments, noting that ‘not everything you try is going to crush it. 50% of the time we’re going to see success and 50% of the time we’re going to learn from that experience.’
The San Antonio location that almost stayed flat
One Matangos store in San Antonio, the one with the dip cup reviews, sat in the review data for longer than it should have before the team spotted the pattern.
Enga’s point was not that the location was broken. It was that it was almost fine, and almost fine is exactly where flat sales hide.
