Somebody had to answer the question without driving over.

Twenty years of driving over

Chris opened his first pizza shop in 2006. On Point Pizza, in Narragansett, Rhode Island, is his fourth restaurant and his eighth business, and for most of its life it ran on paper: a day planner, a tip notebook, a whiteboard schedule, an order sheet with two distributors' prices scribbled in the margin. One at a time, each of those moved onto a tablet by the register.

It got built for one reason. Twenty years in, he was still driving over on a day off just to see whether the prep got done and who actually showed up. He wasn't there to work, only to check. Every screen in here started as a question he used to have to walk in to answer.

The ordering side came from the same place. For years everything came off one truck, and the prices were whatever the prices were. Then a second distributor got set up, and the two lists went side by side on the same sheet. The first list came down on its own. Nobody negotiated. The rep just knew he could see it now, and that has never stopped being true.

The phone came later. It was never about having fewer people to answer it. It was the ringing: forty times a night, whoever was closest dropping whatever they were in the middle of, like a Pavlov experiment. When an AI took over the line, it took the better part of a week to work out what had changed. Same people, finishing things. The service he paid for billed him sixty cents a minute, $1,416 in one month, so he built his own.

The orders came last. The online ordering companies wanted a cut of every ticket and kept the customer's phone number for themselves. The delivery apps sat on a tablet nobody watched. So the order page reads the register, the kitchen screen shows everything on one screen, and the customer stays the shop's customer.

Nothing was added because it looked good in a demo. Everything was added because someone on the line asked for it, or because the owner got tired of doing it by hand. His crew, in his words, is about as resistant to change as they come, and every new thing gets a fight. This one they use without being asked.

The name comes off the board. "All day" is the running count, every ticket added up, the number that tells you where you actually stand. That's the whole idea.

Chris is an owner first, and he stays on the owner's side of the table. He decides what goes into SoFire based on what shops need, and the team builds it. That's also why it's sold the way it is: a short call with Chris, then setup done with you, settings and all, so it fits the way your shop already works. If something you need isn't there, say so. Most of SoFire exists because someone did.

On Point switched to SoFire the day it launched, so when we say it runs there, we mean every shift since.

I wanted to stop driving over just to check on the place. When you can't see it from anywhere else, the shop becomes a jail.

Chris, owner, On Point Pizza