137 – Building a Restaurant Take Out business to survive the Coronageddon

The last episode looks at how Restaurants have become entrepreneurial startups.  We look at has changed with leadership, runway and reengineering for your Restaurant to survive the next 8 – 12 weeks.

Take Out in the age of COVID19.

Today we discuss how to build a sustainable take out business to survive.  With Restaurants now forced to turn to Take Out or to shut down completely, many Restaurants are scrambling to get a sustainable take out business. We are seeing all sorts of Restaurants transitioning to Take Out only, many looking at Take Out for the first time.

We discuss:

  • Take Out vs Delivery
  • Pricing – less important than it used to be.
  • Using Aggregators like UberEats and Just Eat.  What are the risks and opportunities?
  • Menu – you shouldn’t have all of your dine in menu on a take out or delivery system.
  • Repurposing your FOH team to deliveries.
  • Building Customer Loyalty with order X times get a free meal.  This is a no brainer and has a marked impact on customer retention.
  • Restaurant Loyalty Graphs.  How well are you retaining customers.  We are seeing some new customers order 2 or 3 times a week or more.  This is what you want.
  • How to market you Take Out system.  Restaurant Marketing has changed fundamentally in the last 2 weeks.  What is working today in Restaurant Marketing?

Please check out FROLO as you try to transition your customers to a free online ordering system – it is the perfect way to transition from Uber Eats orders that you are paying 30% commission for.

Check out our free restaurant online ordering system.  It’s free, integrates with Stripe and notifies you on mobile, PC, email and Epson TM-82 docket printer.  We are giving it away free to help you survive through the Corona Crisis.

Getting your Delivery system right is critical.  Some Restaurants are doing 50% on a Wednesday night than they used to do on a Friday night.

There are a lot of people stuck at home and it is natural for them to order out for delivery or pickup.  (I picked up some burgers last night! 🙂 )

We expect over the next 2 weeks to see many Restaurants close temporarily or permantly.  There will still be a lot of customers buying meals, so we expect profitability to go up for Restaurants that can survive the next 2 weeks.

To help you through the crisis, we have our Free Restaurant Tools, and if you need more help, contact the team about our special marketing assistance program during the Coronavirus outbreak.  FROLO signups have jumped up quite a lot as Restaurants look to go to delivery or pickup only.

Have a listen to the podcast and see what concepts Restaurants have been dealing with this week.

Check out the Secret Sauce podcast shownotes for more information on this episode.



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