The 10 Secrets To Starting a Food Delivery Business During a Recession
1.
2. The 10 Secrets
To Starting a Food Business
During a Recession
Do you love the food business and dream about having your
own restaurant someday?
But, are you concerned about the economy and wonder if it
could possibly make any sense at all to start a restaurant in
the middle of a recession?
How about customers? Aren’t people cutting back on
expenses and not going out to eat as much as they did just
a few months ago?
What if there was a way to be in the business without the
investment or the risk associated with a restaurant? Would
that interest you?
What if you could make a larger margin than a restaurant
without the 6 or 7 figure capital investment, the risks of long
term leases, the up front cost of outfitting space and buying
equipment, and cost of hiring and training personnel?
There is a way...
This brings us to the first “Secret” of profiting from the
restaurant business during a recession...
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3. The 10 Secrets To Starting a Food Business During a Recession
#1 Don’t start a restaurant
Start a restaurant meal delivery business instead.
A restaurant meal delivery service delivers food for restaurants that don’t offer delivery – which is
most restaurants.
Whether you just got home from a long day at work and have nothing to eat in the fridge, or just
don’t feel like cooking, your options in most places are Domino’s or maybe another pizza place or
two.
What if you are traveling and don’t feel like going out or your hotel doesn’t have room service... Or
maybe it does, and you don’t feel like paying their exorbitant prices for mediocre food...
Instead of a 6 or 7 figure investment with all the other expenses and problems I mentioned at the
start of this report, you can open a delivery business for only $20,000, operate out of your home
with no overhead and be profitable almost immediately.
Even if the number of people wanting delivery or going out to eat has dropped significantly because of
the economy, it won’t matter to you and here’s why....
You don’t need to do a million dollars in revenue to breakeven. You can be profitable at a sales level of
only a few thousand dollars per month!
If a restaurant needs $100,000 in revenue each month to breakeven because of their high fixed costs,
they have a big problem if revenue slips to $80,000 per month.
But if you can be profitable at $100,000 per month, but also have the same profit margins at $50,000
per month, $10,000 per month, or even $5,000 per month, you make money no matter what.
Granted, you make more total profit dollars at a higher level of sales, but as long as you are still
profitable at any level of sales, unlike a restaurant, you are always making money. That’s because most
of your costs vary with sales. In short, you don’t have major fixed overhead like a restaurant.
So, what about consumer demand?
That leads us to secret # 2....
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4. The 10 Secrets To Starting a Food Business During a Recession
#2 Restaurant sales are nowhere near as bad
as the media makes them out to be
We all know that only bad news makes the news.
With all the hype in the media, it would be easy to think the entire restaurant business might be
down 50% over last year... but here are the actual facts as reported by the media itself...
While the last three years have not shown any growth, the overall trend is clear on the following
chart from the National Restaurant Association.
Not even close to down 50%.
Now, while total sales in many restaurants have been
down a bit or stagnant for the last three years, but as I
said earlier, that doesn’t matter for you if you have no
fixed costs...
In fact, the opportunity is great for you to start right
now when everyone else is afraid. Here’s another little
known fact from a survey a couple years ago.
The National Restaurant Association did a survey that
found while 75% of all households would order meals
delivered if they were available from their favorite
restaurant, only 6% of the population had any such
service available to them.
Now, I know the survey is a couple years old, but
the point being made is still valid. There is a huge
opportunity for you to serve an unfulfilled market.
Sometimes people would like something delivered
besides Domino’s.
Your monthly sales will be less to start than they will be
after gaining the repeat business that comes with time. But, isn’t a business that can be profitable
at almost any level of sales the ideal kind of business to start right now?
And here’s something else about a delivery business that is very interesting....
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5. The 10 Secrets To Starting a Food Business During a Recession
#3 Make money off your competitors
If you do decide to open an actual restaurant someday, wouldn’t you like to make a profit off the
meals your competitors sell?
As a delivery service operator, you might deliver for 20 or more different restaurants. This lets you
do four things:
1. Make money off those who will be your competitors when you do open a restaurant by delivering
for them and making a commission on their food.
2. Know exactly the consumer demand for all 20 restaurants you deliver for. Might that be helpful
information in deciding what types of food to offer if you do plan to open a restaurant?
3. Deliver for your own restaurant, thereby increasing your profits substantially.
4. Include ads, coupons, or special offers in your “menu guides” for your own restaurant and any
other restaurant who chooses to buy advertising from you.
Keep the format of your ads the same as those you sell, but you may choose to give your own
restaurant priority placement – and no one needs to know that you got your ads free – or that
you own both the delivery service and a restaurant yourself...
Just think, if you distribute 50,000 menu guides and people keep them by their phone your
menu guide also provides them a reference of places to go when they do want to go out. How
sweet it is to have your competitors paying for your advertising.
One of the biggest problems restaurants have is adapting to changing trends.That leads us to
another advantage you have operating a delivery service.
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6. The 10 Secrets To Starting a Food Business During a Recession
#4 Sell what people want to buy!
One of the largest advantages a well run restaurant meal delivery service has over the restaurants
that it serves is what happens if the economy or consumer preferences change...
Whatever the reason, if the type of food or price point of a restaurant goes out of style, it is
extremely expensive, or even impossible for them to adjust.
A popular restaurant gets known for a certain type of food, atmosphere and price point so that if
it wants to make major changes, it may actually be less expensive to completely close down and
reopen under a different name instead of trying to change what people think you are.
From your point of view as a delivery service operator, if one of the restaurants you deliver for goes
out of style or the economy reduces its demand, you just replace that restaurant with another one
people do want.
In fact, if you have 20 restaurants you deliver for, what happens to any single one does not really
matter...
Here in Denver, one of my favorite high-end restaurants, Ocean, just closed. Within only a few
weeks, the local paper reported that a new restaurant will be opening in the same space soon.
As a delivery service operator, you’d just make a change in your next menu guide, as the owner of
Ocean, you probably just lost over $1 Million – quite a difference, especially considering starting
and staffing that restaurant needed major dollars too...
So now that we’ve covered some of the reasons why a delivery business is an ideal business
for today’s economy and that it will also benefit dramatically as the economy improves, now you
need to know the reasons many of the independent “mom & pop” operators end up going out of
business...
The first one is to...
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7. The 10 Secrets To Starting a Food Business During a Recession
#5 Understand How You REALLY Make Money
That may sound obvious, and it is. But some independent operators do not understand and as a
result, their days are numbered...
You do not make your money from your delivery charges.
So where does your profit come from?
The discount on the food you get from the restaurant.
It’s simple. If you don’t get a big
enough discount, you will fail...
It’s obvious that if your beginning profit margin is not high enough, there’s nothing you can do to
turn it into a profitable business.
While the actual discount percentage and how you get it are a part of the confidential information
we provide in our “review” to people going into the business with us, you should know that the
restaurant can give you a much higher discount than they may think because food sold “out the
back door” doesn’t have the overhead associated with it that food served to sit down diners does.
In fact, after giving you a substantial discount on their food, we can prove to the restaurant owner
that they will make twice the profit after giving you the discount than they make on the people who
come to the restaurant.
And it gets even better for the restaurant owner...
The promotion you do for your business gives him free advertising and more “dine-in” business at
no cost to himself.
And this effectively increases his capacity without any additional expense. The number of meals a
restaurant can serve any evening is normally limited by their seating capacity, not by their kitchen’s
ability to cook food.
So, then what you need to know is to...
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8. The 10 Secrets To Starting a Food Business During a Recession
#6 Understand How To Sign Up a Restaurant
The first place people mess up in starting a delivery business is not understanding the discount
they need and signing up restaurants at too low a margin for themselves.
Once you sign up a restaurant at too low a margin, it can be extremely difficult, if not impossible,
to go back to them and get the proper discount.
Make sure you understand the benefits to the restaurant owner of signing up with you. Show the
owner the numbers – how much of their cost is dependent on people who “dine-in” vs. those who
order for delivery.
Show the owner how you will be promoting both delivery and “dine-in” business by the printing,
mailing and distribution of your menu guides – as well as your Internet promotions.
Some people may use your menu guide to decide where to go for dinner and not order from you
at all...
...and that’s OK.
From the restaurant owner’s point of view, especially in today’s economy, any free promotion he/
she can get should be a good thing...
This is why I can’t emphasize enough that you should not make any presentations to restaurants
until you have all the facts that we provide on our review of the restaurant meal delivery business.
But, that’s not all you need to do, you also need to...
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9. The 10 Secrets To Starting a Food Business During a Recession
#7 Keep Your Overhead Low
You may have come across a franchisee of a former franchisor in the meal delivery business who
did a few things right.
But that franchisor and most of their franchisees are out of business today.
This was due to in part; to the large upfront fees to acquire their knowledge of the business and
even more likely their collapse was due to the operational dictates the franchisor made on the
franchisees. Things like where to office, signage, hours to be open, uniforms, etc. all increased the
sales needed for a franchisee to make money.
Our review gives you the knowledge you need to open a restaurant meal delivery business for
as little as $20,000, not the $100,000 or more for a fancy well appointed office in the “high rent
district”.
Opening a restaurant itself is even more expensive, frequently running into the millions.
Use a desk in your home or a very low rent office in a cheap location (since none of your customers
ever come to you). As a result, your overhead is almost nothing and you can start making a profit
immediately.
You can do the preparatory work such as getting restaurants signed up, finding drivers, and getting
your menu guides and web site set up while still working a job if you want to, and then, when you
are ready to go, mail out your menu guides and be in business within a week.
The key is to...
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10. The 10 Secrets To Starting a Food Business During a Recession
#8 Keep It Simple
Our “review” is aimed at showing you the simplest and least costly ways to perform each function
of a successful restaurant meal delivery business.
One area where a former franchisor and others who have struggled in this business is that they
have over complicated it and spent money on things that are not necessary to make a profit.
The information conveyed in our review will show you various alternative ways you can operate
that we have seen be successful and also plenty of ways that we have seen fail. This advice can
save you several times the review’s cost just by itself.
All in all, you can build quite a substantial business from your home or a small office in a “low rent”
area.
All you need to do is....
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11. The 10 Secrets To Starting a Food Business During a Recession
#9 Pick The Proven Approach
That Fits You Best
There’s no need for you to reinvent the wheel. Our review of the restaurant meal delivery business
provides you systems that work and some that don’t for every aspect of the business. This can
save you years of time and tens of thousands of dollars.
Before Dine-In Delivery’s founder and principle stockholder, John, started the business, he first
bought into an existing operation.
The business had been doing a lot wrong for years and was about to go out of business. Over time,
John worked out all the systems needed to make the business profitable. The knowledge gained
in that turn around is the basis of today’s business review.
Since then, there have been numerous changes and updates to make the systems covered in our
review work even better.
One of the areas where you can spend a lot of money unproductively is in your advertising and
marketing. It’s easy to blow through $10K, $20K or even $30K doing things you think to be obvious
common sense.
The problem is that many of the “obvious” things don’t work.
And, aside from the wasted money, they can also result in months or years of wasted time and
overhead expenses spent while trying to figure out what does work.
And another place where many operators miss the boat is they don’t have the knowledge to make
sure they...
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12. The 10 Secrets To Starting a Food Business During a Recession
#10 Don’t Spend Too Much On The Printing
& Distribution of Your “Menu Guides”
One thing all restaurant meal delivery services have in common is “Menu Guides”.
A menu guide is just a booklet where all the menus and prices are printed from all the restaurants
from whom you offer delivery.
Versions of it are also reproduced on your web site for online ordering.
If you are not intimately familiar with printing and mailing services, you can easily pay way too
much to print and mail your menu guides, significantly hurting your margins.
If you do it right, you might even get them completely paid for by advertisers so you end up getting
them for free!
And, even more important than that is to make sure you...
Don’t Try To Do Everything Yourself
Even if you start off taking the calls as the dispatcher, you might want to consider getting others to
implement the systems in your business so you’re not doing all of the day to day work.
One way to do this is that you might wish to get a minority stockholder to handle some of the
dispatching and driver management for you.
As you may know, employees may show up and they may not – but with their money on the line,
owners are always there – no matter what...
If you use some of what we show you, you may get to the point one of our Operators got to. He
found an equity partner who handled overseeing the day to day operations.
And, oh yes, he still owns 90% of the business.
Now that’s a real business.
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13. The 10 Secrets To Starting a Food Business During a Recession
Understand The “Birds-Eye” View Of The Opportunity
You are very familiar with Domino’s pizza, I’m sure.
They have become a $5 Billion business delivering pizza with hundreds of competitors... Dine-In
Delivery is following their same expansion model to rapidly expand our restaurant delivery service
which has NO national competitors...It only makes sense...
If people are willing to order $5 Billion of pizza – imagine how much they might order of everything
else if it were available.
Domino’s got where they are because of their ability to deliver fresh, hot pizza quickly.
Dine-In Delivery has set up operations so that our Operators can do the same with pizza and
everything else.
No other restaurant meal delivery service company is competing with us nationally. The delivery
services that are out there all operate only in their own local market.
And, even if we do end up with a competitor or two eventually, remember Domino’s got to $5
Billion in sales while having over 100 national competitors.
They showed the difference between a local pizza place and one with a brand name, systems and
a winning concept - $5 Billion in sales.
So if you realize that the really big money in franchising comes from being a multiunit operator,
you may be comforted to know we will license you to operate in another area just by paying the
licensing fee associated with that area. You will not need to pay an additional $17,500 review fee
for your new area.
Do you realize how many DIDs could be in a major metro area?
Take a look in the phone book to see how many Domino’s there are. We have the same issue –
delivering food quickly and hot. That means drivers can’t drive too far between the restaurant and
the customer.
What this means is that in a metropolitan area like Atlanta, it may take 35 or more DID operations
to adequately serve the area.
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14. The 10 Secrets To Starting a Food Business During a Recession
Becoming an “Area Developer”
For a limited time, we are making an incredible offer to a few people who want to be Area
Developers instead of Operators. Unlike most franchises, that require a large financial commitment
to become an Area Developer, the purchaser of a Dine-In Delivery “Business Review” becomes an
Area Developer at no additional cost.
That allows you to earn commissions on anyone you refer who signs up to be either an Area
Developer or an Operator.
In fact, should you choose, you can sell the “review” you purchased from us to someone else, get
all your investment back and still be an Area Developer and participate in the proceeds from the
eventual sale of the parent corporation. You don’t even need to open and operate a DID operation
at all. You can find others to do the operating and oversee the entire operation for you.
How To Personally Profit From The Sale
Of The Parent Corporation
All Area Developers get the opportunity to participate in the eventual sale of the parent company
as though they had a stockholder interest.
You may or may not know that Tom Monaghan sold his 90% interest in Domino’s for $1 Billion.
When we sell Dine-In Delivery, 50% of the sale proceeds will be paid to those who helped make
it happen. Incidentally, should a sale take place, it will not change any rights or opportunities an
Operator or Area Developer has.
And, just to let you know it’s not that far away, the owner, John, knows his way into the offices of
the investment bank that handled the Domino’s sale and a few other investment banking firms.
In short, any number of investment banking firms know major companies who might like to buy us
out long before we have thousands of operators.
Those who get involved now have an unprecedented opportunity to get their money back quickly
and have both the benefit of ongoing operational profits and the back-end “home run” of an
eventual sale.
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15. The 10 Secrets To Starting a Food Business During a Recession
Here’s How To Get Started...
Whether you are interested in being an Operator, an Area Developer or both, contact us now so we
can tell you if your area is available.
Here’s what will happen after you call us at 303-604-6840 or email us at:
Joe@Dine-In-Delivery.com
1. You will get a call from a corporate representative who will answer your questions about the
business and confirm whether the area you would like is still available.
2. If the area you would like is available and you are still interested, our representative will give me a
call and let me know which info package to send you.
3. After you have had some time to review the info, including our two very simple, one page,
agreements, you either call us or we call you to answer any of your questions and to determine
whether you are financially qualified.
4. If you meet the financial qualifications, we will then schedule a time convenient for you and the
owner, and principle stockholder, John Seely, so that he can meet you in person in your area and
spend a half day or more giving you all the confidential proprietary info and financial details
of the business.
5. Should you decide to go forward, John will begin your “Business Review” and schedule a time
at your convenience for a corporate representative to fly out and spend a week with you making
presentations to restaurant owners and/or managers which we have found is the best way for you
to become comfortable answering questions from restaurateurs.
Understand that we are quite different from the typical franchise (we are not a franchise, but a
licensor) because John will share with you, in advance of accepting your check, all the confidential
and financial details of the business.
Most franchisors disclose the type of info we give you, only after you pay your money, not before.
So, take the first step to find out more about the business and give us a call or an email right now!
To Your Success,
Sincerely,
Joe McVoy
VP Marketing
303-604-6840
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16. Dine-InMeal Delivery Service
Delivery
Restaurant
Dine-In Delivery, Inc. P. 303-604-6840
1100 Nautilus Court F. 303-604-6839
Lafayette, CO 80026 E. joe@dine-in-delivery.com
www.dine-in-delivery.com