One Question Friday: How Do You Scale A Ghost Kitchen Business?

Hey guys, my name is Brian and I'm calling about ghost kitchens. I've first learned about ghost kitchens on the pod, so thanks for that. So I developed a model to implement a couple of ghost kitchen concepts into my restaurant. I had great success, lifted my margins over 450%. 50% over 6 months with just one of the concepts. Now I'm looking to scale the business by offering licensing agreements for operators in other markets to use these concepts, including the branding, recipes, etc. It's very simple. You find an operator that wants a new revenue stream and wants to do a ghost kitchen, and they can start slinging product within a matter of weeks. I've researched the model that much larger companies are using where they leverage celebrities to sell these concepts. My model is better, it's cheaper, and the recipes are second to none in the space. Assuming you didn't have the following and the platform that you do, how would you go about selling this idea to restaurant operators across the nation? Where would you start? Sidebar, I love what you guys do on the pod. Sam, I just signed up for Copy That and I can't wait to get started.

All right, so he owned— here's what I understood. He owns a restaurant and then he added in a ghost kitchen, meaning he like created a ghost brand which is like, what that means is if you go on DoorDash or Uber Eats or one of these delivery apps, you can order from a restaurant, but there's no physical restaurant for that thing. It's just a virtual brand. And his restaurant would then like have the packaging. Like, so let's say my normal restaurant is Sean's Pizza. Well, then I could also have a ghost brand called Sean, you know, uh, you know, Silly Sandwiches and Silly Sandwich. If I get an order from Silly Sandwiches, my restaurant crew will just like package it up as a Silly Sandwich order and it'll be ready to go. And so I'm kind of running multiple restaurants out of one restaurant is the idea.

Well, I think he— well, maybe you weren't going to say this. I was going to say go listen to the episode. Um, he, that what his model was, he had a gym and he was like, all right, how do I get my gym to be more profitable? And then he figured out like a sales method to get his gym. If he opened up a gym, he figured out a sales method that would get him to have a bunch of customers paying high prices and making a bunch of money on a gym. And his friend, uh, at a mastermind one day was like, yo, you need to like not do this. You need, you don't need to open up 50 gyms doing this. You need to go teach other gyms how to do this. Like, Your product isn't the gym, it's a sales process to make any gym more profitable. And so that's what he did. Then he created Gym Launch, which would basically advertise, say, hey, are you a gym owner? I can help you make an extra $100,000 a year guaranteed, um, using my sales method to get you more customers paying higher prices. And they'd be like, all right, cool. And then he would fly out to that gym and he would spend the next, I don't know, couple weeks or whatever. Implementing that process so that they would then have more revenue, more customers coming in using his thing. And he would teach them, hey, here's how you do it. Here's your offer. Here's your Facebook ads. When they come in, here's your sales script. Then you sign them up for a free trial. Then here's how you close them. Then here's how you upsell them protein powders and this other stuff. Here's how you upsell them training packages. That's the, that's the sales process. And he built a multimillion dollar business doing that. If you did that for restaurants, to teach them how to do this. That sounds like a business.

100% no-brainer. That's what I would do. Except, so you said that Alex would fly out there. Eventually he wasn't actually flying out there. Eventually it was basically— it, it's not fair to call it a course, but he would— it, that was part of it. So he would teach you stuff, but then also he would be like, here's the Facebook ads, like I've already made them for you. You can use my Facebook ads that I already made. Here's the drip email sequence. Here's the script that we use. Here's everything. And And then he would say, oh, by the way, if you don't want to do this and you just want me to run the ads, fine, pay us and we'll do it. And here's how you sell protein. You want to sell protein. And by the way, the protein that sells best, we just went and bought it. So we already own it. So if you want to be up, get on a subscription and we'll just send it to you and here's how you sell it. We'll just go ahead and do all that for you anyway. So I would 100% do that. We, on that pod, we go, Alex, what's a good market for a gym launch buffer blank? And we actually didn't have that many good answers. The answer is this restaurant business. This is the answer.

This is a great, this is a great example. And like, lucky for, you know, our, our buddy here, Ryan, we're calling him for a second, um, that there's like a pretty great blueprint to follow, right? Like there's a blueprint that he was very public about how he did it. He's now exited the business. And also, by the way, this is what his business does now is it invests in other people doing this model. And he's like, dude, I already know how to do this. I can, Scale it up. Now you have to be at some scale before he'll do it, but like he gives away the free content, um, on how he structured Gym Launch to do, to be able to do this. So that's, I think what you should do, which is like Restaurant Launch or Ghost, the ghost kitchen process, the ghost kitchen system, which is basically, hey, if you're a, if you're an independent restaurant and trust me, it's tough. Foot traffic's tough with COVID It's tough. It's blah, blah, blah. Everyone's ordering delivery. Um, here's how you can increase your margins, blah, blah, blah. Here's how I did it. You kind of open up your financials and you say, look, I was making $32,000, you know, um, a quarter doing it this way. Now I make $58,000 and that extra bit is from my ghost kitchen concept and here's how I do it. And basically they can either pay you for the course on how they can do it, or you'd hit 'em with the Alex Hormozi where you're like, if this sounds too complicated, I can also do it for you. And if you qualify, I'll do it for you. What he did was risk-free. He's like, here's my offer for you. You pay me nothing. I only get money once I've increased your sales by over $30,000, $50,000. So once you've made that much more money off this, then I get to get my cut of 30% of whatever the total is that, that we get. And I'm so confident that I'm gonna be able to raise your sales that I'll do that for you. I'll take the risk on that. How does that sound? And they were all like, yeah, you're gonna fly out here. You're gonna implement your process. It's worked for you. And you're saying that I only pay you once I'm making all this extra money. That's a pretty, pretty damn good offer. And so you could do a similar thing for the restaurant business.

I saw a guy the other day do a sales process where he was like trying to sell, uh, a service just like this. And the, let's just say the restaurant owner was like, eh, I don't know if I wanna do that. And he goes, that's fine, but how about this? We, you implement what I say and, uh, if it works, I get a split of the revenue. And the guy goes, great, I'm 100% do that. What's the split?. And then the seller goes, well, how about 50/50? And the buyer goes, I don't know, man, that's a lot. And the seller goes, well, but I'm, I'm, you know, it's 50/50. It's free money for you. I'm doing all the work. And the guy goes, well, what if it blows up? You know, like you're gonna get a lot of money. And the seller goes, you know, I think you're right. Well, he goes, he goes, it might blow up, but I'll tell you what, you might be right. Fine. We'll go back to the original deal. You only gonna pay $5,000. And the guy goes, okay, fine. It was like the best sales sequence. Like, it totally worked. I was like, oh my God, that's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, I would totally do this business as well. I think that's way better. I would continue running the main thing just so you're in the know and like getting results that you could post to social media. But that's what I would do too. Are there any other industries that jump out now that this could work for? Probably physical, probably physical therapists. I would imagine doctors' offices and physical therapists.

I think maybe barbers, real estate brokers. So, um, every real estate broker is like running their own little small business, um, sometimes as part of a brokerage, sometimes their own brokerage. And, uh, there's a whole process to basically like, hey, you should leave Caldwell Banker. They're taking half of your commission. Um, I spun out my own. Here's how I did it. Here's how much more I make. And I will spin you out, um, of this big brokerage firm. I'll set up your website. I'll set up your back office legal, legal structure. I'll set up your marketing package. I'll show you exactly how this all works. And, you know, like instead of Caldwell Baker taking half of your commission, I will take 5% of your commission, you know, to do this. So I think you could basically— I think selling a sales system is a— is a pretty good business to be in in general.

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's like very, very high margin. I think that a lot of course businesses top out at a certain level. I think when you're selling a sales cycle or a sales product like this, I don't think you're— I think the cap is way higher.

By the way, also, now that Alex Hormozi is not doing Gym Launch, you could also just do Gym Launch again. Like, you know, now that he's like checked out doing other shit, like, you know, you could have always competed with him, but like he put a playbook out there, he exited the company. There's— it's still running, but like you could just do it again. You could literally recycle his business. I think this is so underrated, just recycling business ideas. Um, once the person has exited and, you know, they've let their foot off the gas or they've expanded, they've moved upmarket, it's like they just leave you an exact playbook on what to do. And, um, more often than not, that timing still will work.