Life as the owner of a takeaway business is hard. You’re up against all the big names in fast food as well as competing with all the other small and midsized businesses in your area. This means that you need to make your business as appealing and profitable as possible.

How can you do this without spending big cash? Here are five frugal ways to make your takeaway a real success.

#1 Figure Out Pricing

There’s a very, very thin line between being competitively priced and turning a profit and as a takeaway owner you need to find out exactly where this is. With fast food restaurants, pricing plays a huge part in your success – too cheap and you’ll go broke, too expensive and you’ll lose customers.

Take some time to work out how much each meal costs to make, factoring in the price of the ingredients, cost of fuel, salary of the chef and price of any packaging like greaseproof paper sheets. Once you know exactly how much each meal costs you can work out what kind of profit you want to make from each sale. This sounds simple, but you’d be amazed by how many people skip this step.

#2 Find the Best Suppliers

Being able to choose quality and quantity is key to success, but finding the right supplier for this can be difficult. It always pays off to scour the market to find out the standard that every supplier offers and then pitch quality against price – DO NOT simply go for the cheapest supplier; it may seem like the best option but often the cheapest suppliers also provide the lowest quality items and may not provide the best continuity.

For obvious reasons, your food packaging suppliers should provide you with great quality products, but don’t forget your packaging! This is the first impression that your customers get, so you should be doing everything possible to ensure that it’s a good one. Good quality fast food packaging can make a huge difference to your business and it doesn’t have to cost the earth either.

#3 Target Your Customers

Who are your customers? If you’re constantly serving beer bears then your service will have to be completely different to if your customer base is mainly health freaks.

This means that you should be looking at changing your menu in order to provide a range of products that will sell like hot cakes. You should also phase out items that aren’t particularly popular, helping to cut loses due to wasted stock while increasing your sales by creating items that your target customers will want!

#4 Widen Your Delivery Area

Do you currently deliver? If not, this is a great way to expand your customer base as people love being able to order food from the comfort of home. Already delivering? Expand the area that you deliver to, even if it’s just by 5 miles you will be surprised by how many additional customers you’ll have calling for a takeaway.

Be careful here however, as having a delivery area too large can mean longer waiting times and even food that’s cold upon arrival. Do a couple of test runs to certain areas before opening this up as an option. Remember, it pays off to invest in good quality hot boxes to keep the food tasty until it reaches the destination.

#5 Promote Yourself

This may not strictly be a ‘fast’ was to enhance your takeaway, but once in place you should start to see results very quickly. Get on social media, build a website and start getting your customer’s phone numbers and email addresses. Keep your customers updated on any special offers, discounts and anything else that’s happening in store.

Another approach is to use a third party website like Just Eat to bring in more customers. This isn’t a free service, but by using approach #1 to running your business you can adjust prices and profit margins enough to reap the rewards.
 
Finally, remember to always look at your business from a customer’s point of view. If your competition offers something better then you should try to match or better them, but without risking damage to profits. Following all these tips will help put you on the road to success. Get in touch and let’s discuss how you can maximize the success of your brand.
 

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