Recurring revenue is important for the security of your business. Nowadays, with more uncertainty to cope with than ever, agencies crave reliable month-to-month revenue that doesn’t involve adding more people.
Our new Restaurant Toolkit is a ready-to-go solution for a specific market. It lets you quickly fill a crucial customer need, then charge monthly for the ongoing benefit that you deliver multiple clients.
The Restaurant Toolkit includes software (an instance of WordPress with a plugin, extensions and themes all ready to go) as well as in-depth documentation for agencies (like this Getting Started Guide) and restaurants.
So the next question is how to attract the right clients with this offering, and what to charge. Let’s look into it.
Positioning – How the Restaurant Toolkit compares to other options
There are several options for a restaurant to start selling online. You can deliver much more than the simplest, while significantly undercutting higher-cost options. Three common choices are:
- Delivery services like UberEats, Just Eat, Foodpanda, etc. These are quick to set up and promise convenience, but they get very expensive very fast (fees easily top 10% per delivery). Smart restaurants use these as a way to be found (as a marketing tool) and then direct repeat customers to their own site by offering discount codes or other enticements.
- Simple SaaS platforms (like GloriaFood or OrderStack) that generally follow a freemium model (plus setup fee). Paid services include credit card transactions, “sales optimized” websites, and other necessities. Restaurants can expect to pay at least $50/month.
- Running a self-managed website, with the technical hassles and distractions that this brings.
Websites that you build with the Restaurant Toolkit can compete with SaaS solutions on cost, but with more flexibility and options. Sites are easy to use and maintain. You could even use the Toolkit as a base for your own SaaS platform.
Your Pitch to Clients
The pitch that we see working the most with prospective restaurants is:
- You needed to be online yesterday.
- It’s likely that the hospitality industry is changing for good, and delivery services will be a fundamental part of operations from now on.
- Receiving orders via phone, WhatsApp, etc is messy and time-consuming.
- We can solve this problem very quickly (possibly tomorrow). You just need to provide details to us (e.g. by completing a form) and we do the rest.
- We keep costs down by limiting customization. It’s possible, but optional, to personalize the website and add additional features.
- If you are already using JustEat or similar, perfect! Use them to be found, pay their hefty fee one time, and then entice customers to use your own site for their next orders (offer a promo code or bottle of wine for example).
- If you refer us to other restaurants, we can trim the setup fee.
Ideally, you will be pitching to restaurants in your local area. You’ll be familiar with their market, including its potential delivery area or takeaway customers. Some early adopters of the Restaurant Toolkit have even set up a central domain with each new restaurant on its own subdomain, building a virtual neighborhood.
Pricing
Simple, ongoing pricing models work best.
Exactly what you charge is up to you, but with the positioning above we’ve seen agencies collect recurring fees that start at around $50/month, and setup fees of a few hundred.
This lets you undercut popular delivery services, position yourself as an attractive competitor to do-it-yourself SaaS options, and easily cover your costs. (The entire Restaurant Toolkit is included in your Cloudways account.) The first $50 that you charge might not seem like much, but that changes when you scale to hundreds of restaurants.
Restaurants that survive the COVID-19 downturn thanks to online trading will never let their digital presence go. This is why the next phase, upselling, is a big deal.
Upselling
Each restaurant website offers you opportunities to generate extra revenue through customizations or enhancements like table reservations, etc.
If your agency has expertise in social media, online advertising, or marketing automation, these are obvious services to sell alongside the Restaurant Toolkit too.
We see the Restaurant Toolkit as a long term SaaS opportunity. We will continue iterating this product, and we’re keen to hear from agencies and end-users about features and functions that would be valuable.
Start now
You could get a demo site up and running today and be holding meetings with restaurants tomorrow.
The first step is to sign up to Cloudways (or login), select a server and then add a new application. Choose Restaurant Toolkit and you’re on your way.
Owais Khan
Owais works as a Marketing Manager at Cloudways (managed hosting platform) where he focuses on growth, demand generation, and strategic partnerships. With more than a decade of experience in digital marketing and B2B, Owais prefers to build systems that help teams achieve their full potential.
