Burgers, or hamburgers, are a favorite snack among many people. While most people are familiar with hamburger juggernauts like McDonald’s and the like, many prefer to have a burger from a food truck or a much smaller establishment with no overcrowding. This means that there’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs wishing to venture into the burger business to make money. If you’re an entrepreneur, perhaps you might be thinking big. In this case, a burger franchise may be ideal for you, offering an opportunity to make money without putting in all the work required to build a business from scratch. Finding burger franchises for sale means coming up with the funds needed and choosing the right franchise to invest in. However, for those that want to build their own burger business from the ground up, the following is a guide on how to do that.
1. Create Your Perfect Burger
Even before doing research, it’s no secret that breaking into the burger business is incredibly difficult. This is because you have a host of factors working against you right off the bat. Firstly, you’ll need to give customers a good reason why they should choose your burger instead of what they’ve been consuming. Any urban area with a decent population will have many places for people to purchase burgers. This competition is made tougher if there are big burger franchises in town. This means your recipe will have to be unique. To stand out, you may need to tweak your burger recipe to achieve a taste that will keep customers coming back. A taste that is unique to your burger business will go a long way toward creating many repeat customers.
2. Price it Accordingly
A lot of factors will determine your pricing model. Making burgers means you’ll have to have reliable suppliers for the items needed to make them. For instance, you’ll have to contact bakeries that make just the right buns, the meat suppliers for the beef or chicken need, among others. Your costs of acquiring these things will help determine your price. Of course, you’ll have to know about the local competition. Take the time to research the other burger businesses in the area and know their prices. This ensures that customers won’t see your burger business as ripping them off. For instance, if the average price of your competitors’ burgers is $2.30, it doesn’t make sense to price yours at $5.00. It’s always best to remember that most people buy food items based on quality and price, unlike purchasing things like clothes. Setting reasonable prices will help establish your burger business more steadily by encouraging customers to come to your establishment.
If you can afford it, hire a marketing consultant to advise you on the best pricing models. You can then experiment with different prices to see which one gets more positive responses from customers.
3. Choose a Suitable Location
Location is one of those things that seems easy to find when starting a business. That’s until you actually start looking for one. If you want to set up a vibrant burger business, a place with lots of crowds is your best bet. Unfortunately, such a location will most likely have other food businesses already established because the owners will most likely have followed a similar thought process to yours. It always helps to start with your ideal customer in mind. For instance, research has shown that the under-35 crowds make up a significant number of burger consumers. As such, you want a location that gives you the greatest chance of being in the path of this demographic. This means you should look for a place in or around a shopping mall, parks, movie theaters, and any place likely to be frequented by this age group.
An ingenious way of circumventing the location problem is to use a food truck. This is ideal if you’re just starting out and don’t want to incur the costs associated with a multi-year lease. This will enable you to move around a city, thereby giving you a fair chance at experimenting with the different parts of town. Once you discover that business is good in a certain location, you can then go about leasing some space.
4) Promote the Business
Promoting your burger business is a big deal. You want to create as much hype and awareness around your launch as possible. This ensures that many people get to find out about your establishment immediately. If you have the budget, you can pay for tv or radio commercials. Social media is a very influential tool these days. A well-tailored, promotional campaign can do wonders for your burger business from the get-go.
All in all, you need to plan every aspect of your burger business before launch. Things like adherence to state and municipal regulations and acquiring the right licenses and insurance should go hand in hand with the other steps of launching your burger business.