Evan Carmichael advises Rakesh on testing a new hamburger concept without opening a store. Partner with an existing business that serves your target customers through a pop-up or booth, using revenue-share or rental agreements. Shoe companies at Toronto salsa events do this to test demand and collect feedback cheaply.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm answering a question from one of my readers, Rakesh, who wrote a really long email, very detailed, which is awesome. Basically wants to know, he's creating a new business that has a new type of hamburger and wanted my advice on how to test it because creating the stores are expensive and he wanted to see if people would pay for the this special hamburger or not. So, great way of thinking. You don't want to just go up and open up a store, especially in the fast food business. Very expensive, very time-consuming, and high failure rates if you're not part of a franchise system. The best way to test it is partner up with somebody who's already either selling some kind of food product or selling to your target market. So, I try to scout an ideal location, find somebody who is already in that space, who's targeting your same Customers, the ideal market, so I don't know who your ideal market is for these burgers, if it's young professionals, men, women, whatever the mix is, find a location where all these people are hanging out and then go to someone who's already selling something to them in that location. I try to approach an entrepreneur who you can talk to one-on-one instead of a franchise type of company or bigger corporation because they probably won't give you the time of day, and try to figure out a way to partner up with them. and I would either look at doing a one-day kind of promotion to say, "Hey, for one day we have these special hamburgers coming in. Here's all the benefits of them. Come check it out." Or some kind of small-scale operation where you have a booth or a table within their store, and you're selling it, and the pitch is you're going to help promote them. You're going to bring people into their store as well. You want to do some kind of partnership on this. It can either be they take some kind of cut of the revenue that comes in, Or they may just let you have the space for a little bit of time because you're going to help bring people into the store, or you pay some kind of rent for having a booth set up. As an example, on a smaller scale, at the salsa studio that I'm a part of, it's Toronto Dance Salsa, they'll have events every, or multiple times a week, like 3 times a week there's an event. And sometimes we'll have up to 300 people coming out to the events. We'll make partnerships with shoe companies. So these people have shoes they want to sell to the salsa dancers, we have the salsa dancers, and the shoe company will come in and set up a booth outside and they'll sell their shoes. And sometimes there's a fee to do that, and sometimes it's just for the promotion. So depending on how big the event is, if it's a smaller event, it could just be for the promotion. So the shoe company promises to send out some emails and Facebook notices to their audience to say, hey, I'm gonna be at Toronto Dance Salsa, come check us out. And they get a spot outside the booth. And it doesn't bring revenue to the business, but it brings students and brings people out to the school. So that could be you, right? So this company doesn't have enough funds or is too small to set up their own shoe store, and they're testing out the market, and it's an easy, cost-effective way to promote the business and see if it's gonna work or not. So I'd go and approach these locations. Again, try to talk to the entrepreneur themselves, it's easier to deal with, and try to find a structure where it's either a one-day or special event type of thing, or you have a little booth or table within their store, and it's a great way to test out that location, test out your hamburger, see if people like it or not, see if you need to change the recipe or not, and you're doing all of that on a really low budget instead of going out and opening up your own store with all the costs, expenses, and risks that are associated with it. So hopefully that helped. Great question. I love the finding a way to bootstrap angle to it. It's awesome and should be more widely adopted, I think, by entrepreneurs. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. Always, I just wanna do more for you. And if you have a question about this video or comment or question about your own business or challenge you're facing, feel free to leave in the comment section below. I always read those. I love seeing them come in. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.
