Category: Customer Acquisition

I had some technical problems and couldn’t join the meeting.

I received impatient text messages: “Are you joining? We’re waiting for you. We need to talk.” It was the June board meeting where we were supposed to discuss sales results for the last period. Once I managed to join, there was nothing pleasant waiting for me. Everyone had stern faces, and the message was simple—sales are poor. Fixed costs are eating us alive. We need something to turn things around.

In the team, I am responsible for marketing and sales. I’d tried everything before—collaborating with Google Ads experts, Pinterest, influencers. We even took out ads on streetcars and buses, which are trendy among caterers. My stomach would knot up, as we were constantly spending money on advertising without results. I started wondering if doing nothing would at least save what we were already spending on customer acquisition.

While eating lunch one day, I found myself watching random YouTube videos. Autoplay was on, and since my hands were busy eating, I let the video play. It was something about physics, light concentration, and lasers. I wasn’t particularly interested, but thought, “let it play.” Then, the narrator said, “Light is harmless. But if concentrated into a single beam, it creates a laser that can cut through almost anything.” He went on about its industrial and medical uses, but it hit me—my efforts were like scattered sunlight. What I needed was to “focus” them into a single beam!

So, I chose Facebook Ads. First, the Meta platform includes both Facebook and Instagram, two of the most popular platforms. Second, these channels allow you to create demand, not just satisfy it, as with search engines. I decided not to rely on any agency, consultant, or external expert. I would learn everything myself, so if I failed, I’d only have myself to blame.

I joined groups of international Facebook ad specialists, was active on most forums, read tutorials, and bought highly-rated courses. I kept trying and spent money on both education and the ad budget. But the results still weren’t as expected. Eventually, I realized the problem wasn’t the ads.

Advertising, at its core, is paying an intermediary—Meta, in this case—to display the message we want to convey. There’s more to it, of course—algorithms, content matching, targeting—but ultimately, it boils down to three components:

1. Advertiser : Someone paying to display a message.
2. Platform (Facebook) : Interrupts people’s activities to show that message.
3. Customer : Does something unplanned, like buying your product.

An ad that doesn’t work is usually advertising a poor offer. Can you sell snow to an Eskimo? Sure, but it’ll take some extra incentives. You might be thinking, “but my offer is excellent; I made it myself!” I felt the same. The key is understanding that neither you nor I are our own customers, and we can’t rely on assumptions. By “offer,” I mean everything involved: product, service, price, delivery method. It’s about perceived value versus expected price. There is no such thing as an “objective price.” This is particularly evident in the restaurant business, where raw materials are only a small fraction of the final price customers pay. We pay for the chefs’ skill, unique experiences, ambiance, and so on. Whenever someone asks me, “what’s the one thing I can do to improve my ad effectiveness?” my answer is, “make your offer more attractive.”

So, I took my own advice. We analyzed everything we could do to lower the product’s price and increase customers’ satisfaction with the taste of the dishes. That’s how Cebulka Catering was created:

• Traditional Menu : Composed solely of traditional dishes. First, it’s the most popular cuisine in Poland. Second, it has a lower food cost than those including imported ingredients.
• Delivery Every Other Day : We only deliver on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. This raised concerns about freshness, but most caterers deliver similarly for weekends, and it allowed us to cut transport costs in half.
• Menu of 14 Dishes Instead of 50 : This is faster to cook and thus cheaper. It’s also easier to remove dishes that customers don’t enjoy.
• One Diet Plan—Classic : Eventually, a Meatless option was added. This allowed us to keep the menu short and costs low.

We launched in August 2023 with an offer of “PLN 39 for 3 dishes, 1000 kcal, free delivery.” Despite the very low price, we still had a 20-25% gross margin.

Results? The cost of acquiring a new customer dropped to 1/3 of what it was with our other brand! Of course, we earn nominally less on each day with Cebulka than with Primate.

However, the cost of customer acquisition dropped by almost 70%, compensating for the margin decline. It was time to create a repeatable method from this. And so, the Flambia Facebook Ads System was born. It’s still in use today, in both our business and the businesses of people I’ve trained or managed advertising for.

The Flambia Facebook Ads System method consists of four modules:

1. Business Assumptions : What defines profitable advertising?
2. Technical Configuration : How to make this system work.
3. Data Panel Configuration : Setting up the data in Facebook Ads to display the necessary metrics.
4. Creative Optimization : Creating effective ads.

Business Assumptions

In this section, we ask what makes advertising profitable. What should we aim for before even launching Ads Manager?

• Starting Budget : The monthly budget should be at least 10 times the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
• Defining Customer Acquisition Cost : The acquisition cost should equal the Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer.
• Calculating Lifetime Value : LTV is always considered over a specific period, depending on how long we’re willing to wait for the investment to pay off. The longer we’re willing to wait for a return, the higher the value. A typical LTV period is one year. We calculate it by dividing the value of all transactions by their number in a given period. For example, Primate had 3101 customers over the year, who spent a total of PLN 6,384,642.36 with a gross margin of about 35%.

Use this information and optimize ads for Cost Per Result. The goal is not “maximum conversions,” but “maximum conversions at a set customer acquisition cost.” While this doesn’t guarantee conversions within the set cost, if the offer and ads are weak, no algorithm will make the cost desirable. What will happen, however, is that less will be spent on days when the algorithm can’t find an audience that meets the goal at the set cost. It’s better for your budget to go unspent than to be wasted.

Always optimize for purchase from the start. Facebook doesn’t need a warm-up or learning period. It has better information about us than we do ourselves. Are you optimizing for clicks or traffic? Facebook will find you clickers and visitors, but no one will buy anything.

Technical Configuration

This section ensures that our data pipeline is secure and information exchange is fast and complete.

1. Make sure the following options are enabled. Cookies transmit information about users, which helps algorithms better display your ads. With iOS blocking cookies, ad blockers increasing, and data transmission issues, much of this data is lost. If Facebook doesn’t know someone bought something, it assumes they didn’t buy. If it assumes they didn’t buy, it doesn’t show ads to that type of person. For this reason, we want 100% correct data. Check that all the following options are enabled.
2. The absolutely essential tool is the Conversion API . Here’s a brief explanation of advertising technology: imagine training a dog. It’s not very different from training an algorithm—you reward desirable behavior and withhold rewards for undesirable behavior. Imagine a situation where the dog sits as commanded, but you throw the treat where it can’t see it. The dog thinks it did something wrong and gets confused.
3. Configure a Custom First Purchase Conversion event. Why is this important? Facebook, like any other advertising tool, is designed to get you new customers. You don’t want to pay Facebook, Google or anyone else for selling to existing customers. Read more about this in the article. Why shouldn’t you look at buying? Because the attribution window is 7 days. What does this mean? If you acquire a customer with an ad and in 2 days they deposit money, that will also be counted as coming from the ad. We are interested in customers , not transactions.

Create audience groups. We will use these for targeting – to tell the algorithm who to pay more attention to and who to avoid. In the first instance, we want to reach people who know us, but only those who haven’t bought. We want to reach new customers:

1. A customer base – all the people who are on your list should be fed back to the audience via the API on a continuous basis. This is the most accurate data. Data should be passed along with transactional values (value-based audience)
2. Lookalike Audience 5% of Customer Base – 5% of people from the population most similar to those who made a purchase
3. Purchase 180 – people who have made a purchase in the last 180 days. This data will be less accurate and won’t have as much information as the above, but there’s nothing to further exclude us if Facebook didn’t catch someone above
4. Lead 180 – people who have left their contact details in the last 180 days. We don’t want to spend money to contact people we can reach for free.
5. Website Visitors 180 – people who have visited your website in 180 days
6. Instagram 360 – people who have interacted with your Instagram account in 360 days
7. Facebook 360 – people who have interacted with your fanpage in 360 days
8. Facebook Like/Follow – people who currently like or follow your profile

Setting up the Data Panel

Now that the data is collecting correctly, we now need to set up the panel to look at the data correctly. What we are interested in starts at the very top. The order of the data may vary from path to path. I show my setup below. In some shops it may look different, e.g. add to cart or start checkout then leave contact details (lead):

1. Amount Spent – The total amount spent on a particular ad. This is the amount of money you have spent on promoting this particular campaign.
2. First Purchase – The number of new customers you acquired from the ads.
3. Cost per First Purchase – The cost of acquiring one new customer generated by an advertisement. It is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on advertising by the number of First Purchase events.
4. Purchase ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) – The return on ad spend, expressed as the ratio of the revenue generated by the ad to the amount spent. If your ad generated £2,000 in revenue for a spend of £500, the ROAS is 4:1. I’ve talked about this before – two things are important to us – whether the campaign is profitable and whether it is fluid. Profitable is when the CPA is below LTV. Liquid is when the value of the first payment is higher than the cost of customer acquisition. Then we will never run out of money to advertise.
5. Lead Conversion Rate – The percentage of people who converted to the number of people who visited the landing page. This is a metric that shows how many of the leads acquired actually make a purchase. It is calculated by dividing the number of purchases by the number of leads acquired. This is an important metric because it allows you to assess the effectiveness of your campaign not only in generating leads, but also in converting those leads into actual customers. This answers the final, most important question – is my offer attractive? The minimum is 3%.
6. Leads – The number of people who have left their contact details (e.g. email) in exchange for something of value that you offer, such as an e-book or webinar. Never build a house on rented land. I wrote about this in the article
7. Cost per Lead – The cost of acquiring one lead. It is calculated by dividing the total ad spend by the number of leads acquired.
8. Lead Conversion Rate – The percentage of people who convert (e.g. purchase or leave data) to the number of people who visited the landing page. You create this metric by dividing Leads by Landing Page Views. This is the third important question on the path – is your offer consistent with your Facebook message and attractive enough for me to leave my contact details? The minimum is 20%.
9. Landing Page Views – Number of landing page views. Indicates how many times users who clicked on the ad visited your page.
10. Cost per Landing Page View – The cost per landing page view . It is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on advertising by the number of landing page views.
11. Outbound Clicks – The number of ad clicks that redirected the user to an external page (not directly related to Facebook).
12. Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate) – The click-through rate on external links. It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks on external links by the number of ad impressions. This answers the second important question – are you encouraging people to take action and leave the site? The standard for video is 1-3%
13. Cost per Outbound Click – The cost per click on an external link. This is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on the ad by the number of clicks on the external link.
14. Video Average Play Time – The average time a video is played by users. As well as attracting attention, does the video make people watch it and take action?
15. 3-Second Video Plays – The number of video plays lasting at least 3 seconds.
16. Scroll Stop Ratio – Scroll Stop Ratio . An indicator showing how many people stopped scrolling the page and stopped on your ad. You have to create this metric yourself and it is a ratio of 3 second impressions. This is the answer to the first important question – are you attracting attention? It is calculated by dividing the number of 3-second impressions by the number of impressions (ad impressions). The minimum is 30%.
17. Reach – The number of unique users who saw your ad.
18. Impressions – The total number of impressions of your ad. Can be greater than the number of unique users if the same user has seen your ad more than once.
19. CPM (Cost per Mille) – The cost per thousand impressions of your ad. It is calculated by dividing the total cost of the campaign by the number of impressions and then multiplying by 1,000. For Facebook advertising, we pay not for conversions, not for clicks, but for the number of views of our material. The unit of account is 1,000 impressions, i.e. unavoidable ad impressions. What does CPM depend on? We need to answer what is the interest of the platform. Facebook’s interest is that people spend as much time on the platform as possible. This will happen if the content is engaging for them. An advert is usually displayed every 4 posts. Let’s say each of us scrolls through 40 posts before we switch off the app. This means that Facebook has gained the opportunity to expose 10 ads. If it encourages us to scroll an additional 4 posts, it gains the opportunity to display an additional ad. To summarise: Display ad = Facebook product Longer time on the platform = Facebook sells more products (displays more ads) If you help Facebook make people stay longer on the platform because your content makes people happy – you’ll pay less per display because Facebook will have more products (ads to display) If there are a lot of businesses in the same category besides you, the number of ‘windows’ in which they can show you to that group of people is limited. Whoever pays the most will win. The more companies bidding for the attention of that particular audience, the more you will pay.
20. Display ad = Facebook product
21. Longer time on the platform = Facebook sells more products (displays more ads)
22. If you help Facebook make people stay longer on the platform because your content makes people happy – you’ll pay less per display because Facebook will have more products (ads to display)
23. If there are a lot of businesses in the same category besides you, the number of ‘windows’ in which they can show you to that group of people is limited. Whoever pays the most will win. The more companies bidding for the attention of that particular audience, the more you will pay.
24. Quality Ranking – A rating of the quality of an ad based on various indicators such as interactions, click-through rates, etc. A higher rating means a better quality ad compared to the competition.
25. Engagement Rate Ranking – An assessment of how engaged users are with an ad. A high rating means that the ad is more engaging than other ads.
26. Conversion Rate Ranking – An assessment of the conversion rate of an ad. A higher rating means that the ad is more effective at converting views into actions (e.g. purchases, sign-ups).

Creative optimisation

Here it’s all about what we have to communicate and who has to listen. If you don’t have anything interesting to say, then even if you were speaking to your ideal client, they won’t understand that you have what they are looking for. The other way round, on the other hand, if the message is one that takes my breath away, even though I hadn’t even considered your product before, there’s a good chance I’ll buy it. Let the one who has never bought anything unnecessary in his life just because I thought it was cool raise his hand.

Stage I: Before we have the winning creations

1. Our goal is to identify what reaches our audience as quickly as possible. We define a winning ad as one that has a minimum of 10 conversions at a cost below our target CPA, which is less than the LTV.
2. We use Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO), or campaign-level budget optimisation. Why? Because Facebook has more data than we do about which ad set and which ad is likely to meet the target.
3. We should promote one offer per campaign. If we want to advertise ‘organise a wedding with us’ and ‘drop in for lunch’, these are two completely different offers. They should not be in one campaign or on one page.
4. We divide the campaign into creative angles. Each creative angle = a person ad set (ad set). The same product can be bought for different reasons. In catering, we have separate ad sets for people: Wanting to lose weight, Wanting to save time Looking for cheap food Fond of homemade flavours Do not eat meat
5. Wanting to lose weight,
6. Wanting to save time
7. Looking for cheap food
8. Fond of homemade flavours
9. Do not eat meat
10. You can give 5 texts, headlines and descriptions to each ad. I recommend doing this for each creative angle.
11. In the initial stage, try to make the ads as different from each other as possible. If I had to bet on which ad would work and which wouldn’t – I would lose all my money. The only solution is to come up with all sorts of things and see if they work. You really have no idea what might work. In our case, the absolute best-selling ad of all time was a simple phone photo of a crumpled bag standing on a table taken just like that, hand-held. It worked, I think, because people couldn’t imagine that a catering bag could be un-creased, instead of ironed like a stock photo, and a lot of people stopped by the ad and commented.

Stage II: Once we have a winning creation

If the creative is a winner, i.e. it has more than 10 conversions at the target CPA, then we do three things:

1. We try to create very similar creatives, but different. E.g. we had a photo, try to make an animation. We had a red background, try yellow. There was a woman in the photo, give a man.
2. We check if the ad would do even better in an ad set with different targeting. What is key is to copy the Post ID of the ad. If we create a new one, all the engagement gathered under the post: reactions, comments, shares – will disappear.
3. We increase the budget and look to see if the ad maintains the parameters with a higher spend

I have realised that customer acquisition is not as difficult as I thought before, if I already know where to focus my attention. I spend less time on advertising than I did before, but simply put, all my actions are effective, I follow a plan – I just know what I’m doing. I associate this with jiu-jitsu, which I have been training since 2001. A person who comes to the first training session literally after a while is all jazzed up. This is not because she is inferior in fitness, she just knows how to use her energy effectively yet. I’m sure if I went to play with someone who had even a little bit of tennis experience, I’d be covered in sweat and my opponent wouldn’t even take off his sweatshirt because he’d be so cold. It’s the same with adverts – at first we click everywhere we can, then we know which metrics to focus our attention on.

All the time it seemed extremely intricate to me. I watched all sorts of amazing case studies showing impressions, reach, clicks. I never understood, what impact does this have on the product I want to sell? If you also felt confused, know that this is simply a smokescreen. Although these figures don’t say much, they look impressive. They serve as a veil for the lack of ability to explain simply and to take responsibility for what matters – selling.

Once I understood this and we implemented the above method, the Cebulka’s sales began to grow exponentially. We reached nearly £1 million in sales within 4 months of launch using mainly Facebook ads.

What was surprising was that a side effect was the increased satisfaction of our customers. By constantly thinking about what we could do to improve the quality and keep costs low at the same time, we have a 4.7 rating on Google Maps at the time of writing this article – that’s how much people have come to love the Cebulka.

If you have to remember one thing from this article, remember this story Your responsibility is to create an offer that people will want to buy. If it doesn’t sell, you have an offer problem, not an advertising problem. The offer is something you improve all the time. I created the Culinary Entrepreneur Accelerator based on this experience. It’s a programme where I share all the knowledge I’ve gained both in terms of optimising ads and optimising foodcosts. Hiring email marketing specialists and hiring chefs. All the things I have learnt in 15 years of being an entrepreneur, 5 of them running diet catering.

I spent close to 3 million PLN on advertising budgets, tools, team, finding the most optimal configurations. I tested hundreds of tools, advertising channels. I invested in creating Flambia software, which uses all my knowledge to make running a catering business the simplest and most effective. There were times when revenues grew, but there were also times when I was close to bankruptcy. It cost a lot of time and emotion.

There was a runner after whom the Bannister Effect was named. For all time it was believed that it was impossible for a person to run faster than 4 minutes for 1 mile. The impossibility of this was confirmed by various experts, doctors citing anatomy. Bannister was the first man to run under 4 minutes. Later that year, several other runners broke the barrier. Since that achievement there have been thousands of such runners, and the current world record is 3:45. The effect says that at first something seems impossible, but when someone does it and shows you how, it doesn’t seem so difficult. The same is true here. I’m not saying that running a catering business is easy, it’s the hardest thing I’ve done. However, I am claiming that it can be easier, much easier. Provided one has the tools and knowledge to focus one’s attention on the right things, like a laser beam. What took me years before, now takes days or even hours.

You can enjoy your business without experiencing the same frustrations I did. Polish Your Cooking and Foodtech.ac, among others, have benefited from my knowledge. I paid tens of thousands of zlotys for the courses alone, and several million for the advertising budget. The second amount I invested in the development of the company. If this were to provide you with the joy of running your business and financial peace of mind, is it worth it? Join the Culinary Entrepreneurs Guide. There is one condition, I am only looking for motivated entrepreneurs who want to grow their business. Those who take action. The payoff is commitment and a promise that you won’t stop working on your business, because if you’re running it, like me you’re passionate about it.

If you are motivated, joining is free. Don’t click if you don’t want to work. If you’re not happy – you can unsubscribe.

How long have you been struggling with challenges in your business? Don’t put off making a decision. Imagine you’ve finally found the support you’ve been looking for, and when you do – email me. I’m happy if you find I’ve helped you. Sign up now.

Where to go next

This is one piece of a bigger move: adding a prepaid meal-plan line to the kitchen you already run. When you are ready to land your first paying subscribers, the First-Customer Kit is the step-by-step playbook.

The two most common reasons why restaurant owners think advertising doesn’t work for them are distraction and a lack of clear objectives. It’s hard to blame them, it’s not something they teach in school, and I’ve never met a high level advertising agency that takes responsibility for what they do. I’m not saying there aren’t any, there certainly are. I just think there are very few.

Agencies often talk about ROAS (return on ad spend). This is not the metric you should be looking at. You don’t care about having the highest ad spend. Then you only need to show advertising to customers who already know your brand and either have bought in the past or would have bought without advertising. There are two metrics you should look at, especially with paid advertising:

1. Profitability (ratio of lifetime value to customer acquisition cost).
2. Liquidity

The first ratio tells you whether the cost of acquiring customers is justified. If this ratio is negative, you should change your operations.

The second indicator tells us whether we are not losing cash flow during customer acquisition. A good scenario is when the value of the customer’s first transaction (revenue) is greater than the cost of advertising. The ideal situation is when the profit (after deducting the cost of producing the product, service or, more generally, the gross margin) from the first transaction is greater than the cost of the advertising spent to acquire it. This is not always possible, and a company that has the financial resources, e.g. in the form of working capital loans, to invest in customer acquisition at a cost below the LTV (Lifetime Value), i.e. the PROFIT that the customer will bring during all interactions with the company, will always win because it will have access to a larger pool of customers:

1. Acquisition of customers below LTV cost
2. Acquire customers below LTV cost and first transaction value greater than acquisition cost
3. Acquiring customers below LTV cost and profit on first transaction greater than acquisition cost

When we run a foodservice business, we need to understand how much it costs us to acquire a new customer, and what value that customer brings during his or her relationship with our company. This is what we call Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) profitability in the context of a customer’s Lifetime Value (LTV).

What is CAC and LTV?

CAC is the total cost of bringing a new customer into our restaurant. This can include advertising, promotions, loyalty programmes and digital marketing spend.

LTV, on the other hand, is the total value a customer brings to us over the course of their relationship with us. It includes all the purchases a customer has made with us from their first visit until they stop using our services.

An illustrative example from the hospitality industry

Imagine you run a restaurant and decide to invest in a Facebook advertising campaign to attract new customers. The campaign cost 10,000 PLN and attracted 200 new customers. In this case, the cost per customer acquisition (CAC) is:

First impression: Advertising seems unprofitable

Let’s assume that each new customer spends an average of PLN 40 during their first visit. This means that after the first transaction every customer brings us money:

At first glance, it looks like the cost of acquiring a customer (50 PLN) exceeds the value the customer brings in the first transaction (40 PLN):

Retention activities and customer satisfaction

However, let’s assume that the customer is very satisfied with the food and service, which keeps him coming back to our restaurant. We also introduce retention activities, such as a loyalty program, regular promotions, or personalized offers to encourage them to return. The average customer returns to our restaurant five more times, spending an average of PLN 40 on each visit.

LTV calculation

Now we can calculate the customer’s lifetime value (LTV):

Profitability over the long term

Looking at the entire period of the customer relationship, the LTV is PLN 240, while the CAC is PLN 50. This means that the cost of customer acquisition was fully justified:

At first glance, advertising may seem unprofitable because the cost of customer acquisition exceeds the value of the first transaction. However, due to customer satisfaction and effective retention efforts, the customer returns to our restaurant, increasing its LTV. As a result, the cost of customer acquisition is justified and leads to a significant profit. ROAS is not a good metric because we are interested in maximising the number of customers we acquire with a positive lifetime value to acquisition cost ratio. Put simply, we don’t just want customers who order champagne and caviar. We want all the customers we can earn from, and we want as many of them as possible.

Understanding and controlling the relationship between CAC and LTV is crucial for any foodservice business. It not only allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, but also to optimise your marketing spend and customer acquisition strategies. Imagine driving a car and not knowing how much petrol is in the tank. If you’re a driver, you’ve probably seen the type who drives at 50km/h with his nose over the steering wheel, even though the limit is 100km/h. He’s hunched over, his nose is over the wheel, he can’t see anyone around him and he’s driving erratically. Then there’s the other type of impatient frustrator. They overtake you by millimetres, gasping loudly, only to find out after a while that the whole manoeuvre was unnecessary because they have to stop next to you at a red light anyway. If you don’t know the lifetime value of your customer, you don’t know how much you can pay to keep them. You’re flying blind, you can’t tell if it’s expensive or cheap to acquire a customer. You don’t know if your actions make sense, and instead of slowing down – shouldn’t you be speeding up?

The Profitability Equation

After many years of trying, books, learning on the job and my own mistakes, I have finally managed to create a pattern, a thought pattern, that allows me to understand what I should focus on at any given time. What will be the one thing that will make my business profitable.

Profit is made up of two elements:

1. Revenue
2. Cost

If your business is making a loss, the problem is definitely on one side. We can look at it differently. This way we can understand the business from the perspective of the person we are helping to solve the problem, to provide the service. If the business is losing money:

Profit:

1. Customer acquisition cost – ineffective advertising or low perceived value of the product or service.
2. Customer value – what we earn per customer throughout their relationship with the company is too low.

Customer acquisition costs are all advertising and promotional costs, including salaries and discounts. We can break down the value of a customer further:

Customer value:

1. Retention – how many times we sell our offer to the customer
2. Margin per transaction – how much profit we make on a single sale of an offer

We can break the margin down further.

1. Price – how much we sell our quotes for
2. Production cost – how much it costs us to produce a quote for a customer

We can break down manufacturing costs into:

1. Constants. The most important are:
2. Media. This is not a mistake. In my experience, media costs are fixed regardless of the number of orders. I write more about this in the
3. Local
4. Leasing cars, machinery
5. Variables. The main ones are
6. Food costs
7. Salaries per offer
8. Logistics costs

Details of the margin can be found in this article.

If, like us, you believe in running your foodservice business intelligently and consciously, if you are at the forefront of modern solutions that deliver savings and improve service quality, then join us. Together we form a community that supports each other and strives to increase efficiency in every aspect of our work. We are Culinary Entrepreneurs – I am part of the future of catering. Take the first step and subscribe to the newsletter.

I will help you increase the profitability of your business. Follow me on my social media for more interesting content!

Where to go next

This is one piece of a bigger move: adding a prepaid meal-plan line to the kitchen you already run. When you are ready to land your first paying subscribers, the First-Customer Kit is the step-by-step playbook.

2008 – 3 years after my biggest disappointment. I knew I wanted to go into psychology 5 years before college. I read Charaktery magazine, books by Tomasz Witkowski, Cialdini and everything related to human interaction. I did some research in Warsaw, Szczecin, Wroclaw and even London. SWPS seemed to be the best university in terms of psychology. Unfortunately, I soon realised that I didn’t find myself at the university. The lecturers taught about the human absorption of knowledge, most effectively with the 5 senses from the black and white slides they read. The ‘business psychology’ lecturers were professors who had little to do with real entrepreneurship. I was totally disappointed. This was reflected in my grades, as I was barely passing year after year. At the same time, I was working as a financial advisor, and I was much more focused on that than my studies, which bored me. I really wanted to be very good at something – the best – and I already knew that psychology was

not going to be it.

Once upon a time, in my third year at university, I found myself in an optional course taught by Maciej Misztak, head of marketing for a pharmaceutical company. I particularly remember the class to which he invited Tom Bartnik, then managing director of a large international advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi. They introduced a lot of concepts that I did not understand at all at the time: “strategy”, “creation”, “account department”, but I still remember the story of the launch of the Heyah brand (a once famous mobile virtual network). I listened with rapt attention, the subject was so different from all the theoretical ones I had been taught before. What I was learning was tangible and something I could see every day on the street. It was then that I decided to focus on advertising and marketing – at that time I did not know the difference between the two.

Similar to what I did with psychology 8 years ago, I bought all the books on advertising and marketing: Kotler’s Marketing, Juicy Brand, Like an Orange, Whisper Marketing, Brief magazine. I even read about marketing for the public sector. I started a blog to share my knowledge and to test what I was learning – in practice. A small breakthrough for me was when I placed an ad in Google Ads on the names of famous bloggers directing to my blog. These were provided by Maciej Budzich and Natalia Hatalska from Mediafun. Eventually, my efforts began to bear fruit – I was offered a job as an intern at Ogilvy, an international agency.

Raptly, I was fired after two months for posting the job as “Junior Account Manager” instead of “Intern” on Facebook.

It wasn’t long before I was working in property marketing. I wanted to be the best, so I would do anything to learn from the best. In 2011, I spent PLN 8,000, all my savings plus a grant from my mother, to go to the advertising industry’s Oscars – Cannes Lions – for a week. Living for a week on a protein diet, McDonald’s cheeseburgers for €5 each and pure excitement, I recorded interviews with ad creatives, ad campaigns and tried my hand at being a video blogger (now we would say YouTuber). The Tesco campaign was groundbreaking at the time.

When my contract with P&G was not renewed after my internship, I decided it was time to try something on my own. I toyed with the idea for a long time, calculating the costs and possible income on a piece of paper. On Valentine’s Day 2012, I opened my Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu club. Then there was a sportswear brand based on characters from the Dragon Ball Z anime, a marketplace for extreme sports equipment and, finally, diet catering. I had theoretical knowledge from books and conferences, from working full-time and from my own experience of running businesses. I also had a bankruptcy and debts of PLN 100,000 behind me, which I managed to pay off in full after several years of stress. At that time I said to myself: “Never again”. I worked a lot, but it brought no tangible benefits. I knew there must be a pattern, a correlation, as to why some companies make money and others lose money. What you will learn in the following article is just a collection of these correlations that I have developed by testing them on myself.

Schemes are necessary because they allow us to organise our thinking and our work. We cannot do everything at once. Just as when you build a house you start with an architect, when you organise a business you need to start with a structure. Marketing is nothing more than the organisation of a business. It literally means “to reach the market”. Since the purpose of a company’s existence is to meet a market need, it includes all the activities that describe how a company should operate. A simple scheme that suits me and allows me to better organise my thinking is the 4Ps:

1. Product

• Menu: An assortment of food and beverages offered in a catering establishment. May include different cuisines, special dishes, desserts, alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.
• Appearance and presentation: how the food is presented to the customer, the aesthetics of the plates, the way it is served.
• Variety: the range and variety of options available, such as meat dishes, vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free.
• Additional services: additional options such as catering, delivery, online reservations, special culinary events.

2. Price

• Pricing strategy: The way products and services are priced, e.g. premium, mid-range, low-end pricing strategy.
• Price promotions: Temporary price reductions, special offers, happy hours, promotional sets.
• Discount coupons and rebates: Coupons, loyalty cards, seasonal or occasional discounts.
• Price elasticity: How prices can change depending on the time of day, day of the week, season or demand.

3. Place

• Location: The location of the restaurant, its accessibility and attractiveness to customers.
• Channels of distribution: The different ways in which products are delivered to customers, such as eat-in, take-out, home delivery.
• Logistics: The process of managing deliveries, storage of ingredients, delivery time to the customer.
• Availability: Opening hours, number of seats available, ability to book tables.

4. Promotion

• Advertising: Advertising campaigns in traditional media (TV, radio, press) and digital media (social media, Google Ads).
• Public Relations: Building a positive image through media relations, participation in local events, sponsorship.
• Direct marketing: Direct communication with customers, e.g. newsletters, SMS, emails.
• Sales promotions: Hold special events, competitions, tastings, give away samples.
• Feedback and reviews: Managing and utilising customer reviews on review platforms, social media.

On the internet, in books or in conversations with friends, you’ve probably come across various truths that have some truth to them, but don’t quite reflect reality:

1. Product – cooking is an art, it is the chef’s touch that counts.
2. Price – if you want to increase sales, you have to reduce prices.
3. Place – location is everything.
4. Promotion – a good product will defend itself.

And here is how I see each of these elements and why I disagree with these myths:

The product is an answer to a need. The need is not: “to eat something”. A need can be:

1. Try new flavours – casual dining,
2. Impress your partner on a date – fine dining,
3. Spend time in a pleasant atmosphere – cafés,
4. Satisfy hunger quickly – kebabs, fast food, staff canteen,
5. Nourish the body – healthy food.

Therefore, the product must be repeatable. When I think of McDonalds, I know I will get the same burger, coke and fries every time. When I think of fast food, I know exactly what kind of experience I will get. Humans hate unpredictability. Does that mean the menu should not change? Not at all, McDonald’s also has fixed and seasonal offers. The Lumberjack sandwich, which is only available for a limited time, is so popular that it has entered the language as a synonym for something iconic, unusual and expected. My advice: don’t overestimate the quality of the food. I have learnt in diet catering that what seems absolutely phenomenal to me is not so to customers. What’s more, there are plenty of companies whose food seems average or even inedible, and their sales are growing.

Price – “expensive” means giving little value for the price we have to pay. This is important – the value we, the consumer, perceive, not the seller. I may not want to pay for organic vegetables if they taste exactly the same. On the other hand, people who don’t want to consume zoonotic products pay extra for plant-based coffee drinks or meat alternatives, and no one seems to make a problem of it. Is PLN 10,000 a lot or not? It depends what it’s for. For shoes? A lot. For a square metre of flat in Warsaw? Not a lot. For a square metre of flat in Gorzow Wielkopolski? A lot.

Stanley thermos flasks cost 50-100% more than regular ones and are a hit on social media. Why is that? Their perceived usefulness is much higher than that of competing products.

iPhones are the most expensive in the world and also the best-selling in the world.

For this reason, customers will be more willing to pay more for “an evening of authentic Uruguayan sushi by Master Keryoshi accompanied by Bengali rumba dancers and a tasting of Honduran shaman’s brew” – a unique product – than for “just sushi” – an easily comparable product of which there are dozens, if not hundreds.

Places. It’s probably not the best idea to open a fine dining restaurant in a tunnel under a railway station, but location is not counterintuitive. Matching distribution to location is. We have 4 basic distribution models:

1. Dine-in restaurant
2. Food to go
3. Instant Delivery – delivery via marketplace
4. Planned Delivery – event or diet catering

The distribution method forces the scalability of the restaurant concept. By scalability, I mean the number of customers that can be served in relation to fixed costs, including the size of the premises.

1. The least scalable is a non takeaway and delivery type restaurant (such as fine dining), where we are directly limited by the amount of space in the premises.
2. In second place is instant delivery. The limitation is the capacity of the courier and how many customers they can handle in an hour.
3. Thirdly, we have take-away, such as a bakery or patisserie, where customers come to buy baked goods. They can serve dozens of customers per hour in a relatively small space.
4. The most scalable will be event and diet caterers. The former are able to cater events for thousands of people, while the latter cook thousands, tens of thousands and the largest even hundreds of thousands of meals a day and distribute them across the country every day.

Promotion. It won’t do anything by itself, and it certainly won’t promote the product. The winner will always be the company that is able to pay more to acquire a customer, that is, the one that most likely has a higher margin. You can read about margin in foodservice here. The customer should hear about your brand often and a lot. There are infinitely more people who will never know about your brand, despite your sincerest efforts, than those who will be offended by the amount of content you produce. Don’t worry about the offended, they’re not your customers anyway. Take this drink as an example. Brown sugar water with cocaine in the name – does that sound like a recipe for a brilliant product? How much can you say about such a product? Coca-Cola is doing quite well, and has been talking about the product for more than 100 years. The key is that it advertises constantly at an intensity greater than anyone else and longer than any of us reading this article.

Needs are created. None of us needs sweetened brown water (or the light version with aspartame), coffee for the price of lunch, or pale rolls with something like meat inside. Pepsi Cola, Starbucks and McDonalds are global brands worth billions of dollars. The key is intensity and repetition.

Another myth is that you have to “be everywhere.” As long as you don’t have very large budgets, you simply can’t afford it. Any form of promotion will initially be ineffective until you learn how to use it properly. Learning TikTok, Instagram, print advertising, influencer partnerships and Google Ads at the same time is a recipe for disaster. You don’t need multiple channels. My team and I promoted Cebulka Catering to 1 million in revenue per month in 4 months from launch using only ads on TikTok, then adding Facebook. We didn’t have influencers, we didn’t throw in organic posts, we didn’t do ads on Google – exclusively one communication channel at first, where we tested all the time what we could do better.

If, like us, you believe in running your foodservice business intelligently and consciously, if you are at the forefront of modern solutions that deliver savings and improve service quality, then join us. Together we form a community that supports each other and strives to increase efficiency in every aspect of our work. We are Culinary Entrepreneurs – I am part of the future of catering. Take the first step and subscribe to the newsletter!

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Where to go next

This is one piece of a bigger move: adding a prepaid meal-plan line to the kitchen you already run. When you are ready to land your first paying subscribers, the First-Customer Kit is the step-by-step playbook.