Selling baked cakes, can you sell 1.1 million a year?
Some time ago, a story of a post-90s college student selling baked cakes to get rich appeared on the hot search, and many people's first reaction after seeing it was:
You want to trick me into selling pancakes again?
Xu Yuning, founder of Daewoo Xiansen brand
In the story, Xu, a post-90s college student in Anhui, said that after graduating from college, he chose to start a business and sell baked cakes.
The cost of 3,800 yuan, 300 yuan for a second-hand stove, 500 yuan for a second-hand refrigerator, 900 yuan for the door, plus some peripheral tools and ingredients, the total is 3,800 yuan.
The landlord chose capital to take a stake and did not collect his rent.
In the first year, the turnover was 1.1 million.
After four years of hard work, the university student has opened more than 30 branches, and this year's goal is to open 100 branches.
This statement quickly aroused doubts, and some netizens said after settling accounts:
"110/365 = 03,000 / day, 5 yuan for a baked cake, 3000/5 = 600 / day, even if the store is open for 12 hours a day, 600/12 = 50 / hour, an average of 1 is sold in nearly 1 minute, and the franchise fee is cheated!"
"A college student who has just started a business, where can he find this kind of shop?
"With a million dollars of revenue a year, there are only 6 public reviews. ”
"In fact, the trademark registration company of this pie was established 8 years ago!"
Indeed, it is not easy to start a business in the current environment, and many young people are worried about their work.
can put aside this filter of "envy, jealousy and hate", Wu Xiangjun found that this story is actually very typical.
And quite true.
In the face of doubts, Xu directly threw out his revenue record.
80,000 purchases, with an average price of 12.86 yuan each, which is clear.
In fact, if you calculate carefully, this turnover can indeed be done.
First of all, it should be noted that this kind of small shop with small profits is basically only engaged in offline business, so it is normal for Dianping to have few reviews.
Most of the stores facing Dianping's customers have opened up online channels, and if they rely on online customer acquisition, they may have to spend a lot of money to brush up on praise.
Secondly, the algorithm of "selling a pie a minute" on the Internet is also relatively rigid.
Anyone who has ever sold baked cakes knows that in the baked cake oven, many times more than a dozen cakes come out of the pot at the same time.
According to Xu's explanation, his cake was pasted into the stove and cooked in thirty or forty seconds.
2 employees collaborate, one person and noodles, one person paste, every day from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., an average of 11 hours a day, with a break at noon.
And the unit price is not 6 yuan, but the basic price is 6 yuan, and there are best-selling products of 8 yuan, 10 yuan, and 12 yuan.
In addition, many local companies and enterprises will also have group orders, which can buy one or two hundred at a time, and there will be thousands of yuan for one order.
Xu also revealed that the bosses who sell baked cakes in Hangzhou have several houses in Hangzhou.
"Don't underestimate this kind of small business. In Hangzhou, it is common for a bakery to have a turnover of 1.1 million yuan a year and a turnover of more than 3,000 yuan a day......"
In the catering industry, there is a golden sentence: product is the first competitiveness of the restaurant, and taste is the first competitiveness of the product.
The baked cakes sell well, first of all, the track is good, and the second is the taste.
In big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, there are many migrant workers, and there is a huge demand for breakfast and dinner fast food, and it is not uncommon for many popular breakfast shops downstairs to sell 1,000 copies a day.
Moreover, this kind of small store basically has no credit, and the gross profit of the product can basically be more than 60%.
In fact, it is not only in big cities, many breakfast shop owners in small counties are also very profitable, but there are not many such stores, and the key to good revenue and high repurchase rate is taste.
The core of Xu's baked cake shop is also taste.
Xu said that he went to university in Fujian University of Science and Technology in 2011, because his family could not afford the tuition, he has been working part-time, in the first semester of his freshman year, grinding soybean milk in the school cafeteria as a part-time worker, working from 4 am to 8 am, and he contracted this soy milk stall in the second semester of his freshman year.
After graduating, he went to Suzhou to open a steak restaurant, but due to the problem of category and taste, the sales were not good, and he lost all the money he saved in college.
The best-selling folk snacks for a hundred years have a taste basis and market testing.
After determining the direction and ideas, he went to southern Anhui to learn to make Huangshan baked cakes, and then also learned the practices of Quzhou baked cakes, Jinyun baked cakes, and Jinhua shortbreads.
On this basis, he explored by himself and gathered the advantages of these baked cakes into a single cake.
Taste is the core of the restaurant, and on the basis of a good track, Xu has seized the good taste and made a single store popular, such a story is not unusual.
The catering industry also conforms to the 28 law, and restaurants that achieve the top 20% of tastes can often achieve "winner-takes-all".
If you go to Nanjing to eat pot stickers, the guide may tell you to eat "Qijiawan".
If you go to Bengbu to eat crayfish, maybe the locals will tell you that Ah Liang's family is good.
Image source: Bengbu Daily
There are stories like this everywhere.
From the former Tianjin dog ignoring buns, to the stewed cooked food queued up to buy in the county, there are all cases.
But the question is, how to copy these single-store models and make them into chains?
In general, franchise is the first step for restaurant owners to move towards financial freedom.
On the basis of doing a good job in the revenue of a single store, on the one hand, Xu has built his own factory supply chain through the central kitchen to do a good job in the supply foundation of chain stores.
On the other hand, he must have also found a partner, a partnership company, through the blessing of capital, quickly promote the single-store model, as he said, the "Daewoo Xiansen" brand has more than 40 branches, all over Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Hefei, Changsha, Fuzhou, Nanchang and other places.
Finally, he posted his entrepreneurial story online to attract media coverage and franchisees.
Breaking through with a single product is the key, jumping out of the small shop and running across the country, which is the classic entrepreneurial model of many current restaurant chain enterprises.
For example, the Henan pot ring supply chain management company established in 2015, at the beginning, this store was also engaged in the business related to the wholesale of frozen ingredients.
Later, the boss realized that there was a large market for helping customers solve the problem of "realizing the freedom of hot pot at home", so he began to specialize in hot pot barbecue related ingredients.
Due to the good grasp of the track, the pot ring stores continued to expand, and multiple rounds of financing were completed in 2020, and 9,221 branches were opened by the end of 2022!
Looking back, many tea brands are also in this way, such as Mixue Bingcheng, Bawang Tea and so on.
However, such a story sounds simple, but it is not easy to implement.
The biggest problem in the operation of chain stores is that the revenue of stores varies greatly from store to store due to different tastes/locations.
Last year, there was a news that Xiao Cai and two friends in Zhengzhou, Henan Province invested more than 200,000 yuan to open a store to sell hamburgers.
However, the new store opened for a month, and the one-day turnover was only 79.2 yuan.
I originally wanted to break the kettle and stud it, but I didn't expect that in the end, I couldn't even get my salary.
I don't deny the authenticity of Xu's single-store revenue of 1.1 million, but it's hard to say whether their chain stores can also reach this figure.
After all, before starting a business to make baked cakes, Xu was already a "catering old man", but it is difficult for ordinary novices to do a good job in product selection and even site selection.
Looking at these successful catering entrepreneurs, in fact, a rule can be summed up.
First of all, the founders, without exception, have experienced all kinds of ups and downs, and have experience and understanding of the catering track.
Joining rashly, the probability of failure is extremely high.
Secondly, they all have their own set of exclusive flavor recipes, whether it is baked cakes, milk tea, hot pot ingredients, the premise of explosion is the leading taste.
Finally, it is also necessary to use the power of supply chain and capital to standardize and factory products, so as to quickly roll them out.
In fact, no matter how the economy changes, people's desire for food has never changed, and we always want to be able to eat better food, greener and cleaner food.
If you can grasp the pain points of consumers, even if you do a good job in a small store, the value created will be extremely huge.