Transcription
This is my favorite donut shop, and it's about to go bankrupt. The owners, Tom and R, have asked me to come in and save the business. If I can't get revenue to over $1,000 a day, they'll lose everything for their family. This is my biggest challenge yet.
I know I can get Cake Boy viral. There's a lot riding on this. If I can't get this to work, I'm just wasting their time. It's the biggest thing we've ever done. Now they literally have a line outside the door week after the event.
Walking into this huge building and seeing Cake Boy just stand out with its bright colors and its amazing branding, I was shocked that the business wasn't doing better. We had to figure out what was going on. We do, uh, New York style classic yeast-risen donuts, but it's we're a 100% vegan business. Since, um, we've taken on, uh, Cake Boy, we've had two kids, so there's a lot more pressure to be able to make this a successful business and pass it on and to make money to support our whole families. The fact that Tom and R have two kids at home just instantly adds so much pressure to what we're doing. If I can't get this to work, I'm just wasting their time.
So tell me about the current state of the business. Winter's really good for us, warm donuts, winter, winter food. But in summer, it really dips. And we were also taking out loans, and a lot of the times, like last year especially, we were about $1,000 in the red, like every week. Yeah, especially with family as well. Absolutely. And there's times when we'd pay our our staff members and we wouldn't be able to pay ourselves. This moment when you're sitting at home and you're scrolling your bank account after paying your employees and there's zero, is the darkest moment. It's the moment that you want to quit entrepreneurship forever, but you need to persevere. You need to think your way out of the issue.
And the financials, run me through it. So let's say revenue, like on a daily basis, approximately? Well, currently we're doing about $300 to $400 a day, but to really be up on our feet and covering all of our expenses and pushing forward as a business, we need at least $1,000 a day.
When I first met R and Tom, it was just obvious how much pressure they're under. I think Tom got up at 2:00 a.m. that morning, and he had bags under his eyes, and he was exhausted. It instantly made me want to help him. So you guys are great, you're doing crazy hours, the brand looks amazing. Where do you think you're going wrong? Our only avenue is social media. I find myself getting on the trends, and but it's not going viral here. No, we're just not seeing that build and that reach online that we're seeing other businesses able to do.
I think whenever we want to grow on social media, we kind of got three steps. First, we need to create a product that is worth speaking about. Then, second, we've got to use social media and the most up-to-date viral techniques to get people looking at that product. And then, third, we need a viral offer, something that people can't refuse. What can't people refuse? Free donuts. Giving away free donuts is a very scary proposition to Tom and R, considering they've got a young family. I'm going to be covering all the costs, giving them over $5,000 to host a free donut event. We'll just do what we do at all the time and just say yes, man. Just, just it.
So the reason why I think that I can make this donut store go viral is because technically, anything can go viral. It just needs to be good content. It needs to be hyper dopamine content. The truth is, donuts should go very viral because food is one of the easiest things to make go viral. Remember, virality is just people sharing the content a lot, and the algorithms rewarding you for good content. So how to find viral content in any category? First, you're going to go into TikTok and you're going to search either your category or an adjacent category. So in this case, it'd be donuts, or you could even search cake. Then you're going to go to the top recent viral video, so posted within the past year. Then you're going to break down each section. So first, what you're going to look at is a format. Is it someone like filming with their iPhone making the cake? Is it someone being interviewed about cake? The format is important because that's what you're going to have to shoot. Next, you need to study the hook. The hook is the most vital part. You can have a really, really great video and the hook be bad, and it won't go viral. So study the first three seconds. What did that person say? What did that person show? Chances are, there's going to be a lot of movement and something very controversial or educational or entertaining in the first three seconds. And then write down any other key shots that they've added that you think are really, really important to it. Next, you're just going to break that down and shoot that yourself. Make sure your lighting is really good. And then all you need to do is use the free app CapCut. And don't add random transitions, don't add random fonts or things that weren't in your viral example video. Copy that enough times. And remember, volume negates luck. Don't just post 10 videos. Chances are, you're going to have to post 50 before you get any success, but it will be worth it.
[Music]
So it's a new day. It's kind of funny how I first started talking to R. I did a viral Instagram, and I basically said I could double a cafe's revenue just by doing viral food. And the amount of negativity on that reel was huge, and I totally understand why. To have someone that isn't successful in the hospitality industry say that it is easy, which is not what I was saying, would be extremely, extremely frustrating. But here's what people don't understand: that it is very, very easy to utilize social media to drive a lot of revenue. Now, a lot of people are saying revenue isn't the main thing that you should be looking at, you should be looking at profit. And I agree. The thing that people don't understand about that is that the lease and fixed costs for Tom and R, specifically, is such a large portion of their costs. So if we can increase revenue, that means that those fixed costs will be a smaller percentage, and they will be able to take more net profit percentage home. A lot of other people were saying that I was just going to give them a short burst of revenue with a new trending food group, and then it was just going to fall down from there. And that is 100% true as well. But this is where product innovation needs to be a core fundamental thing for any hospitality business. They need to find the next trend in a month and keep redoing it, and customers will learn to expect that. They'll start following the social media account, and as soon as you release a flavor that someone really, really loves, they'll come and shop again.
Hey, hey, how you going? You going good? Yeah, going well, man. Making the donuts? Yeah, just doing up our, um, secret recipe. Yeah, very nice. Do look at that one. You're going to love the recipes that I've got today. So I've just been on TikTok all night. We're going to follow a viral formula. So generally, what we can do to make food novel is we can make a really, really big, really, really small. So we can adjust the size of it and the portion sizing. That's where you see all these like food competitions and stuff like that work. Or we can use misdirection, which is kind of combining two different food groups so that people, it stops them in the skull and like, I wonder what that would taste like. Right, right. So the first one, in terms of size, we're going to use cookie dough, so just ample amounts of cookie dough stops people in the feed. And then the misdirection, we're going to do a crème brûlée donut, which is scaling very, very well in like London and Y. Okay, cool. That sounds really good. I like it. Let's do it. Flip it over. Yeah, that's pretty good. And then chuck it over off to the side here, and then they rest for about 10 minutes.
Why did you slash the door? I, I don't know.
[Music]
Oh, D has some good bands. You got to, you got to treat the dough good, man. Yeast, yeast is a living thing in the dough. Yeah. I'm not quite open yet. Sorry about that. Yeah, we should have been, we should have been. I'll get up tomorrow for you. I'll see you at 5:00. All right, so am I hired? Absolutely. I'm definitely hired.
One of the most viral videos at the moment is just "make a donut with me," where they film every step of the process, and they're like, "Let's make this product." At the start, so that people are anticipating the end result. They need to watch the end result to see that beautiful donut at the end. And then you just do a simple voiceover after. So it doesn't really matter what the audio is, we'll just record every step. Way. That smells so damn good. Big handful. That's just a standard serving for me. That was great. And press can have a look. Yeah, let's have a look. Mega fill. Viral donut one. Let's do the crème brûlée. I'm so glad that you're bringing this in. I have wanted to do one for a long time. So it's just part of it, just constantly having to come up with new viral recipes, figuring out the manufacturing, and then it's a lot of work on your side, but it will be worth it. It will be. Oh, totally. All right, perfect. There's a donut wizard. That's the recipe. Does it crack? That is so good. Let's get it [Music] online.
Things aren't going as well as I would have hoped. This is part of the issue with me not heavily being in the hospitality industry that I thought would run up against. But they're really struggling with the initial cookie dough product. This is mainly because the supplier can't do vegan cookie dough anymore. So I think we're going to have to scrap that product completely, which is annoying. We spent all day shooting it, but that's just life, and we're going to persevere. The crème brûlée donut, now this is the one that I was really excited about. We're struggling with that one as well. So we initially were trying this dip method that we saw that's going to be really hard to scale, and considering we're giving away like 5,000 donuts, we don't want people just dipping them. So yeah, back to the drawing board about how we actually going to create this product. Might not look like those original videos, but it is what it is. We'll just reshoot them all again, and we'll persevere. We'll get there.
It's been three weeks since I helped Tom and R with a product and met with them, and it's been a disaster. Everything has gone wrong. So to our credit, R workshopped the product, finally got the crème brûlée one working, and then we started posting on social media. Nothing. It was so slow to begin with. Then we finally started to get a little bit of traction. We kept tweaking the format. With social media, it's all about volume. Volume negates luck. With social media, so we've been doing daily posts and starting to get some traction. Interestingly enough, it was only until we launched the free viral giveaway that we started to get a ton of buzz. Lots of people started attending the event, lots of people started following the page, and the reels started to get some really good reach. So I'm heading down there now. We're going to start setting up, and fingers crossed we can just impress a ton of customers and keep them coming back the next [Music] day.
Behind the scenes of the donuts. How long have we got? We got 45. Yeah, 45 minutes. [Music] Okay. It's better than I could have expected. There's probably, I reckon, 500 people lining up. We're about three minutes opening. The crème brûlée is working. This is great.
I was on a phone call about four months ago with the founder of Sandwich Sandwich, and they're based in the UK, and they do the most viral massive sandwiches to get the biggest crowds. And I called the founder, I was just like, what is your exact playbook for this? I was like, oh, can I give the donuts for 50 cents or just like a dollar? And he's like, no, it needs to be 100% free. And it will go viral on social media. You can, if you need to, just boost the post to your local area for $10, $20, $30 of budget. And because it's free and the offer is so good, and the product looks so good, the reach will be incredible. You'll get to lots and lots of people. Technically, we didn't need to boost the post because we started going viral on TikTok organically. And then your sales after that event should increase, which will allow us to hit the target that R and Tom actually need to live their life and help their kids.
3, 2, 1. Wow. We've never done anything like this. Said the lineup was out the door. I saw one of their reels. TikTok, TikTok, Facebook. I got it on Facebook too. It was delicious. It was really good, so we'll definitely be back. Funnily enough, the crème brûlée content wasn't the only stuff that started to go viral. By just looking more at social media and increasing volume, we managed to get stupid videos viral, like "tag a friend that starts with this letter," and we just painted that on the donut. And this just shows how tough it is for business owners, like hospitality owners, because you need to just be constantly on these platforms and looking on them, and it's not a skill set that everyone has. So I don't think what we're doing here is easy. It just requires practice, and because it is important, it's deserving of that practice.
Who wants burnt donuts? J. It, it, it. Oh, that's so much easier. And then I just give it a little twirl. Oh, there we, there you go. Yeah, beautiful. That was pretty good. That's looking great. All right, Tom. Going really good. About halfway through the donut. It's still outside the door. Ringing out the way, really. Now, one thing that is consistent, doesn't matter if you've got the best social media strategy in the world, you've got to be willing to work hard. And Bri and Tom are just the testament to that. They're incredible founders. They want to provide for their family. They'll do anything that it takes to make their business successful. And you have to do whatever it takes to make a [Music] business.
About 70% of the donuts have gone, which is pretty good. That's over 2,000, 3,000 people, I would say, have come through the door, and they loved it. So guys, it's been a few weeks since the event. How have sales been going? Oh, man, it's actually been amazing. The direct week following the event, we smashed our target. We had hopes to do $1,000 a day. We're doing $1,400 a day. That's great. Is that, is that a good week for you guys? Absolutely. We've almost doubled our sales. Yeah, so that was directly after, after the event. And, uh, everything online is really picking up as well. Lots of messages, lots of comments, lots of engagement. A lot of people ordering online too, ordering birthday packs and stuff for their events. So incredible. Awesome. And what's the next product? So we're debuting a cross between a croissant and a donut. We're calling it a doissant. Full of vegan Nutella, house-made recipe, and super delicious. That sounds absolutely delicious. I must say, it's just been such a pleasure working with you guys. You know, you're up at 2:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m. cooking donuts. You're taking time out of your family time so that you can actually provide for them in the future. It's just something that I admire so much. And yeah, it's been a pleasure working with you. Thanks, Davey. Thanks so much.
Working with Tom and R was definitely one of my biggest challenges yet, but to help someone in hospitality, which is such a tough industry and the backbone of our economy, was so rewarding. If you have a business that you want me to try to help, comment up below. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Thanks.