Rethinking Growth in Foodservice: Scaling Smarter, Selling Smarter, and Bouncing Back

Nick: 00:00:02

There are a million ways to make money in the food service industry. You just have to find one. On the Titans of Food Service podcast.

I interview real life movers and shakers in the food game who cut through all the noise to get to the top. My name is Nick Portillo and welcome to the Titans of Food Service podcast. Let's jump right into it.

All right, welcome back to the Titans of Food Service podcast. Nick Portillo here. This is episode 106. I appreciate everyone, everyone following along, listening over the last.

started this podcast back in: 2023

Anyway, you can see here today I don't have a guest, it's just me talking and I want to share some updates.

So the word you're going to hear a lot in this episode of Scaling and when I started this podcast, I know I've talked about it on many episodes before.

When I got into the, into the food service industry, I remember when I first started, my dad was, I was actually trying to get appointments with people by texting them or emailing them. And he's like, nick, you gotta pick up the phone and like call people. You have to go see people in person. Like, that's how this industry works.

And it was kind of an eye opener. He's like, you need to learn how to talk to adults. Because I was, you know, coming out of school, it was hi, Mr. Smith or hi, Mrs. Smith.

And now it was addressing people by their first names and being comfortable with that. So it's just a whole different world and whole different universe.

So he said at the same time, like, when you go out there and learn and you know, press palms, right, Shake people's hands and learn from them. And he goes, there's no book on how to be successful in food service. You just have to go out there and do it.

And it kind of dawned on me and he was actually a big help in starting this podcast when we started a few years ago. And this was my quote unquote, the book that people can come to this podcast and get gain information.

So I would welcome on guests people that worked in distribution, people worked in manufacturing, the brokers, people who worked who own restaurant chains and just some who did menu trends. I love those people. They were so fun to talk to.

Now I've gotten to the point in the podcast where I want to continue to give content, but finding people, inviting them onto the podcast, it was, it's just no Longer life giving, you know, getting people to come on and take the time to do it. It's a lot of work and it's a lot of time into doing that.

And it was holding me back from making more content and providing more value to you as the listener. And so I said, you know what? I need to just stop doing that.

I will interview people on here from time to time, but I want to continue just giving valuable information on the food service industry from the perspective of a food service broker. You know, I have access to many different distributors, tons of operators, many different manufacturers, and I can see how they do business.

And it's a unique and perspective that I want to share, you know, through the eyes of me as the broker. So want to talk a little bit about, you know, scaling? When we first started our business, scaling was hard. It's like when I.

For the manufacturers that I represent, you know, scaling their business can be difficult. It takes time.

And that's where in many instances a broker comes in to help with that growth, to say to a manufacturer, hey, you're really good at making products. Let's keep you focused on making products, coming out with new innovation, and allow us to go out there and build the business.

That's what scaling's all about. In a service industry such as food service, or in a service business such as the broker business, it's hard to scale.

If you take the example of a tech company, right? You can.

Amazon can create a platform and at some point their expenses no longer go up, but they can just increase the number of users that come onto that platform. Another example is a cable company. A cable company, when you sign up, you pay, let's say, $100 a month. These are California numbers.

I don't know what. It could be more than that, too. A lot more than that. But let's say $100 a month for cable.

Well, in the shortest way to say this, they kind of just flip on the light switch, right? And then you have cable directly to your home. They might have sent you a little cable box that you can set up, or they.

They send out a technician to install it for you. But their expenses by you coming on as a customer are not increasing other than giving you a new box.

All they're really doing is flipping on the switch. So it's easy to scale. So they've got the infrastructure built. And what they're trying to do is just add more customers.

Scale in a service industry, it's not like that. When we bring on a new manufacturer partner of ours, we look at it and say, hey, we've got a team here that can work and build that business.

But in some circumstances we may say we need to bring on additional team members to help service that client. And because of that, it makes scaling really hard.

You know, when you take a look at your admin or your ops or your finance or your sales, like, you can offload some of that work. You can find your own agencies that can help you with those types of things. You can bring in people like direct hires onto your payroll.

You can work with, you can offshore or do other things to help with the scale. But it's really hard to do that. And so there's some differences between different types of businesses.

Service industry, it's a service businesses, it's a really fun type of business type to be a part of. It's a lot of fun. Every day is uniquely different. But scaling is hard.

And that's kind of what I found here with this podcast as well, is, hey, I'm constantly creating more content, but I have to be able to get it to a point where I'm not spending numerous amounts of hours just trying to get people to come on the podcast so I can continue to deliver. Continue to deliver. Man, talking is hard. Geez, I could deliver content to you on a weekly basis because that's what I love to do.

And sometimes when you, when you move too fast and you scale too fast, and I'm trying to get out a podcast episode every week. You have to make sure you have the right systems in place.

So I have a team, they're wonderful in helping me edit this episode, get it out there and things like that.

So that one piece of finding new people to come to the podcast because I take great pride in the people that I invite and I'm meticulous and I'm particular of the people that I'm trying to get on here because I'm trying to have them share stories, you know, people that are top of the industry or on their way to the top, that have cool backstories that I'm trying to get to share with you. And I still want to invite those people on and I still will, but it will be more me sharing, you know, again, my viewpoints. You get it, you get it?

Sharing my viewpoints, the eyes of the broker. Because food service, it's really unique. It's a fun industry. Especially coming out of COVID there's food service has changed.

If you think about pre Covid, you had Skype, which we kind of used as a Society a little bit. But really, was it that much? Not really. I, I, I honestly struggled figuring out Skype and just didn't use that much. I know we had FaceTime.

I've never been much of a FaceTime guy on my phone. But then Covid hits and now you've got Google Meet. I think it's, is it Google Meet? I don't use that one, but I, I know Google has one.

Microsoft Teams, you've got Zoom and you've got others I use here for my podcast, I use squadcast and that's how I, and that's how I broadcast this, this podcast. So food service sales, it's evolving.

You know, you see more things going online and as we've come out of COVID who've really tried to reinvent my business, reinvent this podcast. And when we came out of COVID it was, we wanted to redefine who our core customer was.

We wanted to redefine and restructure our go to market strategy, the value prop that we bring to our clients, to our operator and distributor customers. So focusing on those types of things, it took time. But Covid gave us that pause to think about what's the next step forward.

And so here I am, I'm in that pause with this podcast of what's the next step forward to deliver more and better content to you in food service. You also too.

There's, if you look at kind of the business as a whole, you have that old school mentality, right, that hey, we're gonna go out there, we're gonna knock on doors. It's about relationships. I love that part of the business. But there's so much in New school too.

There's so much technology and leveraging that and helping you build your business and in and so going through Covid and you can see I'm kind of mixing in Portugal sales and marketing as podcast.

There's some parallels here, but reinventing who we were as a business has really helped us in the last four or five years as we've come up and out of the pandemic, which was a very challenging time for us. I remember pre pandemic I was chasing what I would call easy money. My wife and I, we started a Airbnb type business.

I remember we had a unit in Costa Mesa and it was a one bedroom apartment. It was fantastic. I mean we had, we had families that would come in that would want to go to Disneyland.

We had traveling nurses, we had business professionals coming in or we had just people looking for a fun time. In Orange county, coming to stay in this apartment. We'd clean it, we'd get it set up on Airbnb, on vrbo, which shout out to them.

I know they've rebranded to vrbo, that we had the unit on there and made good money too. Like we were making 50% profit margins. Like, whoa, Covid hit shut all that down.

But in that time, I also, and I know I've talked About this on LinkedIn, I've lost four of my biggest clients in that time. Cause I just wasn't focused. So getting more focused, defining what is important to me, what is important to the business.

That's where I'm at here with this podcast. I'm redefining what's important to me.

If something isn't life giving, like trying to go out and find, you know, constantly reaching, reaching out, kind of this. It was kind of a. I find someone, send them an email. And I had to get quite a few people in my database to get them to say yes.

I was like, hey, I'm going to. I'm going to make it easy. You know, same thing I do with my business.

Let's refocus, let's rediscover, let's redefine who we are, who we want to be, where we're going. We're going to go. We're going to go do it bigger, better and faster.

And we're going to take the learnings that we have, which I have a lot of learnings in this podcast. Starting a few years ago. This is episode 106. I had five years of professional experience running a brokerage when Covid hit.

And so taking those learnings and. And this is what's going to propel us to the next step. So here I am. I appreciate everyone who's followed along through all of these episodes.

I appreciate all of the incredible people that have joined me as guests on this podcast. I look forward to having more guests, but I also need to deliver more content. I want to deliver it weekly.

That's important to me and I have fun doing it. I thank you for listening and get ready. More is coming. I appreciate.