Your hot food trailer can make you money if you work it right. There is the traditional means of you working it as a sole operator, serving the food yourself and making all the profit. You might have the idea that you have to work it at traditional hot food trailer locations and I'm here to give some inventive new ideas.
1. Lease Your Hot Food Trailer.
If you have enough money then you can always invest in another hot food trailer and lease the first one out. The idea here is that you have a second stream of income coming in, along with the income you already make from your second hot food trailer. Leasing also serves to reduce a number of headaches. You avoid having to pay someone an hourly wage. The key to leasing is that the person operating the trailer is 100% responsible for the profits made. While they do not own the hot food trailer, it is in their best interest to look after the trailer.
When you lease out your trailer, make sure to take all required details such as drivers licence, social security number, address and next of kin details. A written agreement should be written up to decide on the length of the contract and at a minimum it should be three months.
When deciding how much to charge per week for hire cost, try to make it 10% of the profits you made with the hot food trailer. E.g.: If you made $1000 profit, the lease the trailer for $100 per week.
When leasing out your trailer you can give the details of your suppliers to the new operator so they can have access to the food items, utensils and other supplies they might need.
If they have any questions be generous and offer to help them out, after all you will be making money from them, and if they make no money you won't be seeing a contract extension.
Even offer to give them tips on good locations, food items to sell and preparation methods. Your new leasing partner will be very thankful for your help.
2. Functions.
Functions can be great one-off money making opportunities. You can find free local internet business advertisement websites, (a favourite of mine is gumtree.com) and put your ad up. Include details such as what kinds of foods you provide, the service you will give and the number of hours you work. I don't give my prices over the internet. Working functions you can expect to charge premiums for your service and people will pay you if what you offer is in demand and in short supply. Just be prepared to work flat out for a couple of hours but the money is well worth it.
3. Sell Your Business.
If your hot food trailer is making enough money, you can sell the business. This means selling the location, customers, hot food trailer and all other equipment. You will have to get your business assessed by an accountant to make sure the profits are all transparent, and then you will need to get your business assessed for how much it is worth. Get a number of quotes and then make the price at little bit higher to give you some breathing room for negotiations.
When you advertise your business be aware that some people will try to get as much information out of you so they can start their own business. You can spot these people pretty easily after a while and just make sure to be courteous without giving away too much. Just give common sense answers and use your most hospitable manner to give them what they want, then send them on their way.
Selling your business is a great way to make a nice large cash bonus after all your hard work which you can then use to buy more hot food trailers and start another business to sell it.
The only difficulty is you will get a no trading exclusion for a set period of time where you cannot trade within that persons location for a set period of time.
This means you will have to search out somewhere new, which shouldn't be much of a problem because if you did it once, you can do it again.
4. Be A Mobile Hot Food Trailer
This idea is great when you first start out. You rarely need any kind of council approval and all you need is the approval of industrial site decision makers. Basically you will be serving your hot food to workers at their break times at many different work sites. Because your trailer is not set-up as well as a proper mobile food van is, you will need to work a bit harder. The pay-off is you will get to make a lot of contacts which you can then get to come to your trailer when its set-up at the one location. You can set up somewhere within the industrial park that you have been operating in and get all your customers to see you. This is one of my best secrets. So really what you are doing is promoting your hot food first by taking it directly to the workers so they don't have to put in any extra effort. Once you get an established location approved, you can then promote the new site with flyers indicating where you are located and what times you will be operating.
Use these four brilliant ideas to make more money from your hot food trailer.
Yes, according to Rafael Canare, executive director of the Association of Filipino Franchisers Inc. (AFFI), a group that aims to promote micro, small and medium enterprises. One of AFFI’s main projects is the Filipino Franchise Show, with this year’s event to be held from October 12 to 14 at the World Trade Center. poradnik
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