u/UnusualAd3207

Whenever you hear people talking about food establishments, they're almost always passion projects instead of big money producers.

It's usually the owner working in the place every day themselves and just making an average income. They basically work a 9-5 job.

Sure Franchising can get more money coming in, but can individual locations make big money?

Let's take a local bakery, Pizza Place, or Ice Cream Place for example. These usually bring in 60-100k in personal income for the owner, and the owner is working in there daily.

Is it possible for places like these to be bringing in like 200-300k for the owner WITHOUT the owner actually working there?

It seems like most local food places just send out some coupons every now and then, and then just kinda sit there and wait for people to walk into their store. The marketing sucks...

What if a place had REALLY good marketing and was killing it with home delivery orders, doing a bunch of catering stuff, corporate accounts, etc, I wonder how much they could actually bring in.

Reason I'm asking this is because I'm thinking about buying a local hole in the wall Italian Bakery. It's owner operated and brings in 50k a year for the owner.

Everyone tells me not to buy it, but they do almost no marketing, I think I could really scale it with good marketing, get a manager to run the show, and bring in a lot more money.

Thoughts?

I'm at a bit of a cross roads and not sure which way to go

I was making A LOT of money setting up AI Receptionists for companies but it crashed

Awhile back I hired a developer to build our own AI Call Answering software

I was selling it as a SaaS model for 3k/year

Then the market got flooded with a bunch of supercheap or open source options, so our platform was no longer special or better, it got totally commoditized.

I ended up shutting down our software to save on costs and just whitelabel one of the other ones out there and offer set up.

Then suddenly everyones business phone system and CRM they were already paying for, launched AI call answering as a built in feature

So there was no longer a need for anyone to buy an outside platform.

At this point we were just selling the set up, basically prompt engineering, going in and setting up their AI agents to work correctly.

However... It's now super easy for people to do that themselves, as well.

All this happened SUPER quick, I went from closing 25-30 deals a week at $3000-$5000 paid up front, to literally zero.

And I'm sure they could still trickle in if I pushed hard, but I just shut down operations because I seen how fast it was dying, I didn't want to scrape the barrel.

I told myself if this died "I'd just switch to selling marketing" because it's another high ticket service in the same price range as we were doing, and that's exactly what I did, just not on a large scale

I've closed a few marketing clients, but I'm wondering if this is the right direction to go in...

Our main industry for the AI Receptionists was medical, and there's some REALLY cool medical AI platforms popping up. Things that I don't think would get commoditized as fast as the AI Receptionists or at all because it's highly regulated stuff. Mainly AI Diagnostic software, Remote patient monitoring, and stuff like that.

I already have experience selling other peoples platforms (when we pivoted to whitelabeling)

Now I'm wondering what would be a better road to take... A- Marketing company, or B- Partner with one of these start ups selling proprietary medical AI and become a reseller.

A big factor in my mind is longevity. Something that's not going to be made obsolete by AI in the next 5 years.

Some people say marketing companies will be made obsolete by AI but I don't see that happening. AI will handing operations, but it's not good at creative marketing strategy.

Thoughts?

I'm at a bit of a cross roads and not sure which way to go

I was making A LOT of money setting up AI Receptionists for companies but it crashed

Awhile back I hired a developer to build our own AI Call Answering software

I was selling it as a SaaS model for 3k/year

Then the market got flooded with a bunch of supercheap or open source options, so our platform was no longer special or better, it got totally commoditized.

I ended up shutting down our software to save on costs and just whitelabel one of the other ones out there and offer set up.

Then suddenly everyones business phone system and CRM they were already paying for, launched AI call answering as a built in feature

So there was no longer a need for anyone to buy an outside platform.

At this point we were just selling the set up, basically prompt engineering, going in and setting up their AI agents to work correctly.

However... It's now super easy for people to do that themselves, as well.

All this happened SUPER quick, I went from closing 25-30 deals a week at $3000-$5000 paid up front, to literally zero.

And I'm sure they could still trickle in if I pushed hard, but I just shut down operations because I seen how fast it was dying, I didn't want to scrape the barrel.

I told myself if this died "I'd just switch to selling marketing" because it's another high ticket service in the same price range as we were doing, and that's exactly what I did, just not on a large scale

I've closed a few marketing clients, but I'm wondering if this is the right direction to go in...

Our main industry for the AI Receptionists was medical, and there's some REALLY cool medical AI platforms popping up. Things that I don't think would get commoditized as fast as the AI Receptionists or at all because it's highly regulated stuff. Mainly AI Diagnostic software, Remote patient monitoring, and stuff like that.

I already have experience selling other peoples platforms (when we pivoted to whitelabeling)

Now I'm wondering what would be a better road to take... A- Marketing company, or B- Partner with one of these start ups selling proprietary medical AI and become a reseller.

A big factor in my mind is longevity. Something that's not going to be made obsolete by AI in the next 5 years.

Some people say marketing companies will be made obsolete by AI but I don't see that happening. AI will handing operations, but it's not good at creative marketing strategy.

Thoughts?