Every conversation counts

A year ago, when Morph was Morphood and we were still aiming for an A in Chris Mumford's class, I would walk up and down Franklin street, popping into restaurants to interview managers about their delivery. I talked about that a bit in this post.

One restaurant manager I spoke to was Charlie, day manager at McAlister's Deli. The first time I met him, we talked a lot about their current delivery situation, and what it would take to make it better. A few weeks later, I popped in to see Charlie with some more questions. Then some weeks after that, I showed him our wire frames. We'd chat at least once a month for the past year, as I provided him updates on our build-out and he provided insights into managing a restaurant and dealing with delivery.

In one conversation with Charlie, I learned that McAlister's does a lot of catering orders. Customers place their order online or on the phone, and McAlister's delivers it. Seeing as these are pre-scheduled orders, McAlister's can't send them off to a third party delivery service like Takeout Central. They have one of their managers leave the store to deliver it. So the store is left without a manager for 30-60 minutes as he brings the food to his car, delivers, drives back, parks, and returns to the store.

"How much would it be worth if we were to do that for you?" I asked.

"That would be huge," he replied. "I'd give up most of our delivery fee, if it were up to me."

And so, we began that conversation. First with Charlie. Next with JD, the regional manager. Then with the McAlister's corporate office.

And finally, we've got ourselves our second customer, in a way that my white board plans would never have anticipated. The McAlister's manager emails me dates and times for their catering order. I send a driver over (usually Danny or myself) to pick up the food, and deliver it. And the McAlister's manager can stay in the store to manage it, like he's supposed to.

And so far it's been great. It is all within Chapel Hill, so drives are no more than 10 minutes. Since catering orders are often in the hundreds of dollars, the tips have been fantastic. And, most importantly, McAlister's seems to be happy.

So two lessons learned here. One- it's a startups job to solve customer problems, not to stick to a business model. We're accepting orders (and making money) in a different way than our business model demanded of us previously, but it remains as unquestionable growth for Morph. Two- every conversation counts. If I hadn't walked into McAlister's to meet Charlie a year ago to ask his opinion on Morphood, I could never have had the opportunity to work with them today.