How do I start a local food business
How do I start a local food business? So welcome to marketing food online in this video. I'm going to give you the 10 things you need to know in order to start a local food business, no matter what state, city, county, or area that you're in. These 10 things are the list, the go-to list. If you want to start a local food business, you're going to dive into that right now.
How do I start a local food business
All right. So welcome back. And as I mentioned in the introduction, I'm going to run through the 10 most important things. If you are looking to create a local food business, either in your home, your community, or in a commercial area, it doesn't matter where you are, these 10 things are on the list, and I'm going to break them down for you one by one. And if you're not subscribed, make sure that you're subscribed because this is marketing food online. And my name is Damian Robert. I'm a founder and CEO of marketing feet online. My wife, Sylvia, and I are food e-commerce entrepreneurs. We have been for over 12 years now. We still operate six e-commerce businesses. We sell our food all over the place, laugh>, and we operate out of our commercial kitchen, where we also have several YouTube channels. We've actually got six YouTube channels. Three of them are for food entrepreneurs.
How do I start a local food business
You can check those links down below. We have one set up for food, food trucks, businesses, home-based cottages, food businesses, and our other marketing food online channel two, which has even more information on how to start a food business. So let's get right down to it. I'm going to give you this top 10, actually, from number 10, all the way to number one. So be sure that you actually sit back and watch the entire video. Now, number 10, if you want to create a localized food business in your area, wherever you may be, you need to have an IIN. This is an employer identification number. This is actually issued to you by the IRS, no matter what form of food business that you actually end up choosing to do. If it's a packaged food product, if it's a food truck, if it's even a restaurant or cafe, you need to have an AI in it.
Now, how do I get Ani into Damien? Well, you can simply go to the IRS website and apply for it. It's kind of like a social security number for your business, your actual food business. So it's going to give the IRS the ability to track your taxes. You can give it to your accountant. So when you file your access every year, all of the amazing profits that you're going to make from your business, those taxes that you pay on, you're going to do that and use your E I, in which your business will have a dedicated number for that next up to number 10, which is actually going to be the second part of number 10, which is going to be an LLC or S Corp, C Corp. Now what I highly recommend is what I've said in a lot of my videos. When we talk about a variety of different food businesses, you want to make sure that you are an LLC.
How do I start a local food business
That is because I have personal experience with filing our company when it was first formed as an LLC.And I highly recommend you do that because it's a simpler, easier way for you to file your business taxes and maintain the business throughout the year. It's not that complicated. It doesn't get as complicated as an S or a C Corp. My wife and I, to be honest with you, after about 10 years, 11 years into it, about a year ago, we transitioned to an S Corp for tax purposes. For us, that's actually much more beneficial now because our business has grown and there are a handful of other reasons. As far as tax purposes go, that benefits us more and benefits our business more than it did before when it's an LLC. But if you're just starting your local food business, we highly recommend the simple formation of an LLC.
Number nine. Now you need to get eight business bank accounts. Now I know you probably have a personal bank account, maybe a checking account in savings. That's great, but you need to have an aid account set up specifically for your business. And you want to do that for many purposes. Mainly, you want to establish your business as a legitimate business and have a bank account from which you can have checks. If you have to cut checks to business accounts or invoices or wherever it may be, you can draw upon those funds from your specific business account, not necessarily from your own LLC, from your own personal account. You want to make sure that is a business LLC account. So make sure you set up a business account. There are a lot of benefits to that. And down the road, of course, as you get business credit and business lines of credit, you want to distinctly have a separate account, specifically set up for your business.
How do I start a local food business
Number eight. Understand this. If you start an e-commerce food business, if you start a food truck, if you have a restaurant, you need to market your business. Marketing is not rocket science. It doesn't have to be difficult. Simply put, marketing is getting your customers' attention on your product or service, determining who those customers are, where they may be online, and then targeting your marketing efforts directly to that group of people.That is a simple form, a simple explanation of how to do it. It doesn't have to be difficult to be honest with you. The majority of the traffic that we get through our six e-commerce businesses is absolutely free using social media. I have been doing it for 12 years. Plus, I have a degree in marketing, which kind of helps out a little bit, but to be honest with you, the implications and the way that we actually implement and implement most of what we do online are free.
I do some paid traffic through Facebook, but I don't do a lot of it. I actually use the right hashtags. It's worked out great for us. I post consistently, and I simply just create eight pieces of content with links to our product. The same thing goes for food trucks. The same thing goes for a restaurant. If you're a brick and mortar or a food truck, and you're not necessarily in e-commerce, you can still use social media in the exact same way you want to market your food business. Even if you're a local food business, it doesn't matter. Give yourself an opportunity to learn some of these basics. And as a matter of fact, down below in the description section, there's a link to a book that is absolutely amazing. This gentleman brings it out every single year with its 500 social media tips and tricks and is literally a book that's probably just a couple hundred pages.
How do I start a local food business
It's not very thick, but it literally gives you over 500 tips on how to implement them on social media. And they're extremely simple ways to do this. If you allot yourself a little bit of time, you can learn how it works and see what it works best for your food business. You need to market your food business. Number seven. So, as I previously stated, social media isSo you need to have a social media presence. Marketing can now be done outside of social media. If you were to actually have a really optimized website, you could just tap into the traffic that you would get from that. Or if you have an e-commerce business or if you're selling through Amazon, eBay, Etsy, or even the dancer or other websites, you can get what's known as organic traffic, and that's traffic. That's not related to social media at all.
It's simply having the products or services in your service or product on those platforms. And because you have it in front of millions of people, they want to go to your website, and they're naturally and organically just going to go. You don't have to pay for it, but social media presence is everywhere, from LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, and everybody else in between. I highly recommend you be on all of them, but what has worked well for us is focusing on two. And the reason why I say two is that one is not really going to be enough. If you try to master three, four, or all of the social media platforms, you're going to burn yourself out. And to be honest with you, certain products and certain food businesses actually do better on certain platforms. It's going to be up to you to do a little bit of research and find out what works best for us.
How do I start a local food business
It happens to be Facebook and Twitter. So over the past 12 years, I've kind of refined what we've done on those platforms. And those two bring us the most traffic. Even though I am present on LinkedIn and Pinterest, we get nearly 400,000 visitors to our page every single month, with 11,000 plus followers and growing. But all of those links and all of those pages help us to get people back over to our website. Number six, you need to have an online presence now, not to duplicate what I'm talking about. social media or even marketing, but a lot of food trucking. There are a lot of restaurants here, a lot of brick and mortar. A lot of non-online businesses don't realize the importance of having an online presence. And that could be even a simple blog. If you are a food truck operator, maybe you just want to blog about your daily adventures in the food truck industry.
If you have a restaurant or cafe, have a single one, two, or three-page website. You don't have to be all involved in it, but you need to have an online presence. The reason being is that even if you're on Yelp or some of these review websites, the reason being is that people will go to the web, to the internet automatically. They're going to go online and they're going to look and try to find out more information about your brick and mortar, your food truck, your package, food product, whatever it may be, because it all kind of trickles down to being online. So the more information you have about your food product, your food business, or whatever it is, the better off you will be.So make sure that you're actually online somehow, even if it's just a simple blog that you can literally create free through Blogger, WordPress, or even go daddy with Weebly, Shopify.
They all have blogs. It's very simple to start one, but you must have some type of online presence. Number five. Of course, you need to have insurance. Now this is kind of a no-brainer, but I don't believe it or not. Some people who start businesses from home, specifically a local food business from home specifically under the cottage food laws, don't even have insurance coverage for their business. And that is a huge risk. The laws don't necessarily cover you at all. If somebody were to get sick or have a problem with your food and they have hospital bills or lose their job or something to that effect, they can sue you and they will sue you personally, and you can lose your house, you can lose your car, and you can even lose the shirt off your back. Hypothetically, of course, but yes, you could definitely do that, but you want to make sure that you have insurance.
How do I start a local food business
You have a food truck; you need insurance. Obviously, if you have a restaurant or a CA coffee shop or cafe, you're going to need to have insurance. If you're doing it from home, if you're creating a packaged food product to sell online, you're not actually having people come into any brick and mortar, but you have a packaged food product. You've got to have insurance. Be sure to do that. And it usually costs between $5 and $600, starting at the low end.If you're creating packaged food products or if you have restaurants, obviously the insurance is going to be considerably different because you've got a lot of factors to come into play. Make sure you know what permits, licenses, and certificates you have. Every local food business, no matter what type, needs to have a variation of different types of permits and licenses. In order for you to operate, obviously a brick and mortar business is going to be different than a home-based business, but every single one of those different industries, food trucks, packaged food products,
How do I start a local food business
If it's a dessert company, whatever it is, they're going to have a variety of permits and licenses. So be aware of the types of permits and licenses you require and ensure that you obtain them as soon as possible.in mind that every single permanent license is normally an annually issued permanent license, meaning you need to reoccur it every single year, one year at a time. So if you ELAP that and you don't do it and you get caught without having it, you can get into a lot of trouble. I know this from experience, because when we first started, we had a slew of different permits and licenses, and every single year I had to go online, register them, and keep them up to date. Now, number three, dip, depending on the type of food business you're going to have, obviously the budgets will vary dramatically. What I've always recommended to do is to work within the budget you currently have. If you don't have the money that you need right at this moment, give yourself some time and don't be in a rush. Give yourself a few months or even a couple years to accumulate the money that you really, truly think you need without getting a loan or tapping into your existing credit cards, home equity, or 401k.
I speak of this only from experience because I did this when I started my Italian bakery and it was a lot of learning lessons, to be honest. So what I do is probably not what I've always recommended to my clients when I do my consulting or to you guys here on YouTube. Make sure that you just stay within your budget. You can grow your business. Gradually invest, little by little. Or if you have a family member or a friend, if they want to go into partnership with you and they believe enough in your product or service, let them fund it for you, but always keep in mind that if you do that, that you have a plan to pay it back and maybe even potentially back with some interest, but stay within your budget, give yourself time, do not rush into your business.
How do I start a local food business
It's not going to happen overnight. Even if you had a million dollars tomorrow, it's not going to necessarily manifest itself and create this big business within a few days. So give yourself time and invest as much as you can. So, number two, you need to pick the type of food business. So you want to create a local food business? And you're probably thinking, "Well, dam, I have so many interests." I think it's really cool to start a food truck. Man. My dream with my wife is to open up a restaurant, but I really love to create barbecue sauce. Maybe I should create a package of food. Please keep this in mind.There are literally an infinite number of food and business models available.You can resell coffee. You can start a business. You can sell tea online. You can start an e-commerce food business selling prepackaged foods. You could resell existing foods.
You don't even have to make them. You can buy them in bulk, have a warehouse and simply resell them. Now you probably think you're selling well. Isn't Walmart's target Amazon? They've already got the market down. I can't compete with their nonsense. Do yourself a favor and stop thinking that way. There are an enormous number of opportunities online. And I've mentioned this one before, but I actually have one product that sells insanely well. And it's chocolate-covered pretzels. There are probably 10,000 or more people who sell pretzels online, but we probably do nearly a hundred grand a year just selling pretzel rods that we make in our facility. I didn't invent pretzel rods. I just make them, but I can tell you the one thing that separates me from other sellers and the reason why I do so well is that I market my product.
How do I start a local food business
I promote it. I will build content online about it. I am posting on social media, reading blog posts, and it all brings everybody right back to where my scores are. That's the difference between someone who will be prosperous and sell and is going to make money and someone who will not make money. So figure out what it is that you want to do. And if you have a brick and mortar and you're in a local area of town, fantastic. You just gotta keep it up. Keep it on Yelp, keep it on local services, offer door dash or door delivery systems. Make sure that you're out there and you know who the people are that you're going to gear your marketing advertising toward and market to those people. Okay, Lastly, number one, have a passion for what you do. I don't care if you're selling barbecue sauce. If you're opening up a taco food truck or you want to create a coffee shop just like Starbucks in brick and mortar, all of those things can be seeded.
If you are passionate about what you do, I started out 12 years ago, and I was super excited because one of the biggest things that ever happened to us was our first few sales on eBay. Yes, believe it or not. We started on eBay and we were selling cookies, and I got about 20 orders in a matter of a month. And I thought that was the most amazing, exhilarating thing. And I was just hooked on it because I saw the potential and the opportunity to expand and explore new places and new things. So we went to Etsy and then Amazon, and then it all went from there, from Banana and everyone else. So all of these shops actually ended up happening just because I got super excited over selling some cookies on eBay. You are passionate about what you do. If you want to sell ketchup and mustard, you've got your own variation. And so be it, because there are a lot of people who use ketchup and mustard out there and the internet is gigantic. So I have a passion for what you do. That is number one. So if you have questions about how to start a local food business from home or a local food business in your community, let me know down below, and I'll see you guys on our next video.
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How do I start a local food business
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