One search fix, then $10,000 of catering in two weeks

Walker operates three El Famous Burrito restaurants in the Chicago area and three Extract Juicery sites. He has worked with the restaurant software firm Popmenu for nearly eight years.

The change was narrow. Working with his account manager, he had the El Famous Burrito website optimised for search.

Within two weeks, Walker says, the restaurant generated $10,000 in catering. The figure is his own, given in an interview for Entrepreneur's Restaurant Influencers series.

He knew where the money came from because he tracks how customers find the business. "It was like Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, and they started rolling in," he says.

One order came from a customer in Arizona who needed catering for an event in downtown Chicago, 30 to 40 minutes from Walker's suburban restaurant.

She had never eaten there. She did not know the 40-year history of the place, or what Walker thinks of the food. She had, on his account, hundreds of other Mexican restaurants closer to the venue.

The inquiries did not stop with her. The day before the interview, Walker says another five came through Google.

The part worth stealing is the division of labour. Walker does not do the technical work and says plainly that he cannot.

"I don't know SEO," he says. "I can throw out a couple of the buzzwords, but don't get me too in detail."

What he does instead is meet his account manager once a month, bring ideas, and let the team execute them. He also measures the result, which is why the $10,000 is a number rather than a feeling.

The commercial backdrop comes from Popmenu co-founder Brendan Sweeney, who says 42% of US restaurants were unprofitable last year and the average profit margin was 2.8%. Popmenu sells websites, search visibility and marketing tools to restaurants, so treat those figures as the vendor's.

Sweeney's advice on technology is to avoid both extremes. "It's either you're doing no AI or you're doing everything, and both of those are equally bad," he says. On consistency: "It doesn't have to be perfect, but it needs to be consistent."

Co-founder Tony Roy frames the demand problem as a slot fight. If a customer who ate out five times a week now does it three or four, the question for the operator is how to be one of those three or four.

For any founder selling something local and high-ticket — catering, installation, repair, professional services — the lesson is cheap to test. Somebody is searching for what you sell today, and the ranking decides who they call.

Walker's experience suggests two prerequisites: someone competent doing the search work, and tracking good enough that you can tell where an order came from. Without the second, the first is invisible.