Restaurants on the Run

RESTAURANTS ON THE RUN: A FOUNDER’S JOURNEY

1. What led to ROTR’s growth and success?

ROTR's has built its success thanks to several factors:

• Values: “principles of trust and integrity” “the importance  of  serving the customer” “maintaining a people-oriented culture, where emphasis is on the well-being of the employees”
• Attitude and motivation:  “While we didn’t have the Know-How, we had the grit. We had the resilience. Nothing was going to stop us”
• Approach:  “While most food delivery services at the time focused on home delivery, Restaurants on the Run decided to concentrate on delivering to corporation and small business”
• Fellowship, teamwork and specialization: “There were no egos in the beginning. We just did what had to and sort of fell into our roles by action instead of fit” “All of them have different strengths: Anthony is the sales guy, very high energy and light hearted; Matt has a strong business acumen, is more level-headed, focused and serious; and Michael is the most vocal and visible leader…he has heart and the ability to inspired. He has integrity and values people’s success”
• Perseverance:  “ROTR’s management began to aggressively pursue a popular restaurant chain that would specifically cater to the consumer market” “But even after multiple rejections, Michael stayed persistent”
• Risk taking: “In 1999, ROTR made its first acquisition-Dine and Dash, a San Diego food delivery service that soon accounted for 10% of ROTR’s revenues. This transaction was followed by the 2001 acquisition of Galloping Gourmet in Laguna Beach”
• Technology Investment: “The team invested in the coding software used in the contracted-out technology sector and hired a developer” “This is really took us from being handcuffed to our technology source to being able to do whatever we wanted with our consumer data and get some competitive advantage over our competitors”
• Long-term decisions: “Its owners discovered a couple key business tactics they believed would help position their company for sustainable long-term growth” “Among these tactics was a system of advanced data gathering and metrics” “Another crucial decision that  the ROTR team made was to find an investor”

1. What were ROTR’s areas for improvement:

According to Rowland Day, the skill ROTR’s team needed to master was: “understanding the drivers of the business such as key market tends and indicators.” “They didn’t really understand where their company was going”

As Mr. Day says, they can have a false sense of security because their success was based on being in the right place at the right time.