Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Romello and Roland(M.E) Truitt. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Romello and Roland(M.E), looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.
10 years 10 Restaurants we are now on year eleven and we have 11
Crazy thing is … We have turned down so many opportunities
out of fear of not being able to keep up but now we are on the path of not just investing in properties but investing in people.
Team work really makes the dream work.
We always had the scale up model ever since we were kids, example ; my parents could only afford a certain amount of money for shoes for their 3 kids. Instead of settling , we decide to go work for the extra money so that we could add it to the standard budget of what was allotted for us; from then on , we had what we wanted by upgrading on what we needed. We started off in the fashion game and did the same thang haha. we took 20$ and bought 4 tees and sold each shirt for 20$ , we den put $20 back and made $80 more . With music it was the same scale up model , took 5 Cds to a city, told the DJ that we would give 10% to him if we got book at the venue he was playing at , got book for $2500, gave him $250 , from the show , 5 more CD’s were giving out and the same offer was made to the next person , resulting in 366 paid shows up to up to 10,000 per show, yes to scale means to grow, we took the same model and took one restaurant and poured all of the earnings into opening the next restaurant , and took that money to open the next restaurant , all on our own , NO LOAN,
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Well WINGS WORLD , is a family business… PERIOD .. once you work with us , we are FAMILY… i think any family can do what we are doing , they are just too busy being Pessimistic instead of Optimistic . Hey whether you think you can or you think you cant … guess what ? you are RIGHT! I am most proud of being able to create jobs . we literally have over 78 employees who all feed there families as they literally feed families. My mom and Dad run a restaurant called Mr T’s Real Catfish and burgers my uncle runs a restaurant, my cousin runs a Royals Friend Chicken, my uncle and cousin over sees all of the Wings World Restaurants, my oldest brother does the finances, my aunts over seas employees and the list goes on. Problem solving is the key to success, they are the daily issues that you have to overcome to even get to the next level , if you look at it as that your super hero power den you will always save the day , if you look at it as a burden you’ll end up hurtin lol its all perceptive
Does your business have multiple or supplementary revenue streams (like a ATM machine at a barbershop, etc)?
oh ok , yall wanna get to it den , ok haha so lets breakdown how we money. maybe we will build a firm appreciation of what we really do . M.E and my brother call the restaurant industry the pennies games. So do the inflation the profits or slim , but its sink or swim. if A chicken wing cost $0.60 and you resell it for $0.90 cent , you profit $0.30 . that means on every 10 piece you make $3.00 correct ! WRONG! so you think the grease is free, you think the sauce was free ? come on you think the person was cooking your meal for free? what about the ranch? ohh you can walk into a grocery and say give me free ranch? ok cool bring us some … nothing in the restaurant was free for us , not even the napkins that we give away or the ketchup or the forks , a restaurant buys 100 items and gives them away and only makes money on about 4 or 5 things . hey im not tryna kill you business dreams im just going to give you a reality check , lets see if you can cash it in ! Multiple source of income ok , a daiquiri can yield you 50% profit off each customer, all you have to do is spend 2400$ on a TABC licenses and 5000$ on a machine , you need at least 2 , plus the alcohol , the mix and the bottles but hey this is a numbers game remember, if you have 250 customers a week at a 5$ average that 1250$ x’s 4 week = 5000$ half of that is take home , meaning you will be all profit in less then 6 months , this is also a marathon , drinks are a good income inside our business, we pay 1.14$ and sell if for 1.99 that 85 cent profit , cakes are usually bought at 2.50 and sold at $5. business tend to make the most money of the items that sell the least and least off the items that sell the most but the moral is , at the end of the day it all adds up , a penny saved is a penny earned and lets just say we got a lot of pennies saved up , we see over 50,000 customers a month, can you imagine having $2 from each one ? i can ! dont worry about those big numbers because the lil numbers add up and they are more appealing to the customers ears and eyes
How’d you meet your business partner?
Well , how much time we do we have , this is Roland (M.E) Truitt speaking for Romello Truitt and ill tell yall how i met my Cofounder/ business partner …. smirks
so i was 3 years old right , and my mom and dad brought him home and said , this is your baby brother!
the end ! cool story huh
Contact Info:
- Website: wingsworldfood.com
- Instagram: thewingsworld
- Facebook: thewingsworld