Marketing Through a Pandemic

all right good afternoon welcome to our last session uh i'm with uh josh from nuglife and appliquette and we are having some product placement beverages um those of you who don't know nug life they are um would you say josh adelaide's premiere chicken nug enthusiasts restaurant uh we always like to join the where adelaide's realest nugs realist nugs yeah um they are based at uh brew boys brewery in regency park um but also you've got morphe vale now yeah and you're popping up everywhere yeah we've

got a food truck as well so we've been sending that out to golden grove um every week as well yeah so um i thought we might just start by um you know nut life is one of those one of those things that started almost like a virtual outlet yeah so a couple of years ago um i kind of uh saw where i thought food was trending which is we're starting to get into more niche environments obviously take away delivery service is becoming a big thing um

my family was in pubs for a long time so i know quite a few pubs around adelaide and had an idea of looking at a pub and seeing how they could you know better utilize their kitchen to do virtual kitchens essentially because pubs have got quite a range of um equipment they pretty much cook anything but aren't really the type of product that does well and uber eats um so we launched uh launched a our first nug life just out of the maid of auckland um

just through ubereats called it a virtual uh chicken nugget kitchen had quite a bit of press around it which was good um went really well and i think what we realized was that um there was actually quite a market for uh you know fried chicken in adelaide um i always joke like we've had our wanky burgers for a little while now uh but there wasn't really anything like that for fried chicken it was pretty much kfc or you know pub wings that type of thing so

yeah we found our little niche and have slowly grown and now we do wanky burgers as well but yeah it's good and then um i think it was last year that you joined forces with brew boys and you opened a in person restaurant yeah we actually had a little takeaway shop uh in kilkenny and that was our first kind of bit of a production kitchen slash um we cooked out of there mainly on ubereats but then we got a food truck which we couldn't store on

the um at an old takeaway shop so we started to look at different options and uh and we kind of thought fried chicken and beer goes pretty well together uh i didn't actually know the brood boys but i'd been in there and they weren't too far from where old shop was so we started chatting with them and just said look not sure if you've by chance want to have a kitchen like built into your brewery but if you do we think this could be a good

little fit for us and they were like well funnily enough we were hoping to build a kitchen so uh that worked out pretty well um and yeah obviously we've kind of kept trying different things from there but um yeah it's it's been a bit of a different different ride than most hospital i'd say but good so in 2019 opening a kitchen in a brewery sounds like the best idea ever to me and then we get to february march this year and venues are shutting and it

it's not such a good idea anymore yeah um i think a big part of our change as well was we obviously have we had two food trucks so um we were very event-based um which is probably what dropped off and fell away the quickest we we i still remember like the friday that uh kind of restrictions started to kick in we had a it was the end of fringe we had a fringe event at the port the next day and it was like 9am we got

an email saying don't stress this event's going to happen and then 1 p.m you know it's okay we're still going to go ahead and then 4 p.m the event's cancelled so the the brewery was kind of secondary a little bit to that um we we kind of figured that we would be able to still do takeaway trade and you know i think i think if uh truth is sold it probably had a bigger impact on the um on the brewery or the brew boys themselves than

us from a trade standpoint because we always have had a pretty solid uber eats um kind of takeaway um uh you know product but uh what what we noticed was yeah the food truck we had to really pivot and that's that's probably um yeah change changed uh back again i guess so i remember getting a phone call from um one of the the boys owen um we were nearing the end of their website build but we weren't quite there and yeah um hey so uh we

gotta shut tomorrow um you know how we nearly finish this website and we're gonna be able to sell beer on the internet you know can we do it tomorrow um and so i remember we basically tried to move whatever we could around so that we could get some form of online ordering done as quickly as possible but when you're talking about shipping canned product in cartons you know people get thirsty but it doesn't have to be done immediately now you obviously already had a big uber

eats business but that's substantially less profitable than your food trucks yeah we we obviously um so we saw kind of the the writing on the wall pretty quickly in terms of the shift from um in-house dining experience and and takeaway in general um you know we with the brew boys kitchen hadn't um had a lot of you know i guess you your classic pizza takeaway shop they're kind of used to having their customer base have phone orders call-in orders get them delivered so we didn't really

have that model in place initially but i guess so as well as running noke life i also work with appliquette which is a local app development agency and we had the benefit i guess of having access to an app development team so over that kind of first weekend we went to ourselves all right what if we build a an app that um works for nug life and just allows us to be able to do deliveries and and have customers be able to pick up directly obviously

i had a fair few staff so i wanted to try and keep them working as much as possible and figured that i could be a delivery driver so as is the way when you run your own business you kind of fill the gap that's there but um after a couple of days we spoke to obviously hospitality and i've run events and stuff so i've got a few contacts in the industry and there's a lot of hospital businesses that that didn't have access to that tech and

it wasn't that much more wasn't really any more difficult to set up a an app that would allow us to be able to not only sell nuglife product but also work with other hospitality businesses and list and have them operate through the app as well so we decided to go down a different path and and build an app that was um we called it your local so the idea was that it was a local based app uh built for local business we didn't take any any

revenue or any cut from the um from the venues which was just uh us trying to figure out what hospitality was going to look like and and make sure that there was an alternative outside of uber because obviously uber charged a large portion of the the revenue fee um so yeah we had in about two weeks time we we transitioned to really focusing on pushing this app um we built it pretty quickly we've got a pretty good team of applicants so yeah plug plug plug but

now that the excellent the boys worked really hard i think the other thing is because everything's locally based us staff also understanding of how hospitality was impacted so i know our team actually took a lot of passion on it and worked outside of ours so they they did fantastic um built the app and and as soon as we kind of got it out there by chance the uh the brew boys had organized a catch up with um peter melinascus from the the local labor party who

saw what we were trying to do and um thought it must have tied him quite nicely with what he was trying to do so uh from there we had a channel set up an interview the next day and within about two weeks we had about 20 000 downloads and i think 70 70 venues giving it a go and um yeah we ran it for for a couple of months um obviously it was a good alternative option to ubereats we ended up kind of pulling it from

the app store just because i think adelaide and obviously we touch wood when we say this but we've started to come out of um the restrictions that that forced businesses to shift to just take away and now they've kind of begun to focus on building up that um in-house offering again so it just reached a point where it was no longer a needed product and um the reality is because it was starting to become a big project there was a lot of costs and and what

not associated we decided we'd rather pull it than try to make it a another uber eats where we charge a cart and that type of stuff but you know we hope it helped a few businesses it certainly helped nug life and and the brew boys i think sold a few beers through it as well so they were happy but um but yeah it was just a a lucky circumstance you know i don't think there's a lot of hospitality business owners that also have their toes in

the app development business they're not really uh well i mean product we'll come back to that point because that's definitely one that i can already hear people bashing away at people it's going i can't do that um but i guess like you the the app was one of the most downloaded apps in adelaide in that time in australia actually in australia yeah we cracked we cracked all the the trendings uh on ios and android which is pretty pretty impressive huge just being a south aussie app

so but we was that enough to offset the losses from the food trucks so the food truck uh it was an interesting one um and actually has probably led to us rethinking a few of our just our business model in general um so we obviously uh we had all these events booked um that that disappeared into the ethos which is uh what i think everyone in our event industry went through you know tasting australia was a big event that was coming up and we weren't involved

with that but there's a lot of um local businesses that are and we were yeah so uh and then i guess the other thing is you know even now um from a from a food truck standpoint you know we're not really getting too excited about events coming into the end of this year i think we've made the the realization that it's probably unlikely anything's going to happen uh in 2020 and are keeping more our fingers crossed the 2021 stuff starts to change but the the pivot

there was that um we had staff that obviously um you know wanted to give ours to and and make sure that they were looked after because we are very uh ubereats focused i guess we we've always been a delivery partner based product that's kind of why we we joking i joke around like nug life was built for stoners and hungover people eating eating at home that was uh that was our target demo from the start so hey but yeah we we thought to ourselves let's um

let's send the food truck to an area like we've had a lot of people reach out over over time asking for us to pop up in different areas and um we we m onkaparinga council allow you to have a food truck permit and set up in certain zones so there was a little park in morfort vale that i looked at what our ubereats radius would look like and it looked pretty promising so we set the truck up there and just started pumping social media advertising telling

people who were there and uh it really took off so that that allowed us to we then got to shop down that way um which is uh which has been busy for the last couple of months but i think what we've now done is realized that there's uh a market for sending the food truck to the right location and um and using social media as a tool to inform people that were there um and that market in a weird way is almost just as profitable if

not more profitable for us than the actual events industry because uh even though ubereats take a fee a lot of event vendors take a a pretty large fee as well and events can be quite hit miss if you're expecting it to be a big event and uh and you have a lot of stock and a lot of staff on and then for whatever reason weather or um kovid you know it doesn't go ahead uh you can uh you can be at quite a loss whereas running

the the food truck you know kind of as a rolling uber kitchen um it's a lot more consistent so we don't have as much wastage and uh yeah it's it's funny it's the app certainly helped we we we certainly sold quite a bit of um you know we certainly did well through the app and i think it really helped um uh that we were pushing it ourselves as well as a better tool than than relying on overheats and what was actually really like a really good

thing was that you know people understood i think you know sometimes uh when you're in hospitality you can feel like your customers don't really understand the challenges that you go through but we would always get positive messages and people using the app because they understood what hospital was going through so that was really good as well but it was just just the the force change you know sometimes they work in your favor and in this case it does and they're not always going to work that

way i know there's plenty of hospitality businesses that haven't had that type of luck but for us getting uh getting the food truck more as a rolling bricks and mortar has has actually been a good thing and something we would definitely kind of happy it ended up working out that way so here's an interesting question for you did you shut off ubereats around the around the brewery when you were doing your local uh we didn't we offered both we offered both um did you find many

people were shifting from ubereats to your local so that you didn't have to pay the commissions um it would be hard unfortunately uber doesn't provide any real data on its customer base um which is uh deliberate obviously um so it'd be hard to know for certain if if that was the case i think i think what it allowed us to be able to do was uh market um a delivery service uh that so i guess from a marketing um space on a social medias and marketing

spend standpoint i'm always hesitant to to spend a lot of money promoting you know ubereats um because they do take quite a large chunk so to me i actually look at ubereats more as a marketing platform for nug life as opposed to just a delivery services tool um whereas what what we started to do was with your local if we wanted to do social media content it was always focused around your local we created you know special offers we worked with the brew boys to create

a couple of offers that were only available through your local so it was more uh we definitely kept uber because obviously we're not gonna we're you know a free app in adelaide we're not gonna be able to compete with their marketing spend but at the same stage what we did is made sure when we did a social media post that we we focused just on the yolo crap and i think that's probably as i said i wouldn't be able to tell you if it was a

shift i'm sure there was some people that did shift um but on the flip side um it just meant that we had something that we could push out there to the people to say look if you're going to get nug life you know order in with with um with your local um and i think that's the thing is as i said i think we definitely actually had new customers that came to your local that hadn't ordered from nuglife before just because it was something different and

obviously we were advertising and spending money to get it out there so yeah it was it was um but um yeah uber's the great great everything's hidden and secret with them so i couldn't tell you unfortunately so obviously to come back to the previous point you know not everyone can just go hey we're shutting tomorrow i'm going to put my entire app development business and we're going to have to take us offline yeah but it sounds like one of the biggest drivers for you was pivoting

the food trucks and trying to to find a better way of doing business rather than just just providing an app yeah i think i think obviously being a small business owner um and specifically one in in a takeaway hospital environment um you know the biggest thing for me was shifting from working a lot in the kitchen and and uh and being more hands-on to needing to kind of give those hours to staff and and you know obviously trying to make sure that the employees were always

you know working because i'm lucky i've got a great team so i didn't want to have to lose any of them during during covid so what it meant was that there was a lot of nights where i was you know delivery driver and obviously if you don't have orders um i was able to kind of spend a bit more time focusing on uh on us social media strategy specifically you know we um we i spent you know one of the other things is there's nothing to

do so not only as a hospital person running your own business but it's not like in your spare time you can really go out and do anything so i'm just going to go to the pub or dinner with friends no yeah no it was a lot of um just time at the brewery thinking about what we can we can do to make things work um so one of the things we did was we re-shot all of our menu we um really i spent a fair bit

of time just trying to think about what we wanted our social media image to look like um how we wanted to utilize social media i think we'd always try to build a strategy around the idea of um i guess that small business you know you're trying to get people to know who you are type of uh mentality when i think what we've we've shifted to is more using social media for what it is which is an advertising platform so when we we do a post and

when we promote what we do it's it's not um meant to feel it's it's meant to feel like an advert which might be uh you know for some businesses makes sense for other businesses that's not gonna work but um yeah so we went through all of our menu we reshot everything we you know tried um different virtual kitchen concepts and um yeah marketing-wise we we started to really spend extra money on but boosting our social media page i think one of the things that i noticed

was sending the food truck down to morphe vale because it was kind of a new area for us we could actually really see if we spent 100 bucks one week uh the amount of orders and then if we spent 300 bucks the next week it would increase significantly and you know obviously there's a little bit of word of mouth there as well but it was it was pretty clear there was a clear um correlation between what we were spending and what we were getting in terms

of business so it just just allowed me to be able to step back that that little bit that i think every every small business owner really struggles to do you know it's you want to be involved with everything but sometimes you've got to take a step back and go okay what's the bigger picture here how do i make sure that we're doing everything we can to to grow and it that's you know probably been the learning lesson for me is is to make sure that um

i'm not spending you know 50 hours in the kitchen but maybe only 30 and spending that extra 20 working on the socials and and we've got a good strategy in place now built around what we want to do and how we want to present ourselves and where we want to spend our money to to make sure that we're getting people to the door so was that shift in uh social strategy and i guess you can say branding was that driven by covert or was it just

that covert gave you the time to do it i think it was a case of kobe gave me the time um like like a lot of business owners i imagine i've got a big list of stuff that i'd like to get to and get done and um you know stuff like your local wasn't on that list that was something that popped up because of covid so that was definitely a covert influence thing we we haven't really been looking it's funny even though we have an app

development agency we haven't really been looking at an app i'm still not 100 sure how how that works i think marketplace apps certainly work more effectively which is uh why uber has been so successful um and why brands like mcdonald's and hj's and kfc even though they've got their own apps still utilize those platforms so it was that was you know definitely a case of pivoting just because of covid um but stuff like read the the rebrand obviously we've kept the the nug life and the

logo and all the stuff it's more just rethinking how we wanted to push ourselves out there in the social media world that had always been in the back of the mind and it was just that time to you know i've got eight hours today where you know we'll probably won't get a heap of orders but i'll keep the fries on and if i've got time i'll go over and do some photo shoots and stuff or you know i've got the staff on and and i'm waiting

for an order to come in so i'll i'll think of how we can you know push this what target demographics we want to really hit um and yeah it's been good so that that was yeah on that kind of long list of stuff to do and covet allowed me to be able to um spend a bit of time on it so and that that's the thing now is that now that coverts done i still try to make sure that i'm giving myself that time to uh

to um take some stuff off that long list so to speak you didn't touch wood when you said cope it's done mate that's going to be a problem yeah i should have yeah nah you know what i mean now that we're back to at least for the short term business as usual and and uh and we've got a new shop which is obviously busy um it's it's still making sure not to get too bogged down in the the day-to-day so you mentioned before that you could

see a direct correlation between the location that you were targeting with the facebook ads and the orders through uber yeah um i'm assuming uber give you no conversion data uber don't it wasn't just ubereats either it was just revenue in general we could see we could see quite an increase in in our revenue um you know we now as well have kind of figured out a formula for what we're looking for when we target an area uh so if we send the food truck as i

said we're currently sending it to golden grove which is out north and and doing quite well um we know what our uber like our target demographic on social media fits a certain criteria and has a kind of a minimum um capacity for you know if it's ten thousand fifteen twenty thousand that fit that demographic um we had tried in in mainland's um beforehand because we'd had a few people out east inquire about you know trying nug life and whatnot and we could just see just using

that social media kind of um broad audience um data that mayland's had about half of the demographic we targeted versus golden grove so it's not just helped us in terms of uh growing the business but i think it also helps us when we look at you know certain locations we've got a couple of spots out north that we might be eyeing off that when i look at what our uber eats radius would be around that address and then how many people within that social media demographic

suit what we're looking to do i can see that it's quite a quite a substantial um uh fit versus you know a place like mainland's or even you know we looked at what mount barker would look like and it's not not a lot out that way that would suit but that's that's just because different demos different places um but yeah so it's kind of helping us i mean in a weird way um you know there's other forms of marketing and and certainly as we grow we'll

have to start to look at other advertising platforms but for us you know that facebook data especially for the type of product that we do which is you know i guess that fast food style meal it's it's a a pretty broad target demo so it does help you know it's not like we're a super niche product where you're never going to find anything substantial on your social media we can always find a pretty good audience so we've had a number of speakers over the last couple

of days talking about customers personas how i mean we don't want you to give away all your super secret herbs and spices but how detailed do you go with those demographics when you're analyzing where you put in your restaurant we don't yeah we don't we don't go um too too specific as i said we have a pretty broad range of of people that pretty broad product range most most people eat a burger and most people enjoy fried chicken and obviously we've got vegan products as well

so we know that there's other markets that that aren't really targeted i think i think what we're looking for is um you know we look at other fast food locations as well so you know not just the big chains but other kind of slightly smaller groups that might not necessarily fit into our food product range so they might not necessarily be a burger but they'll suit the same type of price price point or um you know it'll be general general interest might be something like fried

chicken which is a simple one but you know when you're a fried chicken vendor makes sense so we kind of take about four or five different things combine them into one demographic um search and then obviously set the radius to be uh what uber eats as radius is and then based on the address we normally get a good feel for what like based on facebook's you know how many people they would have in that demographic and i guess the good thing is we've we've got a

bit of a baseline now for what we do out of brood boys and what that demographic looks like and what we do out of more football and that's a larger demographic and obviously we do more revenue out of more football so um it's a good it's kind of given us a rough very rough and obviously these are all in inexact sciences but a little bit of confidence um and and that has kind of been backed up by where we sent the food truck next which was

mailands which was more along the brew boys line and then sending it out to golden grove which was similar to more football and we've seen the truck revenue accordingly fit that um criteria so yes that's that's kind of the other thing is we we obviously have a pretty consistent spend on our social media across all of our locations but we can tell that we're getting a better bang to buck where that demographic has a broader audience for us as well are you taking the interaction data

from the campaigns and modifying your personas over time not yet i guess what we've we've kind of um started this is um you know it's only been about three months of really playing around with this type of stuff but what we're starting to try and do is is build a more fleshed out strategy so one of the things that we want to do is have a burger of the month and a um a fried chicken product of the month that we can run as a month-long

campaign and see how that compares to what running shorter spurt campaigns over say a weekend or once every like we do a wing wednesday which is starting to build some popularity so we kind of do a shorter term boost on a tuesday night through to wednesday and then that's going to start to give us a bit more understanding of you know what what's working do we we can start to then do some a b marketing playing around with all right we've got a month worth of

data on how people interact with with our wing wednesday post when we target these demos let's now shuffle it around and see if we get more specific or go broader and and see how that works um you know we've tried a few different things with just setting you know the demographic as simple as as interest being food which you know very very broad spectrum um and that's worked for some things but hasn't worked for others i think when we do our kind of product of the

month it actually works a little bit better but when we're trying to promote a discount night it's actually not as effective so it it it does we can see some trends but we've only been mucking around for a couple of months so we don't want to we don't want to say it's all gospel just yet you're the expert um i guess what are the other key takeaways you've you've found particularly with social advertising through covert um i mean obviously we've we've tried different things i think

one of the the key is for me making sure that we've got a social media strategy that offers something um new and fresh so that's why having something that's you know in hospitality it's quite simple a burger of the month or a fried chicken option of the month you know we do um this month a flaming hot cheeto nug which which has been pretty popular okay so you know we having something that's a little bit different so that you know your existing audience uh i guess

there's there's two parts to any any marketing obviously targeting people that have never heard of you before and then targeting people that that have heard of you but you're trying to give them something to come back into so that that's been a good thing in terms of broad spectrum stuff is just creating something so at least every month we know that we can hit up that same audience again with the with a new product to hopefully get them interested and not everyone's going to want a

flaming cheddar nug but they might like what our next kind of fried chicken mother of the month product is um i hope everyone's online now ordering their fried cheeto nug yeah i can see robina on the uber right now that's good yeah i've actually um it's just you know have we got questions are we um yeah good um so uh there are a few places where you should take your van first of all um uh missy's frontline apparently there's a spot moana where you should pull

up yeah and uh i think it's outside the library um yeah so you've got some some spots down where uh yeah we'll pass them on to you and hopefully josh can get down there i like this he just said front lawn yeah and then she finds out she's not in the target demo and she can't she can't have a dog like that um this one and following us and i went from missy christy was thinking about luxor but she reckons it's probably gonna be nugget now

so yeah and she can like sir that would be difficult yeah yeah um this one from missy josh what are your thoughts on many logs snoop dogg ads uh i haven't really seen i'm not a commercial television watcher so i haven't really seen the menu log advertising um but yeah menu logs probably the one the one brand that we haven't really tried with delivery services so um if i had to pick pick one of the delivery services that's certainly been the best it would probably be

delivered to work with um the local reps been been a lot more helpful than than some of the other guys and um they don't have quite as we can't get delivery down at morpheville unfortunately but um certainly out of brew boys they've been really helpful with promotion and stuff so shout out to deliveroo uh and then this other one from jasmine actually uh what's the future look like for true local uh so you're local we've oh you're like i'm sorry wrong one that's terrible they've shut

true local down now we as i said at this stage we've decided to um to close uh your local or take the app off the app store um not for any other reason other than uh as i said it got to the point where the app kind of outgrew our capability to be able to run it effectively so um yeah look we feel like it served its purpose for now obviously if things shift again which hopefully they don't um we might have to revisit it we

haven't you know destroyed it it's just uh just been removed off the app store it was starting to get a couple of little bugs and uh and the cost to develop and time would have would have started to push it into into the point where it would have needed to start to generate some kind of revenue and we just weren't in a position where we wanted to um push venues to have to then start to pay a revenue fee when we've been really pushing the fact

that it was revenue free for them so it's a balancing act with stuff like this unfortunately i think it's great that you could put it out there um without charging a fee but you know we we all know that even if you've you're involved in an app agency and and people can build it there's still a cost associated with that cost associated with running it and if if there's not if somebody's not paying at some point yeah well it won't last yeah i mean in the

short time it was up it generated tens of thousands of dollars in revenue for our venues so it we certainly don't look at it just because it's not running now as a failed project we actually think it was really successful for what it was you know if we don't look at it as an app and look at it more as a marketing tool um which it was essentially that's kind of why we pushed it as a way of generating interest and business i think from a

from a marketing campaign standpoint what we did in in two months was incredibly successful so um it's more just a case of um it was just start to outgrow what it was capable of doing and but that's that's you know a good thing yeah yeah well we're waiting for the last questions to come in something you said before something that i've been really interested in um completely unrelated to all of this but um like i think it's been really interesting as a as a business owner

myself um like covert has been tough for everybody and you've mentioned a couple of times that was really important that you keep your staff working it was really important that you got out of the way and you let them have the hours yeah how how did you i guess how was the whole the the mind space and the ability to to keep the business running like that with all the different pressures that are coming along with that yeah um i think we were in a situation

where um like i mean like a lot of small business it's it's very quickly adapting i think one of the lucky things that i have as a hospitality business is that um most of our costs for our particular hospitality business are variable costs so we um you know we don't have a massive pub that's got a massive lease cost associated with that and we've always really focused hard on trying to keep those kind of fixed costs to a minimum as much as we could so there

was a little bit of give in terms of even though the revenue side of things started to dry up especially with the food truck side of things really quickly um you know a lot of the costs also associated with that dried up you know you're not if you're not paying you know an event some events charge up to 35 percent on on your revenue so if you're not changing well if you're not paying um if you're not paying uh revenue if you're not making revenue at

those events you're not paying that fee um and as i said we we were in a situation where you know it it was i guess we didn't have to make any tough decisions just because the pivot with the food truck worked so that that was a big relief straight away was going okay i need to keep my food truck stuff working let's send it down more for val and you know to be fair that first week it just did enough revenue to cover like the wages

and i was just relieved knowing you know thank god we don't have to we're not running at a loss to keep those guys um afloat um we we didn't get a heat like we got some of the the government subsidies which was lucky as well and you know job keep has been um not a perfect system but i think it's also helped us stay a little bit afloat and get through that first i guess well the problem with job keeper was that it it didn't give

us the immediate help to get through that first month but we were also lucky in that we're not like a small bar where we completely lost all of our revenue day one so we were able to generate just enough revenue and i guess like a lot of small business owners you go through a couple of months where you don't really see a paycheck for yourself but i'm lucky i've got a partner that's uh in healthcare so she was certainly working a lot which is good so

it's that balancing act and that juggle i think um i think for me when i looked at it i i just figured that like obviously we i i knew that our particular type of business model wasn't going to be as heavily impacted as other parts of hospitality i think when we talk about hospitality as a whole we it is very broad because the way my business operates versus a small bar in the city versus a pub that's got you know pokies versus you know craft breweries

each business model falls under hospitality but they've got a completely different set of costs and circumstances associated with them so yeah for me it was just kind of falling into that lucky category of of our business model happens to be a very high variable cost business model so when there's not a lot of uh of revenue coming in it also means that we're we're not having these really high fixed costs and that's why i could kind of take that initial risk but yeah it is also

like if if morphe didn't work if we sent the truck down there and no one was coming in and um we weren't getting any any business down that way i think uh it's a completely different story you know um so yeah um it's like anything in business it's it's you like 90 like i reckon and then the rest of it's just you making sure to take advantage of that luck yeah and it's been so good to see some of the cool stories that are coming out

of the whole experience you've you've pivoted and you've been able to keep business going um our local here is the port admiral hotel yeah um they reopened for friday lunches a couple of weeks ago we were in there the first day and the bar staff were all um all missed us and they're all very excited to have us back and um because you build relationships with these people as well so it's um it's good hopefully we're at the back of it now and we can we

can keep moving onwards and upwards unlike some states who will remain in mexico yeah look i mean that's it you don't want to get too um too far ahead of yourself and i think um as i said we're as much as the the brew boys brewery concept is uh is a very much a dining experience and we've bounced back really well i think that's been another good thing you know i think a lot of hospitality businesses would probably say the same you know winter is normally

the quiet months but for us we've really seen people wanting to come back out and you know people didn't i think i think people have hopefully realized that um hospitality is a pretty important part of their their enjoyment it might not be always a part of everyday life but when they think of good times and the best times they've had it's normally not at home so uh certainly not going to be yeah um but it's certainly been a um yeah brew boys has certainly been a

good experience and i think that's it as i said we we've been in a situation where uh our business model hasn't been as badly impacted by by covert as others but at the same stage it's it's also been a lot of pivoting and trying a lot of different things and you know there's there's event operators and food truck operators out there i'm sure that have uh have really been hit like we we are part of what i do as well as i run a few different

food events in myanmar of course you do yeah normal thing yeah we uh me and my business partner so we we run the the clucky air fried chicken event so we are debating whether or not that's even going to happen this year it's probably not so but you did a virtual chicken festival we did um because we just thought we'd try something different um as as always but i guess that's the thing is even though uh from my standpoint as a as a food truck operated

within the event space we were able to kind of pivot and try something different there's a lot of um operators in that industry that that if they run an event they can't that there's no money to be made this year you know i think tasting is a good example as you said you were involved with those guys they pushed it back thought they might be able to give it a crack and i think it was october or september and now they've realized it's probably off the

cards this year as well so um this ad led oval you know those those bigger industry type of places so there's a lot of hospital places that are starting to crawl out of it but i think overall the industry is still not going to find its feet probably for another six to 12 months