Episode 27 of the Agents of Innovation podcast features an interview with Evan Marcus, co-owner of a Delivery Dudes franchise in midtown Miami. Delivery Dudes is the nation’s premier restaurant food delivery service, delivering for the best local restaurants in your local town. With 46 franchises in 4 states (37 of them in Florida), Delivery Dudes was first started in Delray Beach, Florida by Jason Koss in 2009.
In an on-demand age, with anything in the world delivered to your home, Delivery Dudes is part of the market’s response to consumer demand to pick up and deliver food from your favorite local restaurants. Delivery Dudes charges consumers a delivery fee (sometimes it is waived, depending on the circumstances) and takes a small percentage from the local restaurant.
A week after he graduated from Florida State University in 2014, Evan started delivering for Delivery Dudes in Boca Raton and helped them with the management of their South Beach location. That November, they started signing up restaurants in midtown Miami. And they opened their midtown Miami location in February 2015.
“The cool thing about being a franchise owner (for Delivery Dudes) is that you’re given sort of a rule book and you have to play within that rule book but you also get to custom tailor your own business as long as its within the boundaries of the rule book — and that’s where the creativity comes in, because you have constraints,” says Marcus. The drivers for Delivery Dudes are independent contractors, while the management of each franchise location maintains both full-time and part-time staff who work out of a small office.
“The draw for the restaurant is they don’t need to add any staff … it’s like we’re bringing them extra tables into their restaurant without any extra fee, we’re just taking a percentage off that,” says Marcus.
When they started in midtown Miami, there was no one doing the high-end restaurant concept for delivery (unlike major cities like New York and San Francisco). However, since they started, they have seen major national and international companies like E24, Postmates, Uber, and Amazon try to move into the Miami market with a variety of food delivery platforms. So far, no one has been able to compete at the same level as Delivery Dudes. It seems the local guys know more about the local market than the big, national companies have been able to figure out. In addition, many of the local restaurants haven’t added their own delivery drivers because Delivery Dudes has provided such professionalism and efficiency.
In fact, when customers learn they have options to choose from a variety of delivery companies, the local restaurants in midtown Miami often times have customers ask them which is the best delivery service to use – so far, most continue to tell their customers: Delivery Dudes.
“It was nice being able to admit: hey, we’re not Uber. We don’t have the technology they have. We don’t have the money they have to spend on advertising. So, let’s not be them,” says Marcus. “We have a different business model. Let’s stick to working with local, high-end concepts and do what they can’t do.”
“The person at the highest level of UberEats in Miami is not going to be texting the restaurant owners. I am. I’m able to change a menu item in a couple minutes. They are not able to do that. It was liberating, almost, to have them come in and give even greater juxtaposition to why our business model works even better. It was liberating to see this – one of the biggest companies in the world – and say: there are certain things they will never be able to do that we can do by literally just living here.”
To hear more from Evan Marcus about his Delivery Dudes franchise in Miami, tune into Episode 27 of the Agents of Innovation podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or Soundcloud. Then, be sure to leave comments below or on the Agents of Innovation Facebook or Twitter pages.
