The $2 Killer Taco
How Able helps franchises grow, connect locally and over-deliver.
By Jenny Taylor, President & Chief Growth Officer, Able&Co.
The franchise economy is on track to exceed $920 billion in output this year, adding more than 12,000 new locations and nearly 8.9 million jobs, according to the International Franchise Association. Behind almost every one of those locations is an owner trying to figure out how to grow a business that isn’t fully theirs.
A new client of ours runs a popular taco restaurant with locations across Raleigh and Durham and more on the way. Every Tuesday, legions of fans come in for their not-so-secret $2 tacos. On paper, you’d think that a $2 taco is a break-even promotion, the kind that gets people in the door on other nights, or at least tempts them to add queso, guac, a beer, something.
But after digging deeper, we found the $2 taco wasn’t the deal it used to be. The promotion was a legacy strategy, built years ago when the business was smaller. Today it barely covers the paper it’s served on, the electricity to run the kitchen or the labor to make it happen.
Years of training a devoted crowd to show up Tuesdays for almost nothing had quietly taken a toll on the business’ bottom line. They’d come in, grab two cheap tacos, work the salsa bar for free, drink a cup of water and leave. All for under five bucks.
The franchise owner’s real problem wasn’t marketing. It was math.
Once we showed him the numbers, the decision was easy. Sure, the following Tuesday, the crowd thinned a bit, and the regulars were vocal about the change. But the restaurant held the line and made more money selling fewer tacos, with less going out the door in food, labor and waste.
It’s fun to dream up clever promotions and campaigns. But often, real growth comes when an agency has a deeper view of how a business runs operationally, sees what’s working and what isn’t, and has the courage to tell an owner the truth, and the trust to act on it.
From Tacos to Custom Closets: Every Franchise Has Its Own Challenges
Pricing is often just one of the issues we find when we dig in with franchise owners. One of our clients in the home improvement space, also a local outpost of a national franchise, brought us in to help with an awareness issue.
California Closets runs national campaigns that look great. Watch a TV spot in the Raleigh market and you may ask yourself: What does a dream closet in a desert oasis have to do with California Closets in Raleigh? Nothing. And that’s exactly the problem. A beautiful national campaign is less likely to drive local growth if it doesn’t connect with the local market.
At The Able Agency, we’ve worked with California Closets for over 5 years now, across markets from Raleigh to Richmond to Virginia Beach. People knew the brand. Many didn’t know it was local, with a showroom in their city, designers who live there, and owners who do too. Closing that awareness gap is what we were hired to do.
Even McDonald’s, perhaps the most standardized franchise system on earth, doesn’t sell the same menu everywhere. In India, where many customers are vegetarian, they swap beef for the McSpicy Paneer. In Japan, it’s a Teriyaki Burger that’s been on the menu for decades. National brands still have to earn their place locally.
Making Every Dollar in a Franchise Agreement Work Harder
Franchise ad budgets are rarely big enough to waste. That’s why we leverage relationships and negotiate what owners can’t always secure on their own: added placements, custom activations and the kind of visibility a standard local ad buy almost never includes. Recently, for California Closets, that meant a custom showcase inside a major public venue most local businesses can’t access.
Maximizing spend also means understanding that no two franchise agreements read the same. Some brands mandate real local spend (we’ve seen anywhere from 2% to 7%). For example, McDonald’s typically requires a local advertising contribution on top of a national ad fund fee. Other brands may hand a new owner a name, a menu, a logo and a handshake, and call it a game plan.
Either way, we’ve met plenty of franchise owners who know they’re supposed to advertise locally but aren’t sure what to do beyond buying local media and hoping for the best.
Different Franchises. Same Playbook.
In a recent Adweek profile, I learned how Grubhub built a dual-brand strategy of its own, keeping Grubhub national while turning Seamless into a hyper-local brand just for New York City, then rolling what worked there into Grubhub’s expansion plans. Different category than custom closets. Same instinct. Point is national reach and local relevance are two different jobs, and trying to do both with one approach usually falls short.
An Immediate Win
We didn’t set out to upset tables full of Tuesday night taco regulars, Reddit comments aside. But somewhere between the old price and the new one, we earned the support of an owner with real plans, more money in his pocket and enough trust in us to chase what comes next.
Don’t worry, no burritos were harmed in the writing of this article.
