I started this business out of my bedroom in Pismo Beach back in 1996 with an $1800 tax return I received. I was 20 years old and worked at the front desk of a local resort. During the slow hours at the hotel, my friend Rafe and I would think of business ideas that I’d write down. One of Rafe’s ideas was a “multi-restaurant delivery service” that I dismissed as being writedownable. One day I saw room service delivering food to a guest and a lightbulb went off in my head. I wondered, “How many hotels don’t have room service?” I called all the hotels in the five cities and found that only 3 of them had room service. So I decided to open a business that provided “room service” to hotels and named it Room Service Extraordinaire.

I started out with three restaurants and ran it out of my room seven days a week while I worked graveyard shifts at the hotel to pay the bills. I knew within six months that it was a flawed concept and spent the next 3 years trying to open up to the whole five cities. But since I had spent the entire $1800, I had no way of paying for the advertising necessary to let the public know.

I learned a lot of lessons during those first three years. I used those lessons to transform the business into the full service multi-restaurant delivery service that exists today. I decided to change the name to something that described the service. In 1999, I changed the name to Restaurants To You. It was very generic but it said what we did. The original name no longer represented what we had become (most people confused us for a house cleaning service). That same year, I rented an office, hired employees, and published the first “Restaurant Delivery Guide” to distribute to the local community. This took most of the savings from the profits from those first 3 years.

I only had a high school education (still do), I had no money, I had no idea what I was doing, and made a LOT of mistakes. But I was determined to learn from my mistakes and figure out how to create a successful business providing delivery from restaurants to their customers. I designed each aspect of this business from my experiences as a consumer. Every time I had a great experience with a company, I’d write it into my business plan. Every time I had a bad experience with a business, I’d make sure it was something that my customers never experienced.

I’ve been providing delivery to local restaurants for over 13 years now and I’ve spent those years refining my delivery system into the kind of service I would use. I strive to provide the most convenient delivery service available to restaurants and their customers.


Sincerely,
Brian Breon
Cafe Runner