197. How to Go Viral and Turn It into a Seven Figure Business

0:00Frank Sinés didn't set out to build a viral mac and cheese empire. In fact, not long ago, he and his wife Mary were delivering pizzas at Domino's, riding through shifts, learning the rhythms of the restaurant industry one order at a time. But when COVID hit, everything changed. Mary lost her job, bills were due, and a moment of uncertainty, they made a bold move, launching a cookie dough business from scratch. That business took off, and soon, a random empty space next door sparked a new idea. What if they brought the same energy to something savory? What if they made mac and cheese, but let people build their own?

0:3330 days later, Ronnie's Mac Bar opened its doors and almost immediately went viral, for better and for worse. I'm Ryan Atkinson, and you're listening to the Up The Podcast, where we uncover the secrets of building and running successful businesses. Today, Frank's here to share how they turned negative press into loyal fans, how they built a seven-figure franchise with under$20 ,000, and why raw, honest content might just be the most powerful marketing tool on the planet. Frank, so, so excited to have you on the founder of Ronnie's Mac Bar. Thank you so much for being here today. Hell yeah. Yeah, thank you for having me, man.

1:06This is exciting. Yeah, I'm excited to have you. I was telling you before, my family loves this. I still need to get down to Ames, Iowa to do it. I'm super excited to have you here. But before we dive into Ronnie's Mac Bar, let's go back to the start. What was going on in your life when Mary lost her job during COVID and how did that lead to DoReMe? We've always been, you know, restaurant related. So, you know, restaurant adjacent. Jason, you know, I've always been restaurant operations, you know, managing restaurants and, you know, multi-unit and all that fun stuff. And that's what I was doing, you know, up until COVID started.

1:35Mary, same thing. She was in HR with restaurants. She had a lot of restaurant background and she was actually moving to a brand new job that she was going to have. That was, it was already set in stone that the thing was signed. It was like, hey, she has the job. Great. We're going to go do it. Literally like two days later, then COVID happened and it shut down all of the locations that she was going to be overseeing as, you know, HR. So all of a sudden, we're like everything that we thought, you know, our future was going to be at least the near future completely changed. Like, okay, all of our income now, we just moved over to Texas.

2:05So we didn't have, you know, we were from Tennessee. So we can just go back to the same job we had, blah, blah, blah. So we're like, well, we got to do something quick. You know, one thing that she really was passionate about was cookie dough. She loved making it. She was great at it. And, you know, she's like, you know, I'm just going to throw it on the side until I can find a job. we're just going to make some cookie dough and I'm just going to sell it to some friends or going to sell it to whoever, whoever wants to buy it. And we'll figure out how to do it from there. And that's really what kickstarted.

2:33It was just a, you know, a mutual drive for not stopping, not wanting to stay still and always looking for the next thing. And, you know, she had that drive initially and got us to push on to start entrepreneurship. Nice. I love it. Let's talk about dough rain. Cause I mean, cookie dough, everyone loves cookie dough. Who doesn't love cookie dough. But was there a moment when you're like, holy smokes, like this cookie dough idea, like might actually like work? Was it when you're getting friends? When was that moment for you? Yeah, I think the moment was, you know, very early on when we were looking at opening our first storefront.

3:05So we had enough, you know, customers coming through that were like, hey, this is a viable business, you know, let's look into this. I'm not still working my full time job. And that was our, you know, 100 % our main source of income, other than, you know, everything we were doing a cookie dough, we were just reinvesting back into it. But you know, we did a crowdsourcing thing where we got several thousand dollars of backers that really wanted to see us succeed into a storefront. I was like, dang, we got a lot of people that really want to see this go. And then, you know, my mathematical brain is like, okay, you know, let's, let's just do the numbers.

3:33How many do we need to sell to keep making rent, you know, to at least break even great. How much, you know, what are the logistics look like? And I was like, you know, that's not as bad as I thought, you know, I think this is viable, you know, so let's go into it. And I think that was the moment where I was like, Hey, this could be onto something, you know, who, I didn't even know what was coming, you know, a year later or so with cookie dough. But that's definitely what started the move there. And listeners, I know we're like really whining through this because I do want to get to Ronnie's back bar.

3:59But I mean, Do Re Mi was successful. I mean, you guys scaled to three locations here. Before we dive into Ronnie's, I mean, what did that growth teach you about like scaling like a restaurant business? I forget the saying, simple scales and something else fails, but basically being complicated. That's a mantra that we've lived by for a while, but it proved itself within cookie dough where, you know, we were able to go within a very short period of time from nothing to having three, you know, locations, you know, building out, you know, warehouse and having, you know, an online e commerce business that was, you know, doing better than our stores, even just because of our ability to get cheap leads, if you will, from social media.

4:36And that was really what unlocked our thinking of, okay, wait, we can scale a business like this, you know, that's ultimately what led to what we're going to talk about with Ronies. But really, it was just trying to keep things simple and scalable from the very beginning. It was something we definitely wanted to ingrain into any business that we did, especially this one. And it paid off relatively quickly. Yeah, paid off very, very relatively quickly there. Let's put the listeners in your shoes and Mary's shoes because you've got three cookie dough locations running and then all of a sudden a vacant space opens up next door.

5:07I mean, what was that light bulb moment of like, you know, let's do a Mac bar? Yeah, no, it was funny. We were always talking about wanting to do a restaurant, you know, restaurant just by nature has higher sales, you know, X amount of people get dessert, right? After eating dinner, everyone eats dinner, not everyone gets dessert. So we're like, hey, if we can do this at a dessert place, imagine what we could do at a dinner place. And coincidentally, the place beside us was just an empty spot. And we're like, what could we put in there? And after talking with a friend, you know, about something unrelated, he mentioned a business of a friend of his that had mac and cheese there.

5:40And it wasn't just a mac and cheese restaurant. I thought it was like fully mac and cheese, like genius idea. Wait, we should be like a builder on mac and cheese. It's simple. It's easy. You don't need all the equipment of, you know, most restaurants. So it's a super cheap build out. And we're like, you know what, we can have this up and running in just a couple of weeks. You know, like all we have to do is for the equipment to get here and plug it in. There's nothing else to it. So really, that's what got us thinking. Hey, let's do it. And then when we looked into the logistics, we're like, let's just move fast.

6:06You know, let's figure it out as we go and get it done and get it up and running as quickly as we can to figure out what we don't know and then fix it from there. Yeah. And moving fast, I think is like an important part to like your story here, because you guys opened in 30 days, you identified the equipment that you needed. And you're guys like, holy smokes, like we got a business. I mean, how did you move so quickly from like concept to launch? Was it just like truly being like, we need to take action on this? Or like, what like really motivated you guys move so quickly? Was it opportunity? I mean, the opportunity was definitely there.

6:34I think for us, I mean, I like to put little life hacks, I procrastinate a lot. You know, I do well, I hit things by the deadline, but I do them at the last minute, right? So I was like, Hey, if we just put a date on this, you know, let's just sign it now. We have to get it done in 30 days. Otherwise, you know, we got all this rent that we won't be able to pay that little fire under us, you know, intentionally be like, okay, well, we got to figure out there's a way to do it. You know, Elon Musk in his book with Walter Isaacson talks about Walter talks about it. It's like, Hey, you know, some engineer at Twitter said it was going to take like six months to move the data centers over.

7:06And he was like, what the hell? He went in there with a knife, cut it. He's like, oh, we got it done in three days. And there was no issue, you know. So it's a matter of just taking those timelines that most people think of and be like, how short can we make them? What has to happen to make that actually possible? And that's a, you know, one example, you know, of something that we did for Ronis. But, you know, it's something that we try to keep ingrained within our team and within our franchisees. Like, hey, we can get it done today. You know, we don't need to reconvene next week or, next month to figure it out.

7:32So that was kind of our first go at that. There's a law out there called like Parkinson's law, where basically time will fill to like the deadlines that you have. So it sounds like really a key to entrepreneurship and listeners like take note of this is like, beat Parkinson's law, like don't procrastinate, take action. I know in my own entrepreneurial ventures, that has been true. And it sounds like that was true to you guys. You like really identify the idea, then moved on it. Yeah, 100%. So going out to one of your principles, your laws of food is simplicity and a familiar twist. That's what you need to build like a food concept on.

8:05Why do those principles work so well in food? And like, how did you apply it to like mac and cheese then? The familiar with the twist part really helps anyone looking into food because you don't want something that's too out there where you have to educate people on it or be and it's more of a fad. Let's say, you know, like fidget spinners, for example, they were a fad. They're not something familiar. People didn't know what the hell they were. They got educated on what they were. They got them. And then, you know, the fad went away, you know, frozen yogurt, I think there was a time where there's, you know, a lot of frozen yogurt spots, I don't see a lot anymore.

8:34Nothing is a lot frozen yogurt, by the way. But you know, the idea is there, you know, it wasn't around, you know, at least it wasn't popular, you know, years ago. But you take something like, like an ice cream shop, you know, you go into an ice cream shop, that's been around, you know, since, you know, forever, you know, 100 years, you know, more ice cream shops, you go in there, you scoop the ice cream, you get it in a cone, get it in a cup, whatever, you walk away with our ice cream, that's not going away. So that's familiar. So our cookie dough spot was just like that. It was literally an ice cream shop.

8:59It just had a little bit of a twist, which we replaced the ice cream with cookie dough. It wasn't anything crazy different. Everyone knew what to do when they walked up, they knew they were getting a sweet treat, they could add toppings. It was just like an ice cream shop, but with the twist. So it sets you apart from all the other ice cream shops out there. It makes acquiring customers a lot cheaper because you're not competing with them as much as you normally would be. And you know, you're able to price your things in what works for you, rather than having to add more value than the other guy, our values in the fact that we're one of the only ones with cookie dough.

9:25So people pay to create them for that. And it did really well in store and online. You know, same thing with the mac and cheese place took something that everyone knows how a restaurant works. It's a build your own restaurant. You go up, it's like a Chipotle is a great example of how a restaurant works. And mac and cheese, familiar. Everyone knows mac and cheese. It's not some crazy food that they have to, you know, that's just going to go away in a couple of years and no one's going to try anymore. So pairing the two together, which is rarely done, having a mac and cheese as an entree restaurant, build your own is something unique.

9:53You know, it's got a twist on it. So that's what we would look for if we were to start another business like this. Most people spend months, sometimes years, just thinking about starting a business. But what if you could do it in just 10 days? That's exactly what the 10 day business launch plan is designed for. It's a step by step roadmap that takes you from idea to real operational business in just 10 days. Click the link in the description below and get ready with your business. Let's talk about growing. I love the concept of combining something, you know, a staple, mac and cheese with something unique of like build it, make it your own type of feel to it.

10:27Let's talk about growing though, because one of the wild parts of your stories is how you blew up because you didn't blow up with a lot of positive press. You actually blew up very negatively. Talk to us. What was that situation like? What exactly happened? Talk to us about that. Yeah, that was the watershed moment for us. And that's a moment I wish every business and entrepreneur gets to go through because it defined who we are today and made us as great as we are, at least how great I think we are. What happened was, we're like, Okay, we have this idea. Let's just throw some stuff on the social media, just like everyone else is doing great.

10:55You know, they're doing it. So it must be doing something turns out most people doing it. It's not happening for them. You know, they're doing it because everyone else is doing it. So you had to be tactful. We didn't know that. We just threw it on there for fun. And we're hoping for the best hoping to see some returns. You know, a couple of videos in that we just posted one randomly blew up and got like 30 million views or something crazy. And you know, most of the videos get like 200. And it was, you know, great to see the number, the engagement and everyone all of a sudden worldwide knew about our brand.

11:22But you know, all the comments were just like, Oh, my God, like the chicken looks so dry. This looks gross. They put pineapples on it and just, you know, dogging the concept itself. Look at my baby, you know, and you're saying how terrible people are like, I hope you go out of business like a terrible comments, right? And just, it was, we could have looked at it from the one way of like, Oh my God, like people hate this, this isn't going to go anywhere. No investors ever gonna, you know, go with us like this isn't it's not worth continuing, you know, the grind to try and make this work if it's just not going to work.

11:51But next day, you know, next couple days, there's a huge line going out the door of just I don't even know how many multiples we did on our sales just because it was so much it went from like nothing to everything. So it was great to see. And we're like, Okay, there's actually something here. You know, there's regardless of the hate that we might see in the comment section, just the fact that we got the word out there is what made that difference. And I mean, again, it was free. It was just a video. It wasn't an ad or anything. So just like, wait, this works. You know, what if we like, figure it out what made this work?

12:25Let's do it again. You know, let's keep doing it. Even if we're going to get hate comments. Great. We got this line through it. You know, we got rent to pay, you know, we're locked on this for a year. Let's of it. So that's what we did. We tried making it a science, we tried figuring out exactly, okay, what made that video work when maybe others don't do as well. And that can work for any channel that you're trying to get people through others through ads, or if it's through banners outside, whatever, you know, just the, for us, social media is great, because it's free, you know, we get paid, honestly, a lot of money just to post on it, which is like a reversal on marketing.

12:56So that's really what gave us the we can really scale this, let's just go hard into it, and not look at the negative comments as negative, but more so as just a lot of free feedback that companies will pay thousands of dollars to get that we're just getting naturally on people with no filter online. So we took it. We're like, okay, let's, how do we make it go viral again, but not get all the hate? So, you know, we took a couple of the suggestions, which were pretty valid suggestions, made the brand even better. And now it's very rare to see hate comments on our videos. You know, we get viral videos, usually two, maybe three times a week, we get a viral video on one of the platforms and you know it's usually just positivity people loving the brand asking when we're going to open their town next so yeah if you go viral don't take it uh super negatively it's a it's a good learning experience it is a double-edged sword of going viral because wow oh great it's i have 30 million views now like holy smokes i have 60 million hate comments um yeah that's what it feels like though and i know social media let's dive into that that's been a huge part of it.

13:57And social media is great because like, truly, it's like free advertising. I mean, you have to obviously invest in the content and everything, but it is free at the end of the day. You're not having to pay for leads or anything. What works for you guys on social media? Don't give away the whole playbook. Maybe if you want to, you can. But yeah, like what works so well on social media? How can another want to be entrepreneur emulate that as well? Yeah, for sure. You know, and I'll preface this by saying this worked for us. It worked for us twice. You know, we did this with the cookie dough business and blew that up to a couple hundred thousand followers and saw our online sales explode just simply because of social media.

14:28Did the same thing again at Rony's Mac Bar. So it's something that we would do over and over again. And I feel with high confidence that it would work at any bit. We do a landscaping business. It would work. You know, I see it all the time. Guy puts up a camera and just films some cutting lawns. You know, all we do is B-roll with a voiceover of a story. And, you know, sometimes we do some skits and whatnot. But, you know, for us, what really made it easy and, And, you know, if I were to teach a new person to, hey, how do you go viral on social media? How do you, you know, get all your free leads from social media enough to worry about paying ads?

15:00I would just say, you know, focus on maybe two or three things. One, quantity. Just go crazy with it. Because if you have a shitty video, no one's going to see it. So great. You know, I got 100 views. That's nothing. Great. You learn from it. You do the next one. Oh, I got 200. Oh, why did I do better? Great. Learn from it. You know, next one got a thousand. Next one gets 10 ,000. And then all of a sudden you're like, okay, I know what kind of videos resonate with the people that's going to, I think quantity helps you get there a lot faster. Instead of spending all your time, because at the beginning, you don't know what you're doing.

15:28Nobody knows because I couldn't even tell you if I went into another business, what's going to resonate with that audience. So just doing a lot of videos, figuring out what works helps you learn a lot faster. Second part of it would be going for, you know, something super repeatable, something that you can do day in and day out. Like for us with cookie dough and with mac and cheese, it was easy because I would just, you know, strap on a GoPro. Now we've got the Meta glasses, which are cool. They filmed for me. That's sick. The Meta glasses are cool. They're awesome. But before it was just a GoPro with my, you know, really just a phone on a strap.

15:56And I would just film us making the bowls. You know, my face isn't in it. Nothing. Just silence of me just making the bowls, putting stuff together, put it in the oven. Great. You know, it took a minute to do that. I was going to do it anyways because a customer ordered it. Filmed it. Great. And I just sit in the car and I do a quick voiceover talking about what I'm making or maybe a story of a customer that came in that day. An interesting story. We're just something that's relevant that we think would be interesting for people to hear. That's number two, super repeatable, easy to do over and over and over again.

16:23We don't have to spend a week getting props and picking out stuff. You know, we're not Mr. Beast. You know, that's not what we're here for, right? So that'd be number two for us. And then, you know, number three, I would say just watch your metrics on the videos. You know, you see, hey, everyone dropped off at this point. I need to heighten this point at the next time in the video or, you know, 5 % of people made it to the end. Okay, how do I get that to 10? How do I get it to 20? and you start learning how to tell a story, how to keep people engaged and not scrolling away from your video. And that just comes with, I mean, I could do a whole hour on how to do that, but it's just something that we learned from the repetition of what worked and what didn't.

16:56Yeah, I feel like that's a great point. So listeners, replay that and take notes on that. I think that was very good there. Something that I think is really interesting in your strategy is like, you've shown a lot of behind the scenes struggles. Why do you think like that does so much better than like polished content? Should people have that in their content playbook from like day one, those behind the scenes struggles? 100%. I mean, A, it makes it easy. You've already got content. You know, just talk about that. Put it out there. You don't need to come up with, you know, a new thing every day.

17:21Just talk about what happened before. B, it resonates with people. People like listening to a person. They don't like the worst kind of videos you can do are the ones saying, hey, this is my product. We're selling it, blah, blah, blah. You know, your friends aren't going to watch that. It's boring. And I see it nine times out of 10 for businesses that are on social media. They do boring, stupid stuff like that. I'm screaming at them like, don't do that. Nobody cares. But if you're like just telling about it, like they think you're an employee. They're just like, hey, let me hear about this employee story of something that happened today.

17:50Maybe the power went out or, you know, for us, you know, we've talked a lot about, you know, the viral videos that we've had or issues or, you know, if we messed up an order, oh, God, you know, you normally don't want to talk about imperfections of business, but they hear someone, oh, my God, I messed up this order. Here's what happened. You know, here's what you're like. And you walk people through, they put themselves in your shoes. And that's what works for us. Other people do different models, but don't go for advertising. That's not the point of social media. Social media is to get your name out there.

18:15It's not to advertise. We advertise a lot on ours. You know, it's I wouldn't even say subliminal, but like, let's say we have a deal coming up. We'll tell a story about last time that that deal, you know, did something that was interesting. Like, oh, yeah, last year when we ran this deal, here's something crazy that happened. And then by the way, you know, a little CTA at the end is like, hey, this weekend, we're doing the same deal. So you can definitely utilize it. But I think the best thing that you can do is just find a video that works. Gary V talks it. And if anyone knows Gary V, you know, take that video that works and then just, you know, push it out and different channels, put some money behind it if you want.

18:47And that's a great, great asset source for an ad that is just, you know, it's so powerful because you're going to get such a low cost per watch and per click that you're just amplifying what already works. People know about you and it's just authentic stuff. People don't think they're getting sold to. They just think they're hearing a cool story. They resonate with the person. It's a lot more likely they're going to follow that. That's the only reason I think that a lot of places get followers as they like the people. So you know, having a person there that they like resonate with and really like is a reason to follow it.

19:15And is a reason why a lot of people get some pretty big brand deals. Now we hear a lot about famous celebrities that launch a brand of something that we have a plethora of in any store, you know, a tequila brand or a soap, if you will. And all of a sudden, they sell out, you know, millions of dollars, just because they have a following behind them that wants their thing. So I hope that answers the question. Yeah, no, it definitely does. I feel like the raw content, even just in my own post on like LinkedIn and stuff, it's always like the struggles where people like resonate with it so much more makes you like a human.

19:49It's like, oh, this is an actual person. And you feel like you can just resonate with it so much more. Yeah, 100%. I think that's the key to it. Getting people wanting to listen to it. Really last part of this podcast here is about skilling and like franchising, because obviously, you know, you guys are franchising all over the place. You're down in the Waco area. My family just had food in Ames, Iowa. So you guys are nationwide at this point. How are you guys like working with franchisees when it comes to like marketing something like this? Are they following the same social media playbook? Or like, how does that really work?