I never wanted to reinvent the wheel I never wanted to create a brand I always wanted to
have a restaurant it's just amazes me how food makes people so happy and when I give
them food they're always saying great things about the brand you can get a
burger anywhere but we're also building a relationship with with each and every
person that comes to our store and being part of that Community my name is Alani
I'm 38 years old old I'm a founder and CEO of B my Burgers located in Orlando [Music]
[Music]
Florida I've been in the restaurant industry for the last 16 years working with multiple
franchises and different brands I always wanted to have my own own business and I was looking
into different franchises because my wife and I we are big Foodies and we love burgers and
so we decided we'll do a burger franchise and we were very close in signing the deal and it didn't
work out and so we just decided that we're going to go ahead and open our own brand and bring it
to life in Orlando Burgers you know even though it's so saturated the quality is never there the
quality is there the affordability is not there you're not able to customize the burger the way
you like so we we wanted to bring all of this features together and we just wanted to do it in
an open Kitchen in an open setting where customers could actually see their burgers being made they
could hear the sizzle they could smell the aroma of the burger and that's how the my burger was
[Music] born
initially I had projected the business to cost $200,000 it ended up being $400,000
out of that we had $60,000 in Savings $68,000 in unsecured loans we had about $150,000 in
line of credit through credit cards and then landlord had invested about $122,000 in our
business to open Bild my Burgers we started testing everything in my home kitchen making
Burgers making milkshakes my dad was a big part of that I gave my family a lot of food
to eat and then in December my dad passed away so that gave me a little bit more motivation
he was always one of those drivers where where he was pushing me to do more and so in January
the construction was going well February we found out that you know we're having a baby
and we're all getting ready to open up and then of course in March uh the country shut
down the bills were piling up I didn't have my job because everything that was planned
out to leave my job and start the business that never happened so I was just staying at home and
living off my wife's paycheck and just trying to pay all the bills that that we could to stay
afloat it was very stressful for us to make sure that we're at least making
the minimum payment to protect our credit so it was really difficult but one thing
about me is I'm very motivated I'm very positive I had a vision I had a goal I
wanted to do everything it takes to make sure it comes to [Music]
life we tried different banks and we have nice and pretty rejection letters from all of
them we honestly never had a grand opening we just turned the open sign on and and as BMA Burgers was
opening the State of Florida was also opening at the same time and people were just excited
to get out of their house and tried our food they loved the quality of the burgers the price
of the burgers and it was a great support from the community the lines were out the
door in restaurant you could be a great chef but you don't have to be just a chef you have to know
about managing marketing accounting customer service I mean there's so many pieces to the
puzzle and everything has to work together for it to work as a whole so definitely a
challenging industry but I like challenges I have walked into situation where there's
a line out the door the credit card is down the ceiling is leaking there's so many issues and I
just still have a smile on my face and you just tackle it as one issue at a time and that's what
keeps you going and keeps you motivated we do cook to order Bur Burgers chicken tenders wings
and we do milkshakes in dessert we have cookie and fried Oreos everything is build your own you
pick your bun you pick your meat your cheese then you pick your your toppings and you pick
your sauces we're heavily focused on quality of our food everything is fresh so we just start
with the prep work throughout the day I take care of customers I do the register I do the
grill wherever the store needs [Music] me in the store personally I put in about 50 hours a week
I work about 6 days but the work doesn't stop here once I go home I'm working on social media
replying to you know reviews just working with new companies and new technology to see how we
can improve the business on a daily basis this is a 24-hour [Music] operation I told her that
if this brand does not work and there's losses involved I don't want you to be part of it one
person has to be the person whose credit is totally protected and assets are protected
and so that was the main reasoning behind not putting her initially from day [Music]
one once a month we give away free burgers to UCF students then we also have a discount 50%
off for all police officers whatever we can can do to give back we are heavily focused
on that anyone that comes into our store in terms of like a delivery driver like
uber door Dash we make sure that they they're allowed to get free drinks they don't even have
to pick up the food from us but we just understand that they're representing our
brand they're going to go out there they're going to talk about our brand and so we we
want to make sure that we we take care of the people that are that are taking care of
us we designed the brand from day one to look like a a franchise when we opened customers
were asking us is this already a franchise so that kind of kept us motivated to go into that
franchise route but because of covid and all the challenges we had we had to make sure that we have
a perfect concept designed for anyone to be able to [Music] duplicated our projected growth for
franchising is to open 51 stores in the next 5 years so far thankfully we've been blessed
and we have almost 60 requests from all over the US now when I look back and if someone asks me
hey you want to go and create one more brand I would think a lot because it it just takes
a lot out of you thankfully you know because I had a great support from my wife my kids my
family they kept pushing me to keep doing more and more and that's what keeps me going every
[Music] day