The situation
Mesa Verde runs three restaurants across Austin. For a while they'd leaned hard on the delivery apps — convenient for customers, brutal for margins. They were giving up 25 to 30 cents on every dollar that came through those platforms.
Worse, they had no idea who those customers were. No names, no emails, no way to reach them again. The apps owned the relationship.
What we did
We built an ordering platform under their own brand — one system covering all three locations, handling dine-in reservations, takeout, and delivery. The team can update menus themselves. Customers order directly from Mesa Verde's site, not through a third party. No commission going anywhere.
The second piece was figuring out how to actually get customers to use it. We added a loyalty program to the checkout flow so every order built a record — name, email, what they ordered, how often. From there we set up an email program: weekly specials, re-engagement for people who hadn't ordered in a while, birthday offers. The kind of marketing that's only possible when you know who your customers are.
Each location got its own page on the new site, and we cleaned up their Google Business Profiles across the board. Foot traffic from local searches started picking up within the first couple of months.
What happened
Eight months after launch, direct orders were outpacing the apps for the first time. Revenue was up 40% across the group year over year. The commission savings worked out to over $8,000 a month. Their email list was at 4,200 people with a 38% open rate — numbers most restaurants never come close to.
What the client said
"We were handing a third of every order to the apps. Now that money stays with us. The platform paid for itself in the first two months."
— Owner, Mesa Verde Hospitality · Austin, TX