Build My Burgers founder Aly Lalani always knew that a typical desk job wasn’t for him. He wanted something more challenging and unpredictable.
The 38-year-old has worked in the restaurant industry for the last 16 years, spending most of that time employed by other people — until 2021, when he opened Build My Burgers in Orlando, Florida. The burger joint uses an open design concept to entice customers — roughly 400 per day, Lalani says — who watch their meals being made up close, a more personal experience than a typical fast food chain.
That first year, Build My Burgers brought in $584,000 in revenue, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Last year, that number increased to $739,000, enabling Lalani to pay himself an $84,000 salary.
Very little went according to plan along the way. Between Lalani’s first inklings of his big idea in 2018 and the restaurant’s launch, he lost his father, penny-pinched during the Covid-19 pandemic, prepared for a new baby and pushed the big opening from April 2020 to January 2021.
Here’s how Lalani launched his restaurant, and what’s driving its success so far, he says.
‘We are big foodies’
When you ask the Pakistan-born entrepreneur why he chose to open a burger restaurant, his answer is pretty simple. “We love burgers,” he says. “My wife and I, we are big foodies.”
Initially, Lalani wanted to become a franchisee, owning and running an outpost of an extant restaurant chain. Building a brand from scratch would be too time-consuming — but there was a problem.
“The franchises we were looking into that had a name, they were not affordable,” he says. He and his wife Zahra got “very close” to signing a deal with a particular burger chain, but it didn’t work out, so “we just decided that we’re going to go ahead and open our own brand and bring it to life in Orlando.”
In 2018, the two got to work. They designed the restaurant’s logo and interior — from the wall art to the orange and black color scheme — to give off the…
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