Colton’s Steak House & Grill is a full-service steakhouse in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, a town of about 17,000. Its problem was a ceiling on new customers: regulars kept coming back, but nearly everyone likely to find the restaurant already had. According to DoorDash, revenue rose 20% in the first year after the steakhouse started taking orders through its Marketplace.

The playbook

  1. Name the real constraint. Co-owner Nanette Jordan’s objection was commission cost on top of high food costs in a kitchen that goes through up to 600 pounds of beef a week. The bigger limit, though, was reach: new-customer growth in the dining room had slowed to almost nothing, so the open question was where the next guest would come from.
  2. Use delivery to reach people who don’t dine in. Listing on DoorDash put the menu in front of local residents who were not visiting the restaurant at all. Because those orders came from outside the existing base, they added to dine-in sales instead of replacing them.
  3. Judge the channel on new volume, not per-order fees. Order by order, the commission looked like lost margin. Measured as revenue from customers the steakhouse had never reached, the numbers came out differently, and that incremental volume is what justified the fees.
  4. Make it a standing channel. After a year, Colton’s runs delivery as a regular, recurring part of the business rather than a side experiment.

Results

  • Revenue up 20% in the first year, according to DoorDash.
  • The growth came from customers outside the restaurant’s existing base, per DoorDash, rather than from regulars switching to takeout.

How to apply it

  • If your local market feels saturated, check whether your growth problem is reach rather than menu or service. Delivery extends your trade area without a second location.
  • When you model platform fees, separate orders that would replace a dine-in visit from orders that are genuinely new, and weigh the fees against the new ones.
  • Set a defined trial period with a revenue benchmark, then decide deliberately whether delivery becomes a permanent channel.

Jordan’s verdict for other small-market operators: “If it can work here, it can work anywhere.”

Source: DoorDash for Merchants success story. This Operator Story is partner content from DoorDash, a Whatnow Partner.