Simple And Repeatable: The In-N-Out Rule
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Asked how a friend who loves making burgers should turn that into a business, Mark Tilbury starts from the base rate — around 80% of food ventures fail — and says the whole plan is to be in the 20%. His mechanism is deliberate narrowness plus absolute consistency, modelled on In-N-Out Burger: the simplest menu he has ever seen, three variations of essentially one burger, and the place was flat out. A small menu means customers know exactly what they are coming for and you can execute it identically every time. The killer is not competition but self-inflicted drift — trimming the cheese, thinning the patty, portioning the sauce to protect margin. He maps the decay precisely: you might get a third visit, but you will never get a fourth.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Start from the failure rate, not the dream
Know the base rate in your category — in food, roughly 80% fail, restaurants especially. Design explicitly to be in the surviving 20% rather than assuming enthusiasm carries you.
- 2
Cut the menu to almost nothing
Offer a very small number of items — ideally variations of one thing. A tiny menu makes you known for something specific and makes execution reliable.
Pro tip Resist the 'if only we also did a chicken one' instinct; that instinct is exactly what kills the clarity.
- 3
Make it repeatable before you open
Fix the spec so any given order is identical to the last one. Repeatability is the product; the recipe is only half of it.
Pro tip Write the spec down — weights, quantities, timings — so it survives a bad day or a new pair of hands.
- 4
Guarantee visit two is as good as visit one
The second visit happens because they enjoyed the first. Your only job on that visit is to reproduce the experience exactly, with nothing quietly reduced.
- 5
Never take margin out of the product
Cutting the cheese, thinning the slice, portioning the sauce down — each looks like a sensible saving and each degrades the thing people came for. Find margin in price, sourcing, pitch or free promotion instead.
Watch out You may still get a third visit from someone hoping the second was a one-off, but you will not get a fourth.
- 6
Use repeat visits as your health metric
Because the model runs on people coming back, the count of returning customers — not raw sales on a good day — tells you whether the product is holding its standard.
Pro tip Just keep turning up at the same pitch; consistency of presence compounds the same way consistency of product does.
In the wild
Mark went to In-N-Out in the States with his son and describes the simplest menu he has ever seen — three options that are essentially the same burger made three ways. The place was absolutely flat out, and his son kept taking him back. His instinct as an operator was 'if only I did a chicken burger as well', but he concluded the opposite: precisely because they specialise and the menu is so small, people know exactly what they're going there for and the execution is very good.
→ Extreme menu narrowness produced both queues and repeat visits from the same family.
A plausible failure case Mark describes in outline: someone launches a burger van with a genuinely great burger. Week two, margin looks tight, so they cut the cheese slightly. Week three, the patty is a little thinner and the sauce is portioned. The first visit was earned, the second came on the strength of it, the third happened because the customer assumed week two was a mistake and wanted the original burger back. There is no fourth visit, and the van blames the pitch rather than the spec.
→ Margin protection destroyed the repeat business the whole model depended on.
Common mistakes
Expanding the menu to widen the market
Adding options feels like reaching more customers but destroys the clarity of what you are known for and multiplies the ways execution can slip. Specialising is what makes people choose you deliberately.
Shaving the product to protect margin
Each individual cut looks like a sensible saving, but customers are comparing every visit against the first one. The decay is cumulative and, by the fourth visit, terminal.
Assuming passion is a business plan
Mark warns that passion businesses go down the pan when the owner never looks at the business side first. Loving burgers tells you nothing about whether you can be in the surviving 20%.
From the transcript
“the problem with food is 80% of food ventures fail”
“make it simple and make it so you can repeat what you do”
“But as soon as you start destroying that product or or bringing it down from what people like, it just gets worse and worse and…”
From the episode
A Millionaires Masterclass In Business, Side-Hustles and Passive Income - Mark Tilbury
Mark Tilbury