From selling spicy kebabs on the street to establishing catering brands, and then building supply chain companies, jian li has stepped into the core area of catering.
Jian li’s Xinliangji Company is headquartered in an office building in the Lido business district, and there is also a store near the Zigong salt gang brand "Jinfu Salt Gang" he founded.
However, his fate with catering does not stop there.
He has been doing catering for nearly 30 years. The founder of Xinliangji, the founder of Jinfu Salt Gang and Xinladao is his most well-known identity.
In 2016, jian li’s Xinladao Group was successfully acquired by a listed company in Hong Kong. Later, he entered the crayfish track and founded Xinliangji. Quanjude, Yunhaiyao and Pizza Hut were all its customers.
During the epidemic, Xinliangji’s prefabricated crayfish live broadcast room brought more than 30 million yuan in a single game, which became famous in World War I and entered a broader public vision.
Jian li also experienced the great influence of short videos on business. Perhaps it was at this time that he planted the seeds for making videos and becoming a Tik Tok in the future.
In April last year, jian li opened an account in Tik Tok and released a short video explaining the catering business. He has two more tags: short video online celebrity and catering entrepreneurial tutor.
In the catering circle where the founders are generally low-key, jian li’s high-profile behavior of creating personal IP seems a bit different.
Jian li, however, said that he made a short video with great sincerity, but he got positive feedback from many fans, which gave him a brand-new sense of accomplishment different from starting a business.
Shoot video and do IP
"Old Restaurant Cannon" Cross-bank as "online celebrity"
Facing the camera, when interviewed by Red Meal, jian li’s attitude was very relaxed, and he was already familiar with video shooting.
Most of jian li’s short videos focus on catering entrepreneurship, and he defines himself as "a catering entrepreneur still on the road".
△ Image source: "jian li talks about catering" Tik Tok screenshot
Unlike in the past, starting a business only for himself, now he hopes to impart his rich experience to more young people.
On the one hand, Li Jian has enough ability to do this. He entered the business in 1994 and has been in the catering industry for nearly 30 years. The new spicy road group he founded was acquired by Baifu Holdings in 2018 with a purchase price of 1 billion yuan.
On the other hand, the current catering market is continuing to flood into new entrepreneurs. According to enterprise survey data, from January to November this year (the statistical time ended on November 27th), the national catering registered a total of 2.938 million, 406,000 more than the same period last year. Since 2021, the number of new registrations has exceeded 2.6 million every year.
In jian li’s view, "catering is the only industry in this era that can accommodate a large number of ordinary people to start businesses." However, there are many entrepreneurs in the catering industry, and there are also many people who have failed. A large number of catering whites need experienced guides.
He told the story of his exhortation to a college graduate to open a fast food restaurant. The netizen originally planned to spend 500,000 yuan to open a fast food restaurant of about 100 square meters in Hangzhou.
After listening to each other’s ideas, jian li bluntly said, "This is a great challenge for you. First of all, you lack (practical) training, have knowledge but not necessarily have the ability; Second, the investment of 500,000 yuan in Hangzhou is very tight (not enough to spend), and you may be very anxious in the future, but the money is not urgent. " In the end, jian li put forward some suggestions for this netizen.
In addition to entrepreneurial dry goods, he frequently shakes out some golden sentences in the video-
"Traffic can only be the icing on the cake for catering, and it is impossible to embroider on a piece of rags" "The future competition of catering will be very difficult, but if you don’t fight, you will die. It is better to leave early than that" "After 15-20 years, half of catering enterprises are high-quality chain brands, and the rest will linger" …
Since April last year, jian li’s Tik Tok account has published 336 videos, almost daily, with more than 200,000 fans.
The professionalism of short videos has also been improved. From the beginning, jian li took pictures by himself, and now there is a small team of three or five people who are responsible for the planning, shooting, editing and operation of videos.
With personalized expression and dry goods export, jian li has gained a group of fans, and iron fans affectionately call him "Teacher jian li" and "Brother Jian".
Jian li revealed that he decided to systematize his knowledge and start a class because fans in the background have been asking him about catering entrepreneurship.
According to the students’ entrepreneurial stage, there are elementary classes, intermediate classes and disciple classes, and different classes have different frequency. The primary class mainly teaches how to "open a shop from 0 to 1", while the intermediate class thinks about the old catering cannons that have opened several or dozens of stores, while the disciple class selects the best from the students in the intermediate class without charging any fees. Many students in the disciple class call jian li "Master".
△ jian li is giving lectures to the students.
In the list of students, there are not only catering white, but also chain catering brand owners who have opened dozens or hundreds of stores, and even a catering big coffee like Guan Yihong, the founder of Jiumaojiu Group.
"When you start a business, it is often unsatisfactory."
Jian li’s catering entrepreneurial experience can be described as ups and downs.
In 1994, at the age of 20, he began to drift north after graduating from college. At the age of 22, he founded a fast food company with the first bucket of gold earned by selling spicy kebabs on the street. At its peak, the company took over the staff restaurants in 60 office buildings in Beijing, with an annual income of over 300 million yuan-Li Jiancai was 27 years old at this time.
This experience, which can be called a model of ordinary people’s "drifting dreams in the north", came to an abrupt end when he was 27 years old. Jian li lost his fortune from over 100 million to over 10 million in debt overnight because he indulged in idleness and neglected his career.
Falling into the trough of life, jian li once suffered from depression. However, with the help of his family, he soon ushered in a second entrepreneurial opportunity in his life.
Once, he tasted Suobian fish hot pot in Chengdu, which was amazing. At that time, fish hot pot was still a relatively blank track, and jian li thought it would sell well in Beijing.
He persuaded Xu Bochun, the owner of this Suobian fish hot pot restaurant, a descendant of Sichuan Zigong Yanbang cuisine, to come to Beijing, and the two of them pooled 2 million yuan to create a fish hot pot brand, Xinladao.
At the end of 2004, the first new spicy road store was officially opened in Beijing, and it soon became a success. At its peak, there were nearly 200 stores, 90% of which were directly operated stores, distributed in Beijing, Shanghai, Xi ‘an, Hohhot and other cities.
In addition to the new spicy fish hotpot, from 2005 to 2016, jian li also founded several catering brands such as Jinfu Yanbang, Spicy Daotu and Tan Lao Xu.
Jinfu Yanbang Wangjing Lidu Store △ Image source: Red Meal Network
In 2016, Xinladao has grown into a catering group with an annual income exceeding 500 million yuan. In the same year, Baifu Holdings intends to spend 1 billion yuan to acquire Xinladao Group.
It is puzzling that jian li chose to quit the company that has been in business for 12 years.
Jian li said that on the one hand, the new spicy road was lucky to meet a good buyer, and it was safe to give the new spicy road to Baifu Holdings.
On the other hand, he has made up his mind to invest in the hot crayfish market at that time, hoping to spare more energy.
In 2016, the crayfish market exceeded 100 billion, and the number of crayfish restaurants in Hubei Province alone exceeded 15,000.
More and more entrepreneurs are also flocking to the crayfish track. "So many crayfish owners always need someone to help them solve the problems of product development, processing and distribution. I hope to make the operation of these catering owners easier." In 2015, jian li bought a crayfish processing factory in Hubei and started his third venture.
At the beginning of 2016, he began to build a catering supply chain company, Xinliangji, which integrates farming, processing and transportation, and soon got external investment. "After selling the new spicy road, the money I got was also invested in Xinliangji."
Xinliangji Company△ Image Source: Red Meal Network
2017 and 2018 are the highlights of Xinliangji, which has received tens of millions and hundreds of millions of yuan in financing and become the darling of capital.
However, after several years of continuous popularity, the market has obviously cooled down, and the crayfish business is not good.
"The crayfish business has actually been frustrated since 2019." Jian li told Hongcan. com.
During the epidemic period, Xinliangji successfully cooperated with Hubei crayfish group to reorganize, and the advantages of upstream industry became more obvious, and it also received strong policy support.
Jian li is very emotional about this. "In the past three years, the development of Xinliangji has been a process of continuous blood loss and continuous blood return."
Back to the present, the pressure has not completely disappeared. jian li hopes to find explosive products other than crayfish, and tries to replicate the "crayfish+prepared dishes" model on single products such as pickled fish and hairy crabs.
However, the success of this model remains to be further verified by the market.
Jian li is more optimistic. In his view, "When starting a business, things are often unsatisfactory. Entrepreneurs should always think about the remaining one or two. If they lose, they will lose. As long as they don’t quit, they won’t fail."
"I want to be an active promoter of Chinese food industrialization"
Jian li is facing more controversy, from crayfish cutting into the whole pre-cooked food track.
Since September this year, "prefabricated dishes enter the campus" has pushed prefabricated dishes to the forefront, and a number of catering enterprises have also become the target of public criticism.
In such a public opinion environment, jian li is quite "courageous" and has made no secret of his attitude-supporting prepared dishes.
He called himself "an active promoter of Chinese food industrialization".
"The essence of all competition is efficiency competition." Jian li believes that for chain catering brands, efficiency is an unavoidable topic if they want to enhance the chain scale, and products, processes and services need to be standardized. Among them, product standardization requires the use of prefabricated dishes.
Li Jian once offered a reward of 1 million in a circle of friends, looking for chain restaurants with more than 50 stores and never used prefabricated dishes.
Screenshot of jian li friends circle
"I haven’t found it so far." Jian li told Red Meal.
In his view, everyone’s opposition to prefabricated dishes is, to some extent, too "obsessed with each other."
"Cut clean vegetables in advance, pickled chicken leg is not a prefabricated dish? Large hotels and chain restaurants don’t need pickled chicken legs. How inefficient is it to buy live chickens every day and kill them now? Clean vegetables and pickled chicken legs are actually’ pre-prepared ingredients’. From this perspective, there is nothing wrong with using pre-prepared dishes in restaurants. In essence, prefabricated dishes are a means to help restaurants improve efficiency, not a new invention. "
In 2019, Xinliangji recruited partners for the whole country, launched county partners, and laid out overseas agents.
At present, Xinliangji’s dealer system and explosive ingredients experience store have covered the county level.
Although the explosive experience store uses the franchise mode, it does not charge the franchise fee, and is essentially a product store.
He plans to open more stores, hoping that every county will have a "Xinliangji Experience Store" in the future.
In jian li’s view, the key to the acceptance of prepared dishes by the market is to solve the problem of product "experience".
"When consumers experience high-quality prepared dishes, they are likely to be reluctant to do it themselves. Take crayfish as an example. If prefabricated crayfish can be better, safer, cheaper and convenient to buy, why should consumers spend three times more money than prefabricated crayfish just because of’ existing system’? " Jian li asks.
The interview is drawing to a close. mr. six, who has been attached to catering for nearly 30 years and founded many brands, still positions himself as a catering entrepreneur. As for the future, jian li hopes to add the word "success" before this positioning.
Author: "Red Coffee" column group
Note: This article belongs to the catering industry information published by Yangguang. com. The content of this article does not represent the views of this website, and is for reference only.
Film critic Wei Junzi and director Jing Wong started an online conversation.
