Travis Johnson

Imagine trying to run a business where your team had to manually enter the information for each new client. Now imagine doing that as a tech startup. That wasn't exactly the point where Travis O Johnson was living the entrepreneurial dream. But it was the dark time before the dawn of rapid growth for his company, foodjunky.com.

Based in Detroit, Michigan, four-year-old company foodjunky.com is poised to take on the big competition in the on-line food order/delivery arena. With restaurants scraping out a living on 13.5% margins, the food-order referral business is in hot water. When founder Travis Johnson first launched foodjunky.com, he followed the (lunch) crowd and set his business model on charging restaurants a 5% fee for on-line lunch orders from crabby, hungry professionals. Hey, cash-rich GrubHub charges as much as 30%; why shouldn’t a fledgling start-up? Not surprisingly, foodjunky.com failed to sign up restaurants and generate revenue. So, two years after their first launch, Johnson and his team completely revamped their business model and website. At the end of 2015, foodjunky.com is adding new restaurants across the country at a rate of 1,000 per month.

Travis Johnson, founder and CEO of foodjunky, would rather not look at or smell deep-dish, Chicago-style pizza ever again. Without fail, his former employer would order the same pizza on Tuesdays and Thursdays every week, which Johnson indulged in for almost 10 years. But as he grew tired of it, the lunchtime monotony also gave him an idea.