Platform 65, India’s largest toy-train-themed restaurant located in Hyderabad is a unique restaurant chain with a wide variety of offerings. They currently have five centres in Telangana. The brand offers a complete train-based environment in the 5500 + sq ft area transformed into a railway zone. With enough space to seat more than 200 people, and a PDR section to host special events, this restaurant takes the visitors to a new world altogether with its ambiance and lip-smacking food from Chinese, North Indian, Andhra, and Telangana cuisines. The tables have mini railway tracks, and the décor is set up such that each table has a station name like Nizamabad, Kamareddy, Warangal, Hyderabad, Sangareddy, Vijayawada, Tenali, Guntur, Rajamundry, Trivandrum, Ahmedabad, etc. In an interaction with nuFFooDS Spectrum, Sadgun Patha, Managing Director and Co-Founder, Platform 65 shared the growth of the company and plans for the coming year. Edited excerpts;
With over 2 years of operation what is the revenue Platform 65 has been generating year on year. How much sales are you expecting for year 2021-22?
Platform 65 celebrates two successful years and six branches, although Covid has been a major mishap during its first financial year. Platform 65 boosts its workforce with great confidence in the market for this year 2022, who are the pioneers of the operations at the restaurant. We are highly ambitious about our expectations on sales. We are expecting a growth of at least 2X by the end of 2021-2022, as we are planning to open new branches.
How much investments have you made so far and what are your plans for growing the business?
In the land that believes in “Athidi Devo Bhava”, where the guest is treated as God. Platform 65 is proud of investments made in enhancing our Customer Experience. We take feedback from almost every guest at our premises. This is a great investment, where we get insights into our guests’ likes and dislikes, and we tune ourselves to ring with our guests’ expectations. We have invested greatly in our workforce and their overall development.
Adding to that, it’s been a great investment journey for Platform 65. So far, we are enjoying the success of our 6th location and we have expanded our wings to a new state, Karnataka. In the next quarter, we will open our doors to serve our guests in three more locations in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The initial operations are in progress at Bengaluru, we are sure to amaze our guests in 8-10 new locations across India.
How do you see the growth for your business in Telangana State? Which are the other places will you be looking to expand your operations?
The Metropolitan Hyderabad and Telangana have people from all walks of life. The Nawabi lifestyle runs in the blood of the Hyderabadis. The urge to live and dwell in a lavish lifestyle, the predominant social media influencing the lifestyle of the youth is a great catch for Telangana.
The Nawabi lifestyle of the Old City and the techie lifestyle of the newly developed city allows keeping our restaurant running for 11 hours a day and no days off.
The techies of Hyderabad are more than interested to explore new locations on the weekends, with an attractive theme and a concept that is sure to amaze people of all ages, the market in Telangana is filled with opportunities.
We are pumped to expand our operations to Warangal, Vijayanagaram, Rajamahendravaram. Bengaluru, Tirupati.
What were your initial challenges and current issues before the company as there are many unique restaurant chains in the market?
Initially, at the time of the research and conceptualisation stage, one big question I had in mind was, how do we brand, market, and scale ourselves, but now there is no ambiguity in saying that our effective leadership team has made it so simple and with ease that we experienced waiting on the day one of our launches. Having said that it was a soft launch, yet we received an astounding response. The trio Sarvesh, Madhusudhan and Vinodh lead forward and built a strong foundation for this highly prosperous business. Their endeavour to achieve this has paid off, on average we receive at least five franchise requests every day of the year.
Many unique restaurant chains in the market, are unique in their own way, likewise, we are unique too and our uniqueness is something that is difficult to mirror.
How do you see market opportunities this year?
2022 looks very positive, filled with opportunities, as people are tired and bored of sitting back at their homes, everyone is pumped up to come out like flying colours…
When our guests are so motivated to come out of their homes and have a great time, we would like to take the leverage of our guests’ enthusiasm.
We are highly optimistic about 2022. In the first quarter, we have achieved a milestone, by spreading our wings to a new market. We took off our operations in Bengaluru.
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Narayan Kulkarni
(narayan.kulkarni@mmactiv.com)