Websites, takeout ordering and lunch menus for restaurants in Lombard, IL.

The lunch order gets placed at twenty to twelve, and it gets placed once.

There's a narrow band in the late morning where an office decides. Somebody says they're going out, two other people put in a request, and one person ends up holding a phone. If your food can be ordered and paid for in that minute, you're in. If it needs a call to a line that's already busy, the decision moves on without you and nobody feels bad about it.

Order-ahead exists for exactly that minute. The ticket arrives before the customer does, the kitchen sees it while there's still time to time it, and the bag is on the counter when they walk in with fourteen minutes left of their break.

A pickup time is a promise, so let the kitchen set it.

The worst version of takeout is a customer standing by the register at ten past twelve watching a kitchen that hasn't started their order. It costs you the next visit and it clogs the front of house during the only hour that pays.

Ordering on your own site lets you set how many orders a slot can hold and how long each one really needs, so the times you offer are times you can hit. Slow it down at the peak, open it back up at one. The customer would far rather be told twenty minutes and get twenty minutes than be told ten and stand there for nineteen.

• Pickup slots capped to what the line can genuinely produce
• Payment taken at the time of the order rather than at the counter
• The whole menu readable and orderable on a phone in one hand
• A confirmation with the time and the address, sent the moment it lands

Your Tuesday hours are the ones that cost you money.

Weekend hours get checked and corrected because that's when owners are looking. Weekday lunch hours drift. A holiday that half the offices take, a week you open late, the day the kitchen starts at eleven instead of half ten — those are the ones that end with somebody standing at a locked door at 11:40 with eight coworkers waiting on a text.

So the hours on your site and on your Google listing are ours to keep straight, including the odd weeks and the days that move. Send a message and it changes. That's what the update a month is for, and most owners spend it on exactly this.

A tray for twelve is a different order and deserves its own page.

Somebody organizing lunch for a meeting is not shopping for lunch. They want to know how far ahead you need notice, what feeds twelve without going soggy, whether it turns up hot, what it costs per head and whether you'll bring it upstairs. Buried in a line at the bottom of the menu, that request either never gets made or arrives as a phone call with none of the details in it.

Give it a page and a form of its own. Ask for the date, the headcount, the building and the time it has to be on the table. You'll field fewer enquiries and quote more of the ones worth having, and the person ordering will notice that you've clearly done this before.

The office that ordered once is the easiest sale you'll ever make again.

Individual customers are hard to keep track of. An office isn't. It's one name, one email address and a standing habit of feeding a dozen people every few weeks, usually decided by the same person each time.

Once that's written down, the follow-up is obvious and cheap. A note in November about holiday trays. A message in the spring saying the summer menu is on. It reads as helpful because it is, and it goes to somebody who has already tasted the food and liked it enough to be responsible for it in front of colleagues.

The two plans, and where ordering sits.

Foundation is the getting-found half at $250 a month, with a one-time $250 to build it — the site on your own domain, the Google Business Profile, email at your own address and the search work behind all of it.

Taking money online lives on Growth, which is $500 a month with a one-time $500. That's where booking against your Google Calendar, ordering and payment, the guest ledger, the automatic messages, expense tracking, the monthly report and the accounting sync switch on. Twelve months either way, billed the same date each month, and a year settled in advance is 15 percent lighter — $2,550 or $5,100, with the build billed on its own. Call answering runs $100 a month if the phone is the thing beating you. If you want out early, tell us in writing: you pay the current month plus one more, and the domain, the Google profile and the customer list leave with you.

Put an order through Knox Guac at lunchtime.

Knox Guac is a taqueria with the ordering switched on, built by us end to end. Order something, watch the confirmation arrive, then open the ledger behind it and find the same ticket sitting there with your name on it.