Struggles😩 & Successes🤠 of February

By: Mitch Wooderson

A brief breakdown of the month of February. I'll try to do this every month. Hopefully I can remember everything.

😩Struggles

Dead events: It was February, people were staying in their houses. Most events we did weren't guaranteed money, and because of that, sales weren't great. We did a little too much standing around. Even though it was like that last year, I naively thought this year would be better. I figured since we had a little more time in business under our belt we'd do a bit better. That wasn't the case. Next year we'll probably rethink how we approach January February. We'll likely only do events that are prepaid.

Super Bowl Disappointment: We were offering taquito trays for pickup for the super bowl. They're not our main product, and we don't regularly push them but since the super bowl is a big party day, that's what we marketed. We ended up selling less than last year, so that got me a bit down. Never good to regress.

🤠 Successes

Special Menu Items: Been wanting to roll these out for a while. We have many creations we want to get out. This is the easiest way because we only focus on 1 at a time. This provides for better quality, which is what we were worried about. It's still early, we've done 4 items so far. One of them already got us a 5-star review! We've already noticed it's better for social media interaction. We're excited to see where this goes.

Marketing Realignment: Glad to get this started. The special menu items make it easier. I wanted more pictures of food and more avenues into the customers mind, the two go hand and hand. We started doing weekly menu emails to update the customers and started pushing more out on Facebook.

Private Events: We had some dead events in January and February, but things are looking up for the next couple months. In February our amount of inquiries increased by 700% compared to last year. We already booked some big events for the spring and summer. This is an encouraging sign and has us feeling like we need more employees to take advantage of all the possible business haha.

Menu Clean Up: Re-vamped it using better pictures and less clutter to make it more readable. I designed menu cards on Canva and then printed, cut, and laminated them, then used magnets to stick everything to the chalkboard. This is more visually appealing, since theres much less of our horrendous handwriting 🤣.

Profit Calculator Web App: check it out! Brendan did some hard work to get this done. He used OpenAI's ChatGPT to help him code and host this application. Technology is wild. This took a few weeks but before AI this would have been months and months of work for someone with minimal coding knowledge.

The application is simple but it gets the job done. It could have been done in excel but we wanted to go through the process of building a web app. Plus, its easier to get it out to others who could us it. We put it out on reddit and different food truck Facebook groups. One of our goals down the line is to develop a higher leverage, more scalable product. Software checks those boxes. We have a few more ideas that we're thinking about.