🧠 One Year In - What Have We Learned?

By: Brendan

It's a popular questions from friends, family, customers, and everyone in between when talking about the business. It's usually asked in the form, "What's surprised you the most about running your own business?". But I'm going to twist that into the more general question in the title and answer that. Now that we've made it through a full year I wanted to take time and really reflect on it, since I've never had a good answer. Also, I want to put a disclaimer that there is no way I'll be able to capture everything because there is a new lesson every day.

What We Have Learned From 1 Year Running The Pop-up Shop (No Particular Order)

• How to cook (somewhat) - I'd hope this one is true 😂. Seriously though, when we started, we both read one of the quintessential new-age cooking books Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat. This was a great jumping off point as it lays out the foundational elements of making a tasty dish. It was the textbook to refer back to as we put things into practice. James is obviously the main mind behind the food and his cooking has greatly improved in one year (See the recent taco progress social media post). We started out with just 6 taquito flavors and now we've done at least a dozen, started making all of our own sauces which taste miles better than the standard few we started with, have experimented with sides from simple ones like rice and chips to our citrus sweet corn. We've dialed in and tweaked the way we cook our carnitas over the last 52 weeks of making it and have learned what adds to the taste and how long to cook it to get the best texture. It's been fun to see how the changes we make in the kitchen effect the food and I can confidently say that the product in general is much better than September of last year. We've heard that from customers as well. It's also led to ideas for new menu items and our ability to add more variety. Be on the look out for more good things to come.
• People are MUCH Nicer than I Expected - After over 8,500 transactions, I can only think of a handful of rude people. That's saying something, especially because I know we haven't been anywhere near perfect while serving and learning at the same time. On the other hand, I can think of countless customer interactions that have made us laugh or smile and a multitude of people genuinely interested in our business and us as people. This makes it all worth it, even if we were to be out of business tomorrow.
• It's a grind - Most people see us on-site at a brewery or an event and, like me a year ago, probably think that is the work day for us and although it's busy it is a fun job. I won't deny that I enjoy serving and meeting people on site. However, for every event there is preparation in the kitchen for at least an hour before making the drive, setting up for a half hour before/breakdown and clean-up for a half after which includes a lot of hauling, the drive back to the kitchen, and at least a half hour of sweating over hot water doing the dishes. So basically add in another 3 hours of labor besides when you see us on the griddle and taking orders. I've probably had the three most tired days of my life all within the first year of business. There is literally always more work to be done. Worth every minute though for the great people we've met. This was the lesson that gave me a paragraph to complain, so thanks for bearing with me.
• Time - The most important resource. When running your own business this really hits you in the face. Before, I'd put my 8-10 hours in at my corporate job 5 days a week and then the rest would be free time and it didn't really matter how I used it. Now, running our own business, time is clearly the number one commodity. There are so many different facets of the business that we need to spend our time on that makes optimizing use of time necessary. We have to spend approximately 20 hours in the kitchen per week, 15-20 hours serving, and 2-4 hours acquiring equipment/resources. These are ones that repeatedly, require our physical presence but nowhere near all of the functions required to operate a successful business. Besides this, there are another list of activities that vary in hours per week and the more time we are able to spend on them, the better our business will be: 1. Accounting - D2D and longer term financial projections; 2. Marketing - Weekly social media posts with schedules, making videos, blogging, website update and maintenance, etc.; 3. Scheduling - reaching out to venues, back-and-forth with individuals for private event details, coordinating payments and responding to website inquirires, answering calls; 4. Menu Creation and Purchasing Projections - updating weekly report to determine what needs to be purchased, taking time to think of what will be on this week menu and what will be needed materials-wise to execute that; 5. Cooking Experimentation - spending time in the home kitchen making smaller batches of new items to to taste test and determine if they'd be feasible to make at a larger scale; 6. Strategy - If you don't spend time thinking of longer term goals, expansion planning/hiring/asset purchases/loans, your business is bound to stagnate. Other unlisted activities are equipment maintenance, health inspections and communications, and many more that I am forgetting. All this to say we need to be extremely particular about the events we choose to ensure the best output per hour serving, our kitchen processes need to be tweaked constantly to increase efficiency, and in general Time is of The Essence.  
• Personal Connections are Incredibly Important - It's hard to put a value on relationships with people and I'm not going to try to. There are many people that we've met, whether it be another food truck owner, a brewery owner, a random customer, or a family friend who have given us invaluable advice or lent us a hand. There are many conversations we have had that have led us to changing how we do something whether it be cooking, purchasing, or accounting and it has improved our business. I couldn't be more grateful for that and am looking forward to making it more personal connections and hopefully returning those favors as we learn and share our learnings.
• Persistence and Mindset Management - There are days where we are shocked by the customer turnout and days where something goes wrong in the kitchen and we waste hundreds of dollars worth of product. The most important thing is to try our best (as hard as it can be) to not get to0 high or low with the day-to-day successes and mistakes/failures. It's more about the process than the result. We need to stay persistent in doing what can improve our business in the long run and not let short-term results affect longer term goals by changing our processes.
• Family and Friends - The amount of support we have gotten from family and friends in starting this business is unbelievable. Through patronage, volunteering their time, giving us ideas, and much more. People we love show us that they want us to succeed and that means so much. We definitely would not be where we are without that support. We also have to pick each other up when one of us is down and we're lucky to have each other there for that at all times.
• Margins - Honestly had never really thought about what margins meant or even dwelled on the word at all before going into business. Sounds dumb, but it's true. I had no reason to think about them. You need to be extremely conscious about margins to run a profitable business. In the food service business specifically, since it is such a wide-ranging and gigantic market, the margins are much tighter than other most other types of businesses. This means that you need to do more volume in sales to make a livable wage, which in turn equals more physical work. It's made us think quickly about expansion and possible other revenue streams as a means to make the business more profitable and ultimately make this pursuit a sustainable one.

Bonus Learnings:

• there is a lot of good beer being brewed locally
• marketing is much more important than I imagined
• Farmer's Markets are wonderful, should've been going to them for years
• wind is a major annoyance when you work outside, and weather forecasts are mostly wrong still
• following that up, "make hay while the sun shines" is literally true in this business
• cheese makes everything better
• the word accountability has a lot more meaning
• Spice -  No judgment but a much higher percentage than I thought are afraid of a little spice. Also, none of our food is incredibly spicy, pretty mild for the most part actually. (Except the schmoke, but that's the point🔥)
• government - run entities are slow-moving and outdated
• napkins - people use a whole lot of napkins
• vegetables go bad very quickly
• lift with your legs, not your back
• the oven and griddle are hot - need to learn this one since I have a new burn every week
• instagram/facebook
• Inflation makes running a business tough - Our prices for our main raw materials have consistently gone up over the year. I can't think of the price of anything going down.

Alright, that's the end of my rambling, hope to be learning all new lessons in year 2. Appreciate everyone who has helped us a long the way and we love our local community. We want to continue to serve everyone in bigger and better ways while making higher quality food and bringing the good vibes.