The Story Only I Can Tell

The Back Story

I think it was the summer of 2019. I had just closed down the welding and fabrication business in 2018, had thoughts of building urban rustic furnishings business but could not get enough traction to support a household.  I had taken a "young mans job", as my foreman Ben called it, job drilling and blasting for underground utilities. The basting company was a great reputable outfit and the owner is a solid man of faith business man and knew his trade inside and out. I knew though that the future in blasting was not for me...

My wife and I were standing in our kitchen one evening with a glass of wine and preparing dinner discussing what's next in life.

“Maybe you should buy a food truck and do that”, she said. “Maybe I should work on one first to see if I would like doing it”, was my response.

I was clearly unfulfilled being back on a construction site as my current vocation and the food and hospitality realm was my zone. Ah, I knew someone that owned and operated a BBQ catering business, and interestingly enough saw a post on Facebook hiring for the food truck. I did not know that the BBQ/ catering business also had food trucks. I had wanted to explore the catering business as well as food trucks, so I reached out to the owner. I started working with them and trained to run a dayshift in one of the food carts in Redmond, the first day solo and the state was ordered to shelter in place form a wide spread pandemic.  I continued to work many hours with the BBQ company performing nearly every aspect from Food preparation, inventory procurement and organization marketing of the company through social media, maintenance running our food trucks even solo at a craft brewery in bend, and the list goes on.

Midway through my time working with the BBQ company my early mornings were spent researching and learning everything I could about restaurant success, systems, scaling, company culture, leadership, and the difference between customer service and hospitality. To this day I still am learning and applying in all parts of my life, it has been a unique transformational experience. In those days I needed clarification on the vision for the company I was working for, and what it was to look like in the years to come. I only had an idea of what I thought it should look like and how it should function.

I had written a detailed proposal to help them with their retirement days strategy. I titled the position I was seeking within the company as the Director of Operations. In my mind, if I was to have been given this opportunity, I would eventually direct most aspects of the BBQ company progressively starting with Mobile Food Units, then operations of concession events, lastly operations of catering, the catering of large events would have been still predominantly theirs, progressively delegating responsibilities while increasing profits at that time while gleaning knowledge and information learned from past experiences from them. This in turn would have allowed time for the owners to work on the business, not in the business. Together we could have created an entity that could be franchised or sellable if desired. Sadly one day during conversation when I mentioned that the business could eventually be operated with systems and processes and in turn create less work for owners and managers the reply was simply that it would never work and if any one in this world wanted to get ahead they needed to work more hours to do so. I never presented the proposal. That is the point when they lost me. 

Thought leader and my marketing teacher Chip Klose said, "Three kinds of people in the world. Those who see, those who will never see and those who can see when shown…  I often pondered whether or not my proposal would have made a difference.

In summary, my own food and beverage service one day would start with Collaboration; Systems, Point of Sale, Communication, Delegation, Strategic Objective, Operating  Principles, Operating Procedures, Team Building, Profit, Expansion, Quality of life on and on…

Fast forward

This experience caused mixed thinking about owning my own food truck. One thought was I did not think I would ever just be content working in a food truck for $15 an hour, day in and day out. On the other hand, it caused me to focus on what ownership of such a concept could look like, what employment in such a concept would look like and how all of this together could offer a food experience for our community. Fast forward thorough a job working with interior finishes manufacturing and a bit of time as a server/bartender at my favorite Redmond, Oregon Mexican grill. I am still researching, still learning even more about restaurant marketing, leadership and everything in between. Rinse and repeat. 

Here we are 2025.