This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What's up, what's up? This is Chris Guillebeau here with Side Hustle School. Welcome back and welcome to a brand new week. Later this week, I'll be in Chicago and Boston for Side Hustle School Workshops. I believe next month I'll be in Washington DC and Atlanta.
You can learn about the workshops at sidehustleschool.com/workshops. If your city is not listed, you can put your name down and I'll choose where to go based on who raises their hand. Really excited about some of the stories this week. Today's in particular, kind of an interesting approach. You might say that inspiration strikes in all kinds of places.
Today's story is about a man who's under house arrest, has some time on his hands and works with his cousin to get creative in the kitchen, launching a successful food truck, catering and restaurant business in rural Pennsylvania. That story right after this. [Music]
In 2014, Zach Ellsworth got word that his cousin, Teddy Smith, was under house arrest for a DUI. Zach and Teddy had grown up playing together in Southwest Pennsylvania, but by that point, they were leading very different lives. Teddy, at age 33, had been having a number of run-ins with the law, like the one that led to his house arrest, while Zach was more settled.
He was married with four kids, had a day job working in sales. During the long idle months, while under house arrest, Teddy grew restless, and Zach started keeping him company as a bit of a throwback to their old days. Before his recent encounters with law enforcement, Teddy had been a talented chef, and had worked in several French restaurants. So to pass the time, he started hosting a Tuesday supper club for his girlfriend, Zach and Zach's wife. Naturally, this supper club took place at home, since he couldn't leave the house, and it was over those weekly house-confined gourmet dinners that Zach and Teddy started talking and dreaming of starting a business together.
The two cousins live in an economically depressed region in rural Pennsylvania, where about 20% of the population is under the poverty line. You have to drive more than an hour to Pittsburgh to seek out good restaurants. So their idea was to bring reasonably priced, city-quality cuisine to their county. This idea remained a lot of talk and dreaming, not a lot of action, until one day, a friend approached Zach with a big problem. Her sister was getting married in less than a month, in the Mediterranean restaurant that was supposed to be catering the wedding had canceled on him.
She wanted to know if he knew of any other options or had any grand ideas. As a matter of fact, he did. Right then and there, Zach decided to launch the side hustle. He told his friend that he would cater the wedding himself, and then he called Teddy to say, guess what, we have a job. What they didn't have was a commercial kitchen, but after pleading with local firehalls and businesses, getting rejected multiple times, the duo ended up paying just $25 to use a church kitchen, and they successfully catered an 85-person Mediterranean wedding in the middle of a field.
With that successful event under their belts, the cousins went into high gear. By this point, Teddy was free from house arrest and getting his life back together, so they decided to name their business Clean Slate Catering. Great name, right? And that first year, they brought in $20,000 in sales. The following year, 2015, they launched the first food truck in their area, a long-time dream for both of them.
They served lunch specialties like crab cake sandwiches and peanut butter and pepper jelly burgers, and between that and the catering, that year, they had more than $100,000 in sales. Not profit, because the restaurant business is tough, but sales. Speaking of restaurants, last year, the cousins expanded once again, opening an actual restaurant called The Foundry, which serves modern American food. Altogether, the three arms of the company, catering, food truck, and restaurant, brought in about $250,000 in sales in 2016. Now, if it sounds like this has been easy, it certainly hasn't.
The restaurant world is tough. Neither of the cousins had ever operated their own business. At the outset, other local businesses tried to have the food truck shut down. They also had to figure out the seasonality issue, where when the weather was nice, people would line up around the block, but if it wasn't, they'd have very few customers all day. They had to decode the process of insurance, equipment, gas, electricity, water, registration, tax, and parking, just to name a few things.
In fact, the regulations and fees were so complicated that Zach started a blog specifically to help other food experience entrepreneurs avoid the same problems. You can see that blog at smalltownkitchen.com, and I'll link it up in the show notes. The two cousins try to divide and conquer, Teddy focuses on the kitchen, while Zach manages all that marketing, systems, and sales, and Zach still has his full-time day job, so he puts in about 20 hours a week, while Teddy now works on it full-time. Perhaps not surprisingly, of the three components, the restaurant has been the most time-consuming, while the catering concept has been the biggest money maker. Another interesting thing they did is, instead of using Facebook ads, whenever they have a post about something important, like a new menu or service, they offer a free meal, and they get a lot of people to like and comment on that post.
They say those posts end up with five times the visibility of all their others. So that's a fun little creative hack if you're using Facebook and having trouble getting your posts in front of people. Now, the cousins have this theme of adding a new component each year, so guess what's coming next? Their goal is to start a barbecue place. They're planning to do this on the other side of their rented space, so they don't have to worry about a new venue, but of course, it is more work to be done.
In 2017, Zach and Teddy hope to exceed half a million dollars in sales and $50,000 in net income, and their goal is to hit $1 million in sales. And Zach says that maybe at that point, his side job will finally become a full-time hustle. [Music]
So I thought that was pretty cool. Congratulations, Zach and Teddy. Clean slate catering, what a great name and concept.
Now, as I mentioned, the restaurant business is tough. Half a million dollars in sales for about a $50,000 profit. Now, $50,000 is awesome. I don't mean to make light of that at all. It's fantastic.
And that profit margin is actually pretty normal in the food and restaurant business. But still, from some of the other stories you've heard, you probably realize that some of those other stories have a better profit margin. So if you're interested in going into the restaurant business, this is the kind of thing you should do if you really want to do it and you have that vision. It's not really something to just stumble into. It's kind of like writing a book.
Like I love writing books. I love everything about the publishing process, but you probably shouldn't write a book unless you really, really want to. It's definitely not a get rich quick side hustle. And so the restaurant business is like that too. If you have a burning vision for it, by all means, don't hold back.
Zach and Teddy have seen this great success. But I think the greater goal in all these things is to figure out, okay, what am I compelled to do? What's my vision? What am I excited about? And if you find something that's easier than the restaurant business, well, great.
So much the better. As always, remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to see the show notes, check out Small Town Kitchen. Just come to sidehustleschool.com/121.
That's one, two, one. So much more is on the way. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
