Is/Was your BBQ trailer/Business profitable

What did the DOH tell you was needed to comply with your local city, county, and state regulations? Many places will require a commissary / culinary kitchen, which means you'll need to do all your prep work and food handling at an inspected commercial kitchen. Of course this usually costs a good amount of money so that can seriously impact your ability to make good money.

I ran a BBQ food truck on a Marine Corps base for about 3 years. My general setup was serving lunch from 11am to 1pm, and I did pretty well for the most part. Since I was serving on base I had different regulations and didn't end up needing a commercial kitchen. My food trailer had its own 3 bay sink, hand washing station, and multiple stainless food prep tables along with a propane water heater. I went "bare bones" since I didn't have $100K to blow on a food trailer. I think with the food trailer and all equipment I came in at about $20K. That worked out well enough but I ended up putting another $5K or so into the trailer for AC (almost passed out during a July 4th event), as well as an upgraded serving window with sliding glass doors and screens...plus a more powerful and quieter generator.

Was I profitable? Yes, but not as much as I would have liked to be honest. Some days I was doing $1500 in revenue in 2 hours, and others it was closer to $300. Lets look at this breakdown :

1500 - revenue
3% goes to credit card processing
10% goes to the base
7% goes to city/county/state taxes

So if I did $1500 in sales - 20% leaves me with about $1200. Food costs were between 30-40% since I was a small operation and was buying my proteins from Sam's Club / Costco / Restaurant Depot. So that's another $525 gone and that would leave me with about $675 profit on a good day. Of course I would take about 20% of the profits and put them aside for truck / trailer maintenance, so that would put roughly $550 in the bank for the day.

On a bad day where I would only do $300 in sales I generally lost money since the meat costs were killing me. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the right days of the week, the right weather conditions, etc to give me the best chances at having a highly profitable day. Mind you I was running about 14-16 hour days between smoking the meat all night long, doing my prep work / side dishes in the morning, serving until about 1pm, and then another 2 hours or so of cleanup. If I was cooking again the next day I'd also spend another hour or so prepping the meat.

All this being said I was essentially a 1 man operation. I hired a cashier to help me get orders out the window faster, but I was too controlling to hand off any food prep / cooking duties. So a lot of this physical strain was my own fault. But I did learn a good lesson : NOBODY (outside of you) gives a single shred of anything for you or your business. Local government was the worst part of this notion and it was such an eye opening experience into the absolute incompetence of government. As a Marine of course I was aware of how poorly our government operated, but actually dealing with these people such a poor experience. I'm talking people who write laws but are unable to actually read / comprehend those laws. I also came across a few government employees who were pretty open about wanting "contributions" for them to just do their job. Most of this was in regards to permitting a BBQ food trailer and how they couldn't understand their own laws as it relates to smokers.

I did OK once I learned the best days / locations / times to serve lunch, and overall that made it a better operation. Food prices just kept increasing (2018-2021) and then Covid finally killed my business. To be honest I was kind of glad when I sold my business to a buddy (turn-key), and I'm much happier doing my current job as a civilian contractor for General Dynamics.

Good luck moving forward and feel free to shoot me a PM and I'll gladly attempt to answer any questions you might have.

Lots of good advice. From my experience, I’d add a couple things:

-In addition to those good days, and so-so days, there will be a decent number of days that will be rained/snowed out, which sucks.

-The biggest thing for me is I turned my favorite hobby into work. I did it for a year and by the end I didn’t want to cook anything. Couldn’t stand the smell of pulled pork for a long time. Ate a lot of Thai food and bar burgers that year.

cowboyupbbq said:

Lots of good advice. From my experience, I’d add a couple things:

-In addition to those good days, and so-so days, there will be a decent number of days that will be rained/snowed out, which sucks.

-The biggest thing for me is I turned my favorite hobby into work. I did it for a year and by the end I didn’t want to cook anything. Couldn’t stand the smell of pulled pork for a long time. Ate a lot of Thai food and bar burgers that year.

Click to expand...

I ran into the same thing but with brisket...the smell of all the rendered brisket fat in a small trailer on a hot day was overwhelming to my sense. It took me quite a while to fall back in love with brisket after I sold my business.

Great points and 100% agree.

To ask if there is money in it is a loaded question. Yes, it can be profitable, but you will need to constantly invest back into its growth and work 60-90 hours a week or more. You will need help, hiring good help that stays with you is very difficult as you will likely only be able to afford part time helpers for a while and they come and go every few months. It took me 6 years to really get my business rolling and another several years to get to where I could invest the money to match the growth. I worked the BBQ business full time and also worked a full time job on top of that. A total of 80-100 hours per week. Last month after 13 years, I retired from my full time job and will operate the BBQ business full time in 2023. I have invested a few 100k over the past 13 years to get to where I'm at and most of it was funded by the business so a lot of your profit will go back in. It's very rewarding but also very hard work. If you want it, go for it. Just don't think it's going to be a cake walk is all.

I don't get to read in this section a lot, but this interested me a great deal.

Some really useful advice and suggestions. I might bring up some other considerations such as your health and wellness.

Retiring from a job. What's the job? Qualifications and background. Is that job going well? Could another kind of steady job with regular pay, health care, 401 Contributions work for you? At 44, you see a life changing opportunity. Is it turning a hobby into a very hard job with many many years of development and investment ahead. Have you considered how hard that can be not only on yourself but on your family. Who is coming with you on the journey? Do they know what this really means?

About yourself. Are you well physically and mentally? What's your physical stamina like and more importantly, how is your mental resilience?

I ask this as a bloke who started a business in my early 30's with a good deal of vigour but got dragged down by Sleep Apnoea which affected my mental health while undiagnosed. My story is a little unusual, but what it taught me is that you have to be the right kind of person in the first place. I thought it would be easier working for myself. I didn't ask the right questions. I didn't anticipate the application required. I was not OCD enough. It wasn't about the money. I had plenty of that at the start so that with the right application things may have turned out differently.

If you are (you need to admit it to yourself) running from what you are doing now, then reconsider and reposition yourself. If you are retiring with enough of a buffer, get a job in the industry for a month or two. Doesn't have to be BBQ. It does have to be the grind. The hours. The prep. The cleanup. In a month if you're still chugging away dreaming about sweet blue with lots of new ideas on how to go it alone, then maybe it's for you. If you're not kidding yourself about being the next Aaron Franklin, then again it might be for you.

Just make sure you know who you are and who you can hurt apart from yourself.

Cheers!

Bill

Thanks for answering Steve.

It's a shame that in the USA you're conditions are getting whittled away while in other parts of the established world, there is a realisation that productivity and work ethic increases, the more you look after people. Wherever you go, things are not like they were even 10 years ago. I'm really concerned about your health care and insurance prospects as a sole trader and one man show. These things are expensive to have and even more expensive not to have.

Getting help and QC is a thing you have to learn. But if it's with family it can be hard. You cannot do everything but you can teach and train people to do things the way you want IF they are indoctrinated as to why it matters. If they get your passion and they understand why it has to be done your way all the time, they will do it. Interestingly, you also empower them by giving them the opportunity to improve something as long as they develop it, test it and present it to you. That's how NOMA get's to be NOMA. There is a collaborative process, but of course everyone who works there goes there because they already have that mindset. So develop the mindset and then you get people you can work with.

Family remains tough but cutting corners and sloppy work is not OK. Have a strict set of rules on that but most importantly, lead by example. If you don't nobody cares. If you just yell at people when they screw up, look at yourself first. If you do that, don't get into the food truck business.

As for myself (obviously) I did it wrong and what you see written above is a distillation of issues I had personally (even excluding illness).

In my case I went back to basics and started driving an ambulance knowing further business was not my gift. It transpired then I joined the University sector and have ended up managing simulation systems and mentoring people in the way I knew from healthcare before I got into business and have never been happier.

Take your time and work it out. Go to the gym. Lose weight, don't drink and develop that Idea. Maybe even take some of that money and get some professional business advice. Might cost a bit, but it will cost you more perhaps if you don't.

Good luck.

Bill