The most important part of doing a food truck (or any business) is SCALING
There seems two be two major groups in this sub:
The starry eyed first time aspiring food truck owner who are interested and want to know more
The ones have gone through the motions for years and responding to newcomer's posts with a more bleak, yet realistic outlook.
The biggest problem with many of your struggles and stresses is because you're doing too much for this small business with so many risks and factors outside of your control and you don't get paid enough for working 50-70 hours every week, not including the 30-40 additional hours on your time "off" overthinking about the business.
In the US, most sole food truck/cart businesses alone is not going to pay a business owner's salary after all is paid out, UNLESS you are working the cart yourself and receiving tips or you have a very efficient operation. But how can you be working 5-7 days a week on the floor, setting up, prep, driving to location, working all day, breaking down, cleaning.. and then do inventory, payroll/taxes, social media, etc?
The fact is there is just too much for a single person to be doing. However, you need to learn to be able to scale your business where your truck earns enough revenue to be able to allocate many of the tasks onto some other person OR system.
There's no one way defining how to scale a mobile food business, and it's much easier said than done. It involves big risks, but if you've already established your business then congrats you've already gone through the difficult parts and you've put in your time. As a business owner, the responsible thing to be doing is to be making your business more money and hiring employees to take care of the day to day operations so you can focus on the bigger picture.
Scaling can involve the following:
- Hiring additional staff
- Having a second truck/trailer
- Purchasing a brick and mortar location to expand your concept/ become your own commissary
- Going to bigger events/ doing catering
- Reducing your costs by being able to bulk order. This includes spending less on branded packaging than you would on plain ones.
You really have to sit down and think about your business. If you are the only person that can do what you do, then you are holding yourself back from growing.
Let me illustrate a basic example:
Say you have $50k loan to build out a food truck that is to be paid off within 3 years. What concept do you have in mind? With $50k you can probably have a 20ft truck with two fryers, griddle, burners, oven, and all other equipment. The ideas seem endless with burgers, fried chicken, pizza, etc.
An experienced food truck owner would probably know you can't do every one of these items. You never know how much sales one day could bring so you need to consider not having any waste, which means each item you put on your menu could increase your risk for the amount of waste involved (pizza/ burger toppings).
So instead, it's a much smarter idea to stick to a simplified concept. But then lies the issue of "will there be enough revenue in this $50k truck for a simple food concept?" If you have the experience then sure, you could probably figure it out.
But here's the alternative: Who says you need to have one truck? Have you considered maybe having 2 trailers instead serving a simplified menu, or even 3 trailers that only serve beverages/desserts?
Having multiple mobile businesses mean you have the ability to expand your reach, rather than focusing on location. Because really, the biggest factor in this line of work is LOCATION. The amount of times I committed to an average location because it was consistent rather than do the work of reaching out to other places to see if I could potentially increase my sales was holding me back. If this one location is at least bringing in consistent revenue, even if it's not much, then great. However, now I can allocate another trailer for another location that could possibly do better.
And this allows better efficiency in both businesses. Less waste since you're selling more of the same product that can be split, buying items in bigger quantities, one staff to prep for both trailers, and shared cost of commissary/permit/business license/banking/etc.
And since you cannot operate both yourself, this forces you to realize you have to give up your responsibilities of being on the floor and you need to allocate responsibility to employees. It means figuring out systems where your staff has to follow specific protocols so that you know they are helping run your business the right way.
It's a very convoluted subject but I just wanted to stress the importance of always needing to think about the big picture of why you're doing this and the necessary steps to make this sustainable for yourself and your team.