How did you know (either hindsight or not) you were ready for a brick and mortar?
My wife and I own a small dessert truck. I still work full time making decent money ($110k), but I'm tired of the job. My wife does the food truck full time and picks up some serving shifts during the winter to keep herself busy.
We're going into Year 4 and she's averages about $50-55k a year on the food truck. This is largely for a few reasons:
- We only operate April - October (winter exists here and half our product is ice cream)
We average around $1500-1800 on Friday/Saturday events and then pickup whatever we can during the week.
The goal this whole time is to expand to brick and mortar. We definitely have the following, and we'd expand the menu to offer more winter-acclimated items when it's cold.
I'm curious for anyone's who's taken that jump, either failure or success and in hindsight, what made you feel ready? When were you confident it would be a success?
I guess I feel like we're in a weird spot because there's a lot of good indicators we have going for us (i.e. capping out on orders) but we also just don't have the means to throw ourselves into this full time unless I quit my job, so the total gross/profit numbers don't translate and I'm trying to figure out if that's an excuse or a valid reason.