Keys To Food Truck Business Success

A food truck is a mobile food business concept where a large vehicle is equipped with a kitchen to cook and serve food. A successful food truck can bring in upwards of $500,000 per year in annual revenues. Startup costs can range from $40,000 to a couple hundred thousand dollars.

Some enter into the food truck business with the misconception that running a food truck is much easier than running a full-service restaurant, only to find out that this industry is equally demanding in its own way. Expect a hefty amount of paperwork and legal restrictions, work that’s equal parts chef and truck mechanic, and long arduous days shuttling between buying supplies, cooking, and dealing with back-office work that comes with any small business.

• The first of our keys to food truck business success relates to your employees. Food truck must focus their energy on retaining the good employees they already have and they will never have to worry about finding new ones. Another part of this key is to train moderate employees with long term potential, into good employees.
• The the mobile food vendor doesn’t always work to satisfy the customer…  if you don’t, someone else certainly will. Then, when you are done working for your customer, work for your employee. It is only then you will reap the reward of an employee who works for your customer through your example, and a customer who works for you through their continued patronage and that of their many friends.
• Sell the employee on your products and services and they will sell your customers. Then, never treat a customer better than you treat your employee.
• Keep it fresh, keep it focused and remember to always say “Thank You”. These easy words will keep good people with you and your customers coming back often.
• Do not spend much time trying to trim costs without spending an equal amount of time training your staff to sell more and serve better. Most food trucks fail when they try to “save” their way to profitability.
• Make something idiot-proof and sure enough, someone will invent a better idiot. The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits. Expect and demand the greater good from your employees; they will achieve it…. treat them as if they have no intelligence, and they won’t disappoint you.
• Train daily. Review often. AND never practice on a customer.
• Do not run a food truck. Manage a small business. Success cannot be determined upon profit and losses alone. If you torture numbers, they are certain to tell you anything.
• The real bottom line is not how much you get from your customer, it’s how much your customers get from you. Perceived value of the entire experience is of greater importance than any single dollar you can bank. The interest you earn from a satisfied guest is greater than the interest from a bank.
• A customer is not always right – because this would imply that in every situation the employee is always wrong. The customer is not always right, but the customer is always the customer and it is all right for the customer to be wrong.
• The difference between food truck reality and fiction is simple. Fiction has to make some sense.
• View suppliers and purveyors as partners not adversaries. Anytime someone gets something for nothing, someone gets nothing for something.
• Different is not always better, but better is always different. We may never know the single most important key to food truck business success, but one sure way to failure in the industry is trying to please everybody. Stay true to your concept and the guest demographic group you have chosen to serve.
• The more you keep doing what you are doing, the more you are going to get what you got. If you are happy with the results of your business, keep doing what you are doing. If you are not, then there is only one way to correct it.… you have to change the way you do things in business, until you are satisfied with the results.
• If you are no longer driven, find a new way to steer your business.