Advice for the aspiring pitmaster
To be a success, it takes more than great smoked meat
“If you cook it, they will come” is an unspoken strategy for many would-be barbecue entrepreneurs.
You might be a backyard warrior goaded into opening a barbecue popup by enamored (though not always objective) friends and family. Or you might be a competition cook whose collection of first-place trophies inspires you to set up shop in a parking lot on weekends to sell your award-winning, smoked-meat wares.
The business plan in both cases often is that if you make great barbecue, you are guaranteed to be successful. Having visited hundreds of trailers and pop-ups over the years, I can say with certainty that this is a doomed approach.
Sure, great barbecue is the foundation. But there are dozens of other factors that ultimately determine success or failure.
Based on my own experience visiting with fledgling barbecue barons, here are a few of the secrets to success that I’ve observed over the years.
By far, the most important facet of any new barbecue operation is consistency in schedule. To this day, there are trailers in Houston I have not visited because I cannot figure out when and where they are open.
Budding barbecue entrepreneurs should consider starting out at a few days a week. Most still will be working a day job, so operating on Saturdays and Sundays is a solid plan. Remember, Snow’s BBQ in Lexington — which many consider to be the best barbecue joint in Texas and therefore the world — is still open only one day per week, on Saturdays.
Being open a couple of days a week offers many efficiencies and benefits. Let’s say you need to serve 200 customers per week to be profitable. Assuming you have the capacity, serving 100 customers per day over two days is far more efficient than serving 50 customers per day over four days.
Why? Most important, you are cooking only twice per week, thus minimizing the chance of a bad cook because of weather, grease fire or a problem with procurement of raw materials. Additionally, serving a steady stream of customers over fewer days assures that the barbecue will be freshly cut and served right off the pit rather than having to “hold” it when there’s a lull, which often results in less-than-perfect, driedout meat.
And, quite frankly, a long line of customers and later being able to announce you are “Sold out” have become status symbols for successful barbecue start-ups, as inconvenient as this might be for customers.
Opening fewer days per week also allows for management of family issues, which have a greater impact on new barbecue joints that often are a one-man-show or mom-and-pop operation. Of the many times I’ve visited an unexpectedly closed trailer, the reason is almost always a sick child or other family emergency.
Certainly a reason worthy of sympathy and understanding, but the reality is that most customers will move on to another place and never come back. By opening only a couple of days per week, you can more easily mitigate such issues without affecting business.
So you have a trailer, location, consistent opening days and times, and world-class barbecue. Now you need to make sure at least 200 customers per week know about all of the above.
At minimum, a new barbecue business should use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for this. Facebook is particularly effective. For as little as $50, you can present an advertisement to thousands of people who self-identify as barbecue fans in your immediate vicinity.
It’s also critical to understand that social media is inherently visual. So the aspiring barbecue entrepreneur is not only a cook, accountant and marketer, she also must learn how to be a photographer. The ability to take mouthwatering photographs of your own barbecue is surprisingly critical to attracting that minimum number of weekly customers.
For every successful trailer that’s made the jump to a permanent brick-and-mortar restaurant — Corkscrew BBQ, Southern Q and Pappa Charlies Barbeque, to name a few — there are dozens of others that don’t make it. The aspiring barbecue baron must wear many hats and cultivate many skills. Great barbecue alone doesn’t guarantee success.