No Pay? No Business!

Today we're going to talk about something that makes some people really, really uncomfortable.

Sometimes people need to be uncomfortable because comfort is exactly what allows bad

business habits to stay in place year after year after year. If your business does not pay you,

you do not have a business. You have a hobby. We're going to talk about the people that have a hobby

and the people that pay themselves. Welcome to the 10 minute food truck training podcast. My name is

Bill Moore. I'm the executive director of the National Street Food Vintage Association, which is

an on-profit dedicated education advocacy and uplifting all food vendors. Today we want to talk

about why you need to pay yourself. If you don't pay yourself, you really just don't have a business.

You've got a job. It's a self-created job. You might have a hustle. You might have a rolling

survival machine. Well, all you've done is buy yourself a whole bunch of stress and dead and long

hours and sore feet and an expensive way for you to stay personally busy and show nothing for it.

If the business cannot consistently pay the owner, we have to stop pretending it's healthy.

It's a hobby. If it's a hobby, there's a whole lot more fun things to do out there that you

can get enjoyment out of without pouring so much money into what you're calling a business.

People confuse sales, top-line revenue, with being successful or being successful. They say,

we did $10,000 this month. We were slammed all weekend. We sold out. We had people lined up.

50 people deep, 60 people deep. That sounds really great. But if you're not getting paid,

none of that really matters. If you don't have money in your bank account based on all of those

things, you don't have a business. You can't accept whatever's left over. Owners pay themselves

whatever's left over after propane or after food costs or after the helper or after the generator

repair or what they gave to their cousin because the cousin needed a little bit of money and they don't

know how to say no, it's your pay is never whatever's left over. Your pay should be intentional

and should be one of the very first expenses that get taken care of. Now, I'm not saying to ignore

other expenses. If you are forced into making a decision over paying the insurance for the month

or paying yourself, you have one of two problems. You have an incoming revenue problem which is

marketing or you have an internal expense problem that you're not addressing correctly.

Both of those things are fixable. You should never accept I'm not paying myself because I got to

pay the insurance. That's not a business. That's basically you accepting left overs and they're

very bad left overs. Essentially, you're a scavenger. You cannot build a real business on scavenging.

If the owner is the last person that's being considered, that means the owner's taken all the risk

that also means the owner is working the longest hours. They're carrying the most stress home

and then because they're scavenging, they're probably getting a lot of guest complaints or getting

no reviews, which is just as bad. You're trying to figure out how to fix breakdowns that you don't

really know how to do yourself because you have no money to call in the pro. You're worried about

whether you're worried about meat and payroll. You're worried about permits and repairs and

shortages and scheduling and every other moving part on a feed truck. And then the owner takes a

deep breath and goes, maybe next month, that's broken thinking. The owner is not the least important

person in the business when it comes to getting paid. The owner is the person that made the business

possible. If the owner never gets paid, the numbers are lying and they're lying to themselves

thinking they have a successful business. They do not. It makes for a neat story to say, I've been

business three years and just now paying myself. Okay. Well, how did you eat? Where did the money

for your mortgage come from? And there's where you get the whole story. They really weren't motivated

to run a food truck because they had other income. They may have had a well paid spouse. They may

have had a well paid job and only ran their food truck on the weekend. When you're motivated by the

fact that you have no other income, you figure out really, really quickly how to get the sales up.

So you yourself can eat and you yourself don't have to live under a bridge somewhere. People tell

me the business is covering its bills. And then I say, how much are you making? Oh, I haven't paid

myself yet. Now, the business really isn't covering its bills because it's not covering payroll.

A business that doesn't cover the labor and the leadership of the owner is not providing profitability.

It's proving dependence on underpaid leadership because it needs that dependence for things to

happen that aren't getting paid for. You can't hire a marketing person to do the marketing when

you yourself are not being paid. You can't hire someone to take your place to get truck number two

because they're not going to work for what you're paying yourself right now. So make a plan.

If you had to replace yourself tomorrow, you've had surgery and you can't work on the food truck,

but you need the income from the food truck, how much are you paying that person? If the business

is only surviving because you're donating the labor, guess what? You'll never find somebody to

take your place for that surgery because they're not going to accept zero. Too many business owners

subsidize a weak business with their own free labor and then brag about, hey, I'm in business,

I've been doing this. Don't learn from those people for one. And then really question everything

that they say because if they're not making money, they really don't have a business. And you

want to be in business to make money. You can't learn how to make money from people that aren't

making money. And you know what happens when you don't pay yourself? 15% of all people when they

go to sell their food truck and they're being honest will say, I worked too hard for too little

money. So let's almost one in five people work too hard for too little money. They start getting

resentful because they're not getting paid. They get tired because there's no enthusiasm to get

up tomorrow to make nothing. Then they end up being short with guests. They end up being frustrated

with the staff when things don't go the way they expect. They stop enjoying the work and they

stop thinking clearly. Then what they end up doing is to put a little bit of money in the bank.

They start cutting corners. They buy inferior ingredients. They send employees home and work

by themselves. Then they start to wonder why they ever got in the business in the first place.

And all that happens because the owner sees themselves as being the unpaid hero. And they never

really learned how to create a business that'll stand on its own. Passion for your business

doesn't pay your electric bill. Pride doesn't pay the rent. Excitement and enthusiasm don't build your

future retirement. And being busy certainly doesn't mean you have a paycheck because busy is relative.

I've had people tell me they were busy and I sat and watched them going, you ain't busy at all.

Why do you think this is busy? Waiting on six people an hour is not busy but some owners call

that busy. The business has to support the owner. The business cannot just consume everything you

give it and not give you something back. People are afraid to face the truth. And that's why this

topic just absolutely bothers me. I hate people that will say, you should not make money the first

year, first two years, for three years. How do they eat? Answer me that. And then it goes into,

like I said earlier, oh, they've got a spouse. Oh, they've got. Oh, they've got. So it's really not a

business. Why are you canceling people to not pay themselves? Once you admit that your business is

not paying you, you have to face one of several uncomfortable possibilities. Could be your

prices are too low. Could be your menu as far too complicated. Could be that your food cost is

just out of control. Could be your labor is unproductive. Could be that you're doing bad events

or you're choosing week events because you don't know any better. Maybe your portions are inconsistent.

You make them everything's perfect. Your employees make it and they're all heavy-handed. Maybe you have

theft. Maybe you have waste and it's way worse than you think. Maybe you bought too much of a,

maybe you bought too big of a food truck and you don't have enough business to keep the capacity,

your service capacity close to where it needs to be. Maybe you built something that looks really

super exciting, but it's weak because there's no systems. There's no reason for the employees

to do things consistent from one sandwich to the neck. And then the one thing it just drives me crazy.

People say this is how it is in restaurants. No, it is not. The industry is challenging. The industry

on the restaurant level has thin margins, but the industry requires discipline and it's not that

hard to do. You can't be an unpaid full-time employee forever. All you're going to do is get

frustrated. You need to create a budget. What does that budget look like? You need to follow

up on your costs. Can you reduce some costs? You've got to stop looking at paying yourself

as some luxury that you'll achieve after the business makes it. People tell me all the time,

I got no money. Yeah, no what? You're right. You have no money because you haven't set the business

up for success. You haven't set your own systems in place so that you get paid if everything within

the system that you created is perfect. You're menu price to a 25% food cost and you are hitting

a 25% food cost. You have all your expenses to the lowest possible amount. You're not wasting

one bit of gasoline. You're not wasting one bit of propane and you're still not paying yourself.

What you have is a marketing problem. You're not bringing enough revenue in because if you can't

adjust the prices and still be busy, then all it's left is you have to bring more people in

marketing problem. So you need to diagnose yourself. Do I have a pricing problem? Do I have full

cost control? Do I understand what a quality event is? What's my ticket average? What's my speed

of service? How much food am I really wasting? Is my labor productive? What is my overall expense

load? Can I reduce any of those expenses? Am I seasonal? Do I understand my own season? Or is it

just poor planning? You're not selfish if you want to pay check. I want you to have a paycheck.

I wanted to be the biggest paycheck you've ever gotten but you had to go out and earn it. And you

don't earn it by putting in the time because if you're not paying yourself this year, nothing's

changed in next year for you to be able to pay yourself. When you don't pay yourself, you quietly

teach everybody around you, all your family, all your friends, and even your employees that your

work has no value. So do you really want your family to think that you should sacrifice without

reward? Do you want your staff to think that, well, let's just do it. The owner makes it work

without getting paid. Do you want to train yourself just to normalize the struggle you're feeling

right now? You're training the business to operate and it's got a missing expense. So it's really

not operating. That's dangerous. You're going to end up selling. You end up frustrated. You're going

to end up quitting. All because you haven't set the business up correctly to pay yourself. You have

to budget for it, you have to measure for it, and then you've got to go out and fight for it with

marketing. Just don't do this to yourself. Don't accept that it's customary for a business not to

pay the owner for a number of years because it is not customary. Thank you guys so much for listening

to the team minifood truck training podcast. If you're finding everything helpful that we do,

please do two things. First thing, whatever platform you're on, like, subscribe, follow,

whatever they want you to do. Please do it for us. So you know, when the next episode's coming out,

second thing, go to nsfba.org. Join our association today. We've got once a week live coaching. We've

got once a week live classes. We've got twice a week live group coaching. We've got a whole bunch

of videos you can watch that will help you to learn how to take yourself.