Adventures in Micro Entrepenurisim

This weekend my Girlfriend and I got the opportunity to run a food booth at an outdoor festival in northern New Mexico, Watt5, about 30 miles north of Santa Fe. Both my Girlfriend and I worked our asses off. We about broke even- we were probably about 100$ short of it, which isn’t too bad for our first attempt, and not really knowing anything about the market. We met a ton of people, and in the end I can say I have another notch in my belt for a business start up, and I think this time it went off better than I could have expected. We both learned a ton, but in the end, for our first business together, I think we both did extraordinarily well.

Up until now my adventures in festivals have been purely on the passive/attendee side. One of my other blogs, http://www.festivalagogo.com, is dedicated purely to this activity. This weekend we took the lunge into being on the other side of the fence, trying to contribute something to the community we’ve been a part of for so long.

It kind of weirds me out that some people have this idea that business and capitalism is all about exploiting and taking and being a dick. The way some people think of business reminds me of the way some people were so willing to accept the doom and gloom of the end of the world prediction there was made for this Saturday- that there is only badness on the horizon and that we should all lament and freak out. While there are those kinds of exploitative and messed up people in the business world, there are also those kinds of people in any situation. The irony is that each business i’ve ever started has been ten times more work and responsibility than i’ve ever experienced as an employee of someone else.  Its a big part of the reason why I decided not to try to get the supervisor position that was available about a year ago at the place I work at now, the cost to benefit ratio is way, way off, and if anything, the worst position to be in is as a entry level supervisor with no hope for advancement in the next five years. Simply put, one has to give, on orders of magnitude more time, money, thought, and risk than any worker ever has to. I wish more people would try to start up small businesses in their spare time, even if its not something that you would like to do full time, I think it gives people a perspective on business that they could never understand otherwise.

I feel like, after this weekend, we did a fairly good thing. We fed a ton of people who would have gone hungry had we not been there, and we did it at reasonable prices with tasty food. We ran out of stuff and had to go back to town twice, which was a good thing. Pricing, organizing, transporting, setting up, tearing down, operating, accounting, marketing, cooking, and entertaining was a ton of work, I think both of us worked 16 hours straight for both Friday and Saturday, and at least another 10 hours straight on Sunday. Altogether this was a solid start to our run up for a gourmet food truck, which we are hoping we can get financed soon.

Seth Godin has it right- the factory- the part of the business that produces the actual product, really is a sideshow to all the other stuff that has to happen in the background.

We’re looking forward to doing another booth soon.

ps, mad love to the entire Watt5 crew, Braheim, Dave Decibel, and everyone else who helped make this a great time.