I’ve had the idea for a food cart for several years now. Originally I wanted to do a hot dog stand in NYC, back when I graduated college and had nothing to do. I spoke with a few hotdog vendors who made at least 90K a year. The problem was that I’m not a people person, so I needed someone to join with me as a partner. With my lack of social skills at the time (combined with the misery of having a degree with no job), that was never going to happen. Fast forward to present day.
I didn’t think about a hotdog stand again until a few years ago. Smalltown’s downtown district has been developing quite nicely, and a food cart business in the right location would be very profitable. There aren’t too many vendors in the area (nothing like NYC at least), so the competition would be relatively low. This is one of the advantages of coming from a place like Brooklyn where everyone is out trying to make money. Hustle is king. But I still have the problem of not being a people person. So who would I get to serve the foods, especially in a town where I’m the outsider? The answer? The ultimate outsiders… Immigrants.
One of the great things about being a landlord is that I get connected to cultural networks. The better I get as a landlord, the more people trust me and my business acumen. And the deeper I get into their community, the more resources I have to tap. It works for the immigrants as well. They get the valuable resource of always having a place to stay, or a job for incoming countrymen from a guy who won't treat them as second-class citizens. The Nepalese tenants have proven to be quite valuable, and even my old African tenants connected me with some people that I can use from time to time. I met a guy, Ani, who owns an African restaurant named. The food was very good (particularly the sambusas), but he recently had to close up shop due to issues with his landlord (in other words, they weren’t making enough money). They will still sell food out of their house, but that’s about as far as they’re willing to go for now. I lack people skills. They lack the ability to run a successful business. We would compliment each others faults, and that can make for an extremely profitable business. Ani is just one of the many choices I’ll have when the time comes.
Now let’s not kid ourselves here. This is an extremely rough draft of my mobile food business idea, and it will take far more preparation than the Used Car venture. I’ve been watching Youtube seminars on the ups and downs of owning a business like that and it will cost at least 30K to 40K to get it started... ten times the startup money needed to start the used car selling business. I won't even have that much disposable income until 2018 at the earliest. But I’ve got a ridiculous amount of passion for this particular idea. The same kind of passion I have for real estate and stock trading, so I know it’s gonna happen if I’m still around. The profit I would make both financially and socially makes this too good of an idea to keep on the shelf.
P.S.: Stuff like this gives me even more motivation to continue learning new languages. My Mandarin courses through Rosetta Stone have been great, and I’m looking forward to learning Hindi starting in 2017. By the time I’m ready to start the food cart, I should be at least conversational in both languages…
I didn’t think about a hotdog stand again until a few years ago. Smalltown’s downtown district has been developing quite nicely, and a food cart business in the right location would be very profitable. There aren’t too many vendors in the area (nothing like NYC at least), so the competition would be relatively low. This is one of the advantages of coming from a place like Brooklyn where everyone is out trying to make money. Hustle is king. But I still have the problem of not being a people person. So who would I get to serve the foods, especially in a town where I’m the outsider? The answer? The ultimate outsiders… Immigrants.
One of the great things about being a landlord is that I get connected to cultural networks. The better I get as a landlord, the more people trust me and my business acumen. And the deeper I get into their community, the more resources I have to tap. It works for the immigrants as well. They get the valuable resource of always having a place to stay, or a job for incoming countrymen from a guy who won't treat them as second-class citizens. The Nepalese tenants have proven to be quite valuable, and even my old African tenants connected me with some people that I can use from time to time. I met a guy, Ani, who owns an African restaurant named. The food was very good (particularly the sambusas), but he recently had to close up shop due to issues with his landlord (in other words, they weren’t making enough money). They will still sell food out of their house, but that’s about as far as they’re willing to go for now. I lack people skills. They lack the ability to run a successful business. We would compliment each others faults, and that can make for an extremely profitable business. Ani is just one of the many choices I’ll have when the time comes.
Now let’s not kid ourselves here. This is an extremely rough draft of my mobile food business idea, and it will take far more preparation than the Used Car venture. I’ve been watching Youtube seminars on the ups and downs of owning a business like that and it will cost at least 30K to 40K to get it started... ten times the startup money needed to start the used car selling business. I won't even have that much disposable income until 2018 at the earliest. But I’ve got a ridiculous amount of passion for this particular idea. The same kind of passion I have for real estate and stock trading, so I know it’s gonna happen if I’m still around. The profit I would make both financially and socially makes this too good of an idea to keep on the shelf.
P.S.: Stuff like this gives me even more motivation to continue learning new languages. My Mandarin courses through Rosetta Stone have been great, and I’m looking forward to learning Hindi starting in 2017. By the time I’m ready to start the food cart, I should be at least conversational in both languages…
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