Career Crush: Do You Have What it Takes to Own a Food Truck?

Every time I’m waiting in line at a food truck, I can’t help but wonder what’s going on inside. How do you prep all the food in such a small space? Where do you even get a truck with a grill in it? Is owning a food truck really the dream it sounds like for foodies who are trying to start their own business? For this episode I got in touch with Jon Moy, owner of the Moyzilla food truck, to find out what it’s really like to run your own restaurant on wheels. As you can probably guess, it’s about a lot more than just being a great chef. There’s so much that happens behind the scenes — from navigating the often confusing rules and regulations, to fixing flat tires and faulty generators, to dealing with the financial ups and downs. And honestly, even though it’s not as expensive as opening a restaurant, the startup costs for a food truck are higher than I thought. But if you love cooking, starting a food truck can be a good first step on the road to running your own restaurant. Read the full interview below for more insights from Jon. Kelsey Alpaio: How did you get started in the food truck business? Jon Moy: Before I started the food truck, I went to college at Hofstra and majored in finance. I was just following the typical route — you graduate from college at 21, and you’re like “I just spent all this money on this diploma, so I guess I need to go get a job.” So, I got a job. I was working for John Hancock in Boston for six years after I graduated. It was just a typical corporate finance gig. Honestly, it was cool because I graduated in 2008, and at that point, the economy was in shambles. I just felt fortunate to have a job. But then I started to feel stuck. My family had always been in the restaurant business, and I actually grew up hating it. I never saw my parents for holidays, and I knew that it meant long and hard hours. I never thought I’d be drawn to the industry again, but I think I just had it in my blood. I was really looking for a way to get back into something tangible and I found that cooking for people and food really makes me happy. At the time, food trucks were just starting to become a thing in Boston — there were only a dozen or so trucks. I was 25 at the time, so I just jumped into it a bit naive. We started off by doing festivals out of a tent to save up money for the truck, and then when we finally did that, we were like “Hey, this might actually work.” So we invested in a truck and got started in 2014. Why did you decide to go the truck route, instead of a physical restaurant location? Restaurants are super expensive. I personally just didn’t have the financial ability to jump in and lock into a lease for 10 years. Food trucks are a really good way for people to test the waters and get their chops in the industry. Restaurants and food businesses fail all the time. When you’re running a food truck, the worst-case scenario is you just sell the truck. But if you’re locked into a long-term lease, it’s a bit harder to move forward. So how much does it cost to start a food truck versus a brick and mortar restaurant? With a restaurant, there are so many variables. You can be looking into the millions of dollars range. For food trucks, it’s still a lot of money. But our first truck cost around $80,000. And then, there’s other startup costs associated with that — the actual product, a commissary to prep the food. So you’re looking at over $100,000 to get a food truck business started. Is $80,000 a standard price for a truck, or are there different tiers? You can probably look on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace and find a food truck for $20,000. On the other end of that, you could also go out to one of the premier food truck builders and spend $150,000. The first truck we bought was a nice compromise. We didn’t have all the bells and whistles. How long did it take you to get enough money to buy the truck? I actually lived with my parents right after I graduated while I was working for a bit. That was the best decision of my life because I was able to save that money. And then, working at festivals was a proof of concept for us and helped us gain the capital we needed to start. When the food truck idea came into my mind to the first time I actually drove the truck was probably about two years. How did you originally find festivals to serve at? In our first year, there was a lot of pounding the pavement. Really, the internet and social media have been a huge help. I don’t know how this would have happened without those tools at our disposal. I would scour the internet and reach out to contacts. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. We’ve definitely done festivals where there’s just like five people there and they all brought their own lunch. In terms of the truck, can you just park it wherever you want? I’m not sure how it works in every city, but in Boston, there’s a lottery system. Every year, you get your permits to run your truck, and then they announce a day for the lottery. Every food truck owner goes down to City Hall, and they literally pick names out of a hat to determine the areas you’re allowed to park your truck. And the spot you get only lasts for the year. So if you draw a customer base and you’re killing it in a spot, but the next year you can’t park there, you can’t just tell your customers like “Hey, you can always find us here.” You will always get a spot — it just might not be in the hot areas. Tell me more about the food truck community — is it cut throat or more friendly? When we started our food truck back in 2014, there were about a dozen food trucks in Boston. That number in 2019 was well over 100. So in like five years, the landscape has changed dramatically. But being the new person in 2014, I was nervous. My worry was that we would drive up in our new truck and these other trucks were just going to think we’re there to take away their business. I imagined it could probably create a pretty hostile environment. But the community ended up being a big part of the reason we were able to sustain our business and get our feet under us. I was just taken aback by how friendly a lot of them were and how willing they were to help. And that’s the personality that I’d like our business to continue now. We want to help the newer people, and we’ve helped a lot of food trucks come along since. It’s such a community. Because one food truck parked on the side of the road is great — you’ll have great food, people will come. But what’s even better is a handful of trucks parked close to each other. It just draws more people in, and everyone’s going to benefit if there are options. What does your day-to-day look like as a food truck owner and operator? The day-to-day honestly looks different every day of the week. It depends on a lot of things — the weather, the location, the time of year. But everyday, we typically start down at our commissary kitchen, which happens to be my parent’s restaurant. That makes it pretty easy because it’s free and there’s tons of space. Once we’re there, we cook all the carbohydrates, the noodles and the rice. Then we’ll just have a meeting and go over the game plan for the service and make sure everything that we need is loaded on the truck. Tell me more about your team. Who do you work with? So I started the food truck with my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, and my father. During the beginning of it, we’d work like eight days a week just trying to build the brand. It was exhausting at times. But my dad, he’s always worked in restaurants, since he was 16. I never really got to see my dad growing up much because of restaurant hours. So it’s cool now being able to work with him. He’s helped develop a lot of the recipes and has really shifted towards overseeing the prep staff, making sure that we have all the food prepared, and not giving away the secret recipes. Working with family, at points you get so frustrated. But there’s honestly nothing better. Business is hard, and the food business is super hard — to know you have people on your team that have your back through thick or thin, it’s been our saving grace. How many members do you have on staff? Pre-Covid, we were operating four trucks, and we had a physical location in the Seaport of Boston. But Covid really turned things upside down a bit for us. We previously employed 34 employees, but now we’re down to eight. That was by far the hardest day. We had to go through conversations with almost 30 people letting them know that we were going to have to shut down indefinitely. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. We officially closed down towards the end of March 2020, but things had pretty much slowed down since the beginning of March. We were going out to our city spots and maybe feeding a handful of people. And we kept everyone on for a couple payroll runs — it just felt like the right thing to do. Eventually, when those hard conversations came, we realized that if we ever wanted to chance to come back after all of this is done, it had to happen. Everyone was super understanding and, at the time, we just didn’t know the severity of everything that was going on. Now, it feels like we’re almost having to restart the business. Things like large office populations, huge festivals, corporate catering — all of that just disappeared overnight. It really made us bring out our creative side, and we had to look at the glass half full. Right now, we’re sending out two of our four trucks. We’ve ended the lease at our physical location, and we’re actually scouring for our first brick and mortar right now. Wow, and I’m sure it’s not just Covid. Are there other challenges that tend to disrupt this industry? I say this all the time, like half jokingly, that food trucks are the worst idea. You’re building out this commercial kitchen in a 20-year-old truck that has to drive 55 Mph down the highway as everything bumps and rattles. And to be able to scale your business, you have to trust your team members to just drive your entire business down the road. It’s such a scary thing. So many interruptions can happen. For example, if it’s raining, our business decreases by at least 70%. There have been shifts where we forget to check the propane and we pull up to the spot and have no propane to cook with. Sometimes, a piece of our equipment won’t work — the friers or the grills aren’t functional for whatever reason. The tool we use to accept credit cards can break, or get stepped on, or just forgotten. So much can go wrong. Things break all the time, and you can’t have nervous breakdowns about that. Whether it’s mechanics, the equipment in the truck, the generator — which supplies power to our refrigeration, hand sinks, things like that. Wow, how do you deal with the anxiety of that? Or do you just learn to live with being nervous? I’ve almost gone numb to it at this point. Starting the food truck, I was the least mechanically inclined person. I had no idea how to check the radiator fluid or anything like that. My personality was just like, “Well, we’re not going to be able to cook food if we don’t figure this out.” So I’d spend hours learning how to fix generators or checking trucks out. I still can’t do a ton, but I think that eases my anxiety knowing the first steps to take if something goes wrong. The early days must have been so hard. What were those early days like for you? We look back at it all the time. I love our first truck for very sentimental reasons. But it’s kind of like, only a mother can love her children. Our first truck, we drove back from Rochester, New York in negative 10 degree weather. It broke down twice for us on the way. And I was like, wow this was just really not meant to happen. Once we finally got the truck back to Boston, we ran through all the permitting, and the first season was just a whirlwind. My whole body hurt. It felt like we were just sleeping on the truck at that point because we were working so many hours. I think through all the fatigue and everything, I just still really loved it. I was tired, and it was really hard work, and it was frustrating at times when things broke. But at the end of the day, a good day on the food truck was just like the best day of work I’ve ever had. You’re out there interacting with people who actually enjoy what you’re doing. Being able to see people come back week after week because they enjoyed what we were making — it felt really good. I think that’s what carried us through all the bumps of our first season. During each season after that, we got a little smarter. We learned from experience how to do things a little better — how to work smarter not harder. What did you change about what you were doing after your first season? When we first started, my vision was to serve yakitori — meat on a stick with different seasonings. We also had four different kinds of dumplings, rice, noodles, and a bunch of other things. It was super fun, and we had a huge menu. But with such a big menu, we could only realistically have served 100 people during a lunch shift. We knew something had to give. I realized from the business side of things, we really had to slim things down. So we cut our menu down quite a bit after the first season and we saw huge improvements. But the compromise was keeping a larger catering and wedding menu. All of those things that aren’t on our regular lunchtime menu, we can prepare for smaller groups. So how much do you personally pay yourself for all of this work? In the first year, I paid myself nothing. My dad, my wife, and I were like, we know we’re going to lose money. We either lost money or broke even in the first year. We were making payments on the truck and getting our brand out there. The second year, we made a little bit of money. And I couldn’t help but compare it to what I would have made in finance. And I was making like a fourth of what I would have made. If I were in finance right now, I’d probably be making around $150,000 a year. During our second year, we made $15,000. Over the last couple of seasons, we really gained traction and were able to expand. In 2019, we had our best year and did over one million dollars in revenue. And our margin on our bottom line is about 20% of that, so I started paying myself around $75,000 a year. Our total life, take-home income was around $300,000 in 2019. During Covid, it feels like we’re back in year one again. But we’ve been able to make a living off of it. I have two kids now. We bought a house a few years ago. But I’ll be honest, it’s not for everyone. The winters are tough. The repairs are tough. We realize that we’re definitely some of the lucky ones. What are some misconceptions about owning and operating food trucks? The biggest one is that we only work for a few hours a day during the lunch rush. If we’re serving from 11 AM to 2 PM, the day actually starts at like 7 AM and probably doesn’t end until 5 PM or 6 PM. With prepping the truck and the cleaning process, three hours of service probably takes triple the amount of time. What is your role when it comes to the food truck? Nowadays, I have found myself on the truck a lot more just because we’re a smaller staff and we’ve been fully booked with catering gigs and weddings. But we just don’t have the staff to not allocate myself as someone on the truck. If I’m not on the truck, it’s actually less glamorous. Some days, I’ll be creating catering proposals and trying to secure more business for the future. I’ll be trying to look into the business development side of things and what’s next for Moyzilla. Other times, it’s even less glamorous where I am just cutting my body weight in chicken, cleaning a fryer, or trying to fix something. My day is definitely never boring. It’s really true small business ownership — you’ll wear a lot of different hats on any given day. How do you maintain your passion for cooking when you have to do these less glamorous parts of the job? I still love cooking, being on the truck, and feeding people. But I think what I’ve realized is that I also have a passion for owning a business and working on the business side of things. When I was at John Hancock, I never hated my job. And through the process of scaling Moyzilla, I’ve realized that I really do love the business side of it almost equally to the cooking part of it. It’s hard but it’s fun. What is your goal for Moyzilla in the future? Do you want to open a restaurant? We’re always so consumed by the day-to-day that we don’t really think about this enough. But I do know for sure that as long as people will have us and trust us with catering their weddings and events, and people on the streets keep coming out to the truck, I never want to stop doing the truck. The food truck business has been really, really good to us, and whatever the next step is, I’d really like to have that always remain a part of our business model. I think the immediate goal for us would be to open up a storefront — a space to call our own where people could always find us. Consistent hours, more than 100 square feet of space to prepare the food, and the opportunity to put some neat things on the menu. And of course, continuing to try and improve. Every season, we get better and learn different things. We want to continue to do that and take people’s feedback to heart. So if I wanted to start my own food truck, what are the skills I should prioritize learning if I want to be successful at this? The first is work ethic. If you’re not prepared to work seven days a week, 70 hours, right off the bat, I don’t think it will work for you. Owning a food truck is a very romantic idea to a lot of people — owning any type of business is a romantic idea, like getting to be your own boss. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that I literally work for everyone else as the owner of the business. I work for my employees. I work personally for our clients and customers on a day-to-day basis. If they’re not happy, there is no business. Another skill you need is being able to problem solve on the fly. If you forgot forks on a shift, there’s a car parked in your spot — being able to adapt. You have to be really even-keeled. Okay, last question: Who is your career crush? The people I really look up to the most are my grandparents. My grandmother emigrated here and started off in insurance. She was working at a time when women in the insurance industry just weren’t really a thing. She crushed it, all while starting a restaurant and just absolutely crushing it there. My grandparents were part of the inspiration for me to get back into the restaurant and hospitality business. They started their business together and were super successful. I saw that and was like, I want to be like them. It’s really echoed with me, now working with my wife and Moyzilla being a family business. They’re amazing people, and I definitely wouldn’t be in the position I am today without them.

Career Crush: Do You Have What it Takes to Own a Food Truck?

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