Dream and Hustle

Swagger Jacking and Kick Starting the Food Truck Park Model

A permanent food truck park opened up here in Atlanta and was considered a roaring success. I wrote about this business model in 2011 and as you see, we pretty much are now going to talk about how someone else did what no one reading Dream and Hustle bother to do for our hoods. So we going to try this again in 2012 and will help brothas and sistas setup a crowdfunding strategy on Kickstarter to help them get this up and running in the hood.

You can find the original article I wrote about this food truck park model at the following address:

http://016f182.netsolhost.com/dhblog/2011/02/18/thoughts-on-creating-a-privately-owned-food-truck-park/

Case Study: Atlanta Food Truck Park and Market

Off 75 Expressway and Howell Mill Road in Atlanta a permanent food truck park was setup called Atlanta Food Truck Park and Market. I’ll let the media coverage speak for itself.

Atlanta Food Truck Park Opens: MyFoxATLANTA.com

To say that Thursday night’s grand opening of the Atlanta Food Truck Park & Market was a success would be a gross understatement.

Howard Hsu, co-owner of the park that is set up on a three-acre tract on Howell Mill Road at I-75, said he was expecting some 600 to 700 people to show up to sample the culinary offerings of about 15 food trucks.

Instead, the opening night drew a crowd of more than 3,000 – so many people that the trucks all sold out of food earlier than expected and were delayed in getting back to the site in time to reopen at 11 a.m. on Friday.

One truck – Nana G’s Chick-n-Waffles – was so popular that they were turning people away by 7 p.m., just two hours after the park opened Thursday night.

“It was extremely successful for everyone involved,” Hsu said. “A lot of people were parking almost a mile away; that’s a good problem to have.”

Just before 11:30 a.m. Friday, Hsu told the AJC that he had already had to turn away several dozen people because none of the trucks had arrived to begin serving lunch.

Source: http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/food-truck-park-opens-1427263.html

No one can argue that the food truck park model will not work. If anything, it appears to always be an instant success and continue to do good in all of the food truck park models I’ve seen. The inner city Black community have plenty of empty lots that can be converted into a food truck park. The inner city Black community has high density population that would keep these food truck parks crowded and profitable. It does not take a college degree or a rocket scientist to establish and maintain a food truck park in the hood.

Swagger Jacking Their Food Truck Park Business Model

Doing some research, you can learn how they were able to pull off this successful weekend. First, they had a ScoutMob deal (similar to Groupon) that help spread the word to deal seekers who probably spread word of mouth. Second, they had a lot of buzz in the media as food trucks are the new media darling stories. So these two things you need to keep in mind this is how you going to blow up your food truck park.

The thing about a food truck park is they are really a nice festive atmosphere that can be done on a daily basis, similar to the Taste of Chicago. People like to eat and hang out and be in clusters. Then you give them a place to have a seat and chillout and now you are straight in business. In the Black community in the hood, you can do a block party type ish setting where you blasting Frankie Beverly and Maze or some old school Luther when he was with the group Change:

Cats out eating at food trucks, the girls all walking around turning heads and the young brothas trying to look good and it’s another good day in the hood because you got a food truck park we can all hang out at and support food truck entrepreneurs and be a real Black community once again like it’s 1973 North Philly.

How to Go About it on Kick Starter

Thanks to crowdsourcing, many of you brothas and sistas ain’t thinking and don’t realize it probably would be a pretty straightforward task to crowdfund the financing for a food truck park in the hood. You sitting up there wanting to get a job and ish and don’t realize you charge a food truck $100/day and you get 10 trucks and that’s $1,000 a day and $365,000/year off an empty ass lot in the hood that had nothing but crack pipes and garbage laying around before you did something about it.

Think about the proposition you bringing to the table – you are going to have local cats in the community, not these bigot unions lay down the asphalt, build the tables and sitting benches and create flower beds, fountains to beautify the empty lot into a park like setting for Food Trucks to park at and serve the people. If you want to go another step, you can setup a space for vending cats and get more cats in the hood be entrepreneurs on your food truck and vending lot.

Then think about the other social good you can bring to the table. If the inner city community was a food desert, someone can create a food truck that offer fresh fruits and vegetables to sell to the local community to take home. No more kids getting hit by an ice cream truck when they can walk to your food truck park and enjoy ice cream there. Cats can have supervised visits with their kids at your food truck park and local politicians can come around and kiss these supervised kids on the cheek for photo ops, pass out political flyers claiming they helped you get this food truck park and demand a $5,000 contribution from you.

That is the kind of stuff that the investors on KickStarter and other crowdfunding sites want to see is the social responsibility aspect of it. And this food truck park transforming a bleated empty lot into a bustling ground floor hustle for hood entrepreneurs is about as social responsible as a cat can get. So now you got to put a presentation together and sell the food truck park hustle and let’s discuss the details:

Video Propaganda. You want to make a video propaganda film for KickStarter that show you standing on an empty lot and show videos of used needles, crack pipes and used condoms – pick up the used condom off the ground and stick it in the camera to show the audience how bad this empty lot is. Then sell your dream of you wanting to turn this lot into a food truck park and sell all that social responsibility sh*t about empowering entrepreneurs, giving the community a place to enjoy themselves and reinvest the money back into the hood.

Visual Diagram. You going to need a visual of how you imagine the food truck park will look like for the investors but for yourself to see. The image above is the type of image you need to create and have on Kickstarter so investors can visualize themselves what you are thinking. You can use Google Sketchup or Open Source Blender to create these kinds of diagrams but this takes real skills and practice. You may want to pay some cat in Turkey or India to create this diagram on the cheap for you over the Internet.

The Revenue Model. Explain you will make money by renting out space to food trucks and vendors and also you will charge to do a ticketing or a prepaid system similar to how they do at the carnival. This is where you stand in a line and buy tickets and you spend the tickets at the food truck. This is an extremely important part you need to do because food trucks should be just serving food, not counting change or collecting dirty money. Do it like they do at the Taste of Chicago and have a ticket system and pay the food trucks the cash when they redeem the tickets at the end of the day. In a big city like the South Side of Chicago, you are realistically looking at $500,000 to a million/year revenue on a good empty lot.

Marketing and Promotion. You tell them that you will offer deals on Groupon to get an initial crowd and explain that crowds attract more crowds. Explain the funding will be used to invite the media by giving them vouchers to try out the food trucks and experience the park and cover it on the news. But you know the hood and the community is going to show up strong at your spot the same way our ghetto ass show up at these fake Freaknic styled picnics ran by some ghetto promoter at the last minute.

Return on Investment. Investors on Kickstarters cannot buy shares in your hustle but what you can do is give them something in return as gratitude for their investment. The first thing you better think of is do it like Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta and just put their name on a brick that will be on the grounds of your food truck park acknowledging them as a crowdsourced investor. The second thing you can offer them is free vouchers to spend as they please for being an early investor. Yeah, I bet you realizing by now this is probably a hot hood hustle that don’t take much to get going and raise money on, huh?

Summary

You really should now come to the conclusion that setting up a food truck park in the high density inner city hood is probably not a bad idea and not something that will not fail either. Probably can have this setup in the hood by the 4th of July if you want to keep it real. Dream and Hustle was talking about food trucks as economic empowerment models for the hood for a few years. In fact, I even wrote a fictional story about two sistas and one of them open a food truck and you may not know this, but some sistas around the country actually started their own food truck operation after reading that story.

When I see food trucks in the news, all I see is long lines of people and hearing about these food trucks running out of food and being sold out due to the popularity. Only a dumb fool would doubt this hustle, would not swagger jack what already works and would not run to kickstarter and get cats to crowdsource $17,000 to get an empty lot in the hood to see revenues of $500K/year. The social responsibility is there, the empowerment model is there and also the ability to better the quality of life for cats in the hood is there.

And I will leave it at this – you should already know I will put in money on your Kickstarter proposal if your ass did this proposition right like I told you to. Just put Dream and Hustle on one of those bricks and send a brotha some vouchers to get his grub on and look at the fine hood sistas all lined up to eat at the shredded BBQ chicken truck at your food truck park.