I had a thought while typing the same email that I’d typed out to five other people for my food and culture business, Good and Golden. “I should turn this into a template. I need to choose a CRM (client relations management system).”

Had I not been part of the streamlining systems process at Stoke, I definitely would not have thought that (I’d had zero ideas of what a CRM was before then). Sometimes MailChimp will work for emails, and sometimes you need something more robust, like Nutshell, which is my preferred client relations management system.

I’m still in the first year of owning and operating my own business as a side hustle, since I’m a full-timer at Stoke as the marketing and program manager. We share Lao food and learning experiences with people, where they get to taste the flavors that make Lao food so unique and learn cooking techniques as well.

Here’s a rundown of what it took to launch our business and where we are about eight months in. My partner and I pulled a lot together in a short amount of time to apply for a grant, so the first part of the process took just a few weeks, and we’ve been working on other aspects of the business since then. If you’re thinking about starting your own business, I hope these insights will help you. If you’re already well-established, then I hope you can reminisce, reflect, and maybe even re-evaluate as you read about our journey!

Start and Lead With Why

I love cooking for people and my heritage is very important to me. I find joy and fulfillment in sharing my family’s food with folks and it seemed like as good a time as any (mostly propelled by a grant application deadline) to turn my passion into my side hustle. Lao food was introduced to the states as Thai food, since Thai food had gained popularity in the ‘80’s prior to an influx of Lao refugees arriving due to The Secret War in Laos. My goal is to have Lao cuisine be identified and appreciated for what it is, for folks who have never tried it to learn to love it, and for Lao people to be proud of their food. This guides me in the decisions that I make for Good & Golden.

Good & Golden’s soft launch party, an interactive dinner!

Choose Your Business Entity

For us, operating as an LLC made the most sense and would insure that we (the two of us) were protected in certain circumstances. It separates us from the business by a certain degree. I also consulted with a trusted mentor and fellow small business owner.

I’d considered just filing a DBA or being a sole proprietor, but 1. My life partner also wanted in on this business venture, thus also becoming my business partner, and 2. When you’re serving food to people, you want to make sure that you’re a business entity that has some security and protection just in case.

After filing as an LLC and a few hundred dollars later, we then had to apply for our federal tax ID/EIN.

Write Out Your Business Model

We used a lean canvas template to do some high-level business planning and then began using LivePlan to dig into the details. If you don’t know how to complete all the sections and answer all the questions being asked of you - don’t worry. These plans are meant to be revisited often.

While facilitating mentor sessions for Stoke during Coffee + Convo, I made mental notes of tips from Ndaba Mdhlongwa, one of Stoke’s resident mentors who is a business planning and strategy consultant. He’s brilliant, and our conversations about conducting analyses as well as how to approach developing one’s business plan were so helpful and continue to be. You can also find help for writing your business plan through the Small Business Development Center or through organizations like TWU Center for Women Entrepreneurs and TechFW.

What Are Your Offerings and How Do You Deliver Them?

Another mentor’s wise counseling helped me figure out Good & Golden’s unique value propositions: we weren’t just selling Lao food, we were helping folks experience Lao cuisine and culture without having to travel internationally. This particular mentor, Patrick Peters, asked questions like “How are you making people’s lives better? What is actually the result of your product or service?”

Funding Your Business

We did not end up receiving the grant that we applied for, but we knew that we were going to forge ahead, pay for things out of pocket as much as we could slowly, and give a crowdfunding campaign a shot.

Our Kickstarter campaign was nearly 200% funded within weeks thanks to our community! We read about how to create our Kickstarter project page, made some content (a video for the project page and some social media graphics) and promoted it through the social media accounts we’d set up for the business, as well as on our own pages. Shortly after we launched the campaign, we also hosted a soft launch party in the form of an interactive dinner, showcasing one of our business’ offerings.

Friends, family, and strangers who found us through Kickstarter’s platform helped pay for a lot of the equipment costs that were taking a chunk out of our own wallets, like catering coolers, storage containers, chafing dishes, quart containers, pop up event supplies, and so on.

However, if this doesn’t seem feasible (paying for startup costs out of pocket and/or launching a crowdfunding campaign), there are small business loans that you can apply for.

Figure Out Your Finances

This started by way of soft launching our business at an interactive dinner and saving all of our receipts. We did the same with each pop up event. The fun part is handing off the spreadsheet duties to your partner if you’re the one who handles the other fun stuff, like content creation and marketing. Documenting everything will help you figure out costs so that you can price you products or services appropriately.

Go Get ‘Em

You will learn as you go, and you will have moments where you think to yourself “WHY didn’t we do this another way?” or “That was … way too much to try and do for our first event.”

We try to have a learning and growth mindset when we think back on what we consider to be losses or mistakes. Get up and try again; do better next time; we are only getting better and better. So on.

And after purchasing a truck for work purposes but feeling quite overwhelmed by the new commitment, our salesman (who we’d spent hours with talking about books, our food business, and life, of course since the car buying process somehow still takes forever) encouragingly said, “Go get ‘em!” before we drove off.

Small Business Case Studies: Good and Golden