New business opened. now what? (long)

Wow, sorry to see you had such a bad start. Your booth looks great. I do the same thing up here in Alaska and we averaged about $500 a day. Our first day we did close to $400 without any advertising. I don't think you will need advertising, just send out flyers to businesses. We actually had a few close calls with people seeing our booth and making quick turns. One person came in and threw away his burger king whopper and said he has been craving a pulled pork sandwich. As for cooking ribs, I sell them as a sampler (3 ribs), 1/2 rack (6 ribs), and full rack (12 ribs). I slice the ribs in groups of 3. When someone orders any ribs I take them from the fridge and heat them on a charbroil grill and apply a glaze. This works great. As far as pulled pork go, I pull the pork and put in gal zip lock bags, put alittle pepper vineger sauce and alittle rub and seal it up. When I need some pork, pull out a bag and heat it up in a microwave for about 5 min and keep warm in a steamwell. Brisket I slice and put in pans. When I need some I put in plastic container and with alittle water and heat in Microwave for about 5 min, and put in steamwell. I haven't had any problem with drying out food. And all my customers are very pleased. If you need more advise you can email me @ hgroetsema@hotmail.com. Hope this helped ya, good luck. Don't worry word of mouth is the best advertisement.

capt, your pains are indeed felt here. my wife and i have, and are still experiencing some of the same problems. we opened the day after thanksgiving last year. just a small place. first day, one customer. second day, two customers. 500 dollars a day average is like a dream. worst thing about small places is not being able to project your sales for the day. so how do you prepare for a slow day or a busy day? well, we started out keeping stuff hot on the steam table. big mistake! stuff dries out and quality varies. so we decided to portion everything and keep in the cooler. sides, meats, sauces, everything! nuc to order. works great. we use 8 oz squat cups for the sides and the bbq. just fill them using a scale for weight, place them in an aluminum pan and cover with foil. we get 12 cups in a pan. stuff will last a long time without going bad this way. 1 minute in the mic and serve. as for ribs, i slice the slabs, weigh out 4 bones to half pound portions, wrap with a deli sheet, place in a full aluminum pan just like the bbq portions ( you can get these pans cheap at sams and reuse them) no need to foil the ribs, they are wrapped. just put one portion in the mic and nuc for 1 min. sometimes an extra few seconds. ribs will stay for a long time this way. we go through days with little to no sales. depression.... then all of a sudden we might get an order for a hundred bucks. never know, so always be prepared without losing quality of the stuff. same for bake beans, stew, just about anything.
as for ribs, i had to change my recepie just
a bit to keep them tasting great after 4 days of being in the cooler. what i did was this... after smoking i place them in an aluminum full pan with enough coke to cover the bottom. put them in an oven or smoker for an hour at 225-250(you will have to experiment with this). this enables the ribs to soak up the coke so that when you reheat 2 or 3 days later, they will be juicy. take them out of the oven or smoker and put them straight in the cooler. its hard on the cooler, but important for the ribs. if they cool off too slowly, they will not retain any of the juices. i usually wait til the next day to portion them, however sometimes i have to dip into them same day. i always try to stay a couple days ahead on quantities. that way if we get an unual busy spell we have the food for it. just means extra smoking the next day.
i hope this helps you, it has worked great for us. its hard to keep your head up on the slow days, but remember all the days wont be like that. i strongly urge marketing!!!!! its the most important part of any business... you gota do it now! pass out menus within a few square miles.... act like a politician and go door to door. we did that at first. passed out 2 thousand menus that way! create a coupon to pass out with the menus.. place the menus and coupons on counters at area business, talk the misses into delivering lunch to the area. target car sales lots. take samples with you when you go.... we hit 15 lots, and got 2 regular monthly catering gigs out of it. one for 24 people and one for 55 people! well, that is all for now, the marketing game is endless, limited to your imagination. we are now running a t.v. commercial. all through trading.... good luck, keep us all informed and we will try to help......

Thanks a bunch Big Daddy. And Coffee Bluff BBQ I saw your web page...a really nice layout. Both of you have been incouraging and quite helpful. You know i recall telling friends about how I would operate a bbq restaurant should I ever open one. And here it is today and I have almost forgotten all those things learned previusly. One of those was the great thing about pork and how it can be frozen and heated and reheated and still be great! What I would realy like to look forward to is I think it would be great to have a small charbroiler to reheat the ribs. I had read somewhere that someone heated their cooked pulled pork on a grill which gave it a unique flavor! Anyway I have quit trying to keep the ribs warm and now just keep them in the refriderator. For ya'lls info we took in a whoping $497 this week and $565 last week. My rent and utilities should be under $600/mo so I did make my bills and have money for product. And that was in only half the month.

Tomorrow we have a meeting with the printer to check on our design and order up 1000 menu/fliers. Now we get into the marketing!

I will be talking to DrBbq tomorrow while he heads out on a long drive to one of his events. He helped me a bit before and has urged me to call him again. With the help of you all I feel rather confident that we'll make it just fine.

I thank you all again for being there!

Peter www.captpetesbbq.com

I can feel for you. I have been doing my smoking business for several years-and still can't figure out how much to make each time. I use coolers to keep the cooked meats in. I wrap each serving in aluminum foil and place in the coolers. The meats stay hot for hours (I have even melted the insides of a few of them from the heat). On my best days I have sold out in 3 hours, and there have been days with only a few sales.......

Vacuume seal the meats and keep in a pot of warm/hot water. They will keep all day and not dry out.

Thanks Texakingfish! A very simple process that would cure that problem...I'll need to get a vacuum machine, however! Betcha I could borrow one...

Peter

I use a similar technique in my business.
I am set up in a brewery and I never know how many sandwiches I will sell. Sometimes a hundred, sometimes ten.

After I cook the pork (or beef) I pull it and package it in one pound and two-and-a-half pound vacuum seal packages and freeze it. It is then a simple matter to drop 'em into simmering water and heat. I then hold that in a cooker (smells better than a steam table) and make sandwiches out of it. I never have to waste much, if any.

An added benefit is having one-pound packages to sell to the public that they can take home.