True Tales From the Food Truck Market

True Tales From the Food Truck Market: An Entrepreneurial Q&A with Jennifer Ward-Batts, Ph.D.

By Annabelle Huether

What exactly is entrepreneurship? There are a lot of simplified ideas about what it is and what it means, but for those who are actually privy to the exciting world of being a CEO or the owner of a company, it’s more than just running your own business.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss the idea of being an entrepreneur with experienced small business owner and operator, Dr. Jennifer Ward-Batts, in order to get the inside scoop on what it really takes to start your own business.

Jennifer Ward-Batts is a labor and demographics economist. She received her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Washington and obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Throughout her career, Jennifer Ward-Batts was awarded multiple fellowships and has performed extensive research on individual and household decision making. She has taught at University of Washington, University of Michigan, Claremont McKenna College, and Wayne State University, and is currently a visiting assistant professor of Economics at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Having previously owned a food truck with her husband, and soon to be the owner of a new Turkish restaurant in the Claremont area, she knows a thing or two about what it takes to run a business and has advice to spare for aspiring entrepreneurs who will listen.

Could you give a little bit of information about your involvement in the food truck business? How did you enter the business, and what food truck did you run? What did you learn from this experience?

My husband, Mito, and I operated a food trailer called Mito’s Döner in the Detroit area 2015 through 2017. My husband is Turkish and wanted to open his own restaurant. He and I met when I was on a Fulbright in Turkey. He went to culinary school after arriving in the US, and then worked country clubs for experience for a couple of years before we got the food trailer. This was a grand experiment and a stepping stone to opening a restaurant. It was lower start-up cost and didn’t require that we commit to a particular location. I was full-time faculty at that time, so I was less involved than I am with the coming restaurant startup. I did accounting and marketing, … and baklava. We got our feet wet, perfected recipes, and figured out that Americans do love döner once they learn what it is. Mito got a taste of managing American workers. He had managed a large staff in Turkey, but the culture is different here.

Could you speak to your most recent project, the opening of your own restaurant? Why did you decide to open your own restaurant, and how is this project coming along?

I honestly would never have pictured myself doing this, but it’s what my husband wanted to do. And I’m very excited about it. You know, the retail market is getting increasingly tougher because of online competition, but people have to eat. And eating is local. My husband loves to cook and loves to feed people. Both of us have pretty good sense for making decisions that make sense financially. So, we think we can make a pretty good go at this. We’re not just selling another burger or pizza. It’s different. There’s no Turkish food for quite a few miles in any direction. And we know from Detroit that once people try Mito’s döner, they love it and they want more. So, we’re quite confident this will be a big success. Getting it ready to open has been a long process though, and we’re still not there yet. We looked for a space for more than a year before finding our small spot just off Garey near the hospital and the 10 freeway in Pomona. Planning and plan review processes took a long time, and construction is taking a long time as well. Everything takes longer than I hope, always. But we’re pretty sure, barring major catastrophes, that we’ll open this month, inshallah!

What is the most challenging part about running your own business?

There are two interrelated challenges for me. One, I have never been good at delegating. To run your own business, you have to hire people to work for you and then actually let them do the work. Second, I find very often that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. This is one reason I don’t delegate much, as a rule. But we have to hire people to design and build-out the restaurant -- we’re converting from a retail space, so that means a lot to do – but I get disappointed and frustrated trying to get them to do what I want and do it right. There are errors and communication failures. I’m often going behind people, questioning whether they did something the proper way. I’m calculating how big my gas line needs to be to get the BTUs I need to run all of the cooking equipment at once and making sure the pipe they installed is big enough (don’t have an answer yet on that one). So, there’s this tension between needing to let people do the jobs you hired them to do, and the realization that at the end of the day, if things aren’t done right it’s my problem.

What is the most rewarding part about running your own business?

That’s a hard one to answer. Maybe it’ll be an easier question once the business is actually open! As an economics professor, I tell students we assume firms maximize profits, but I also suggest that in some cases, firm owners may have other objectives as well. I like to do well in whatever I do. So, having it be a success would be rewarding in and of itself – not just because of the income, though that has to be part of it. Success is multidimensional – income, fame, and providing decent pay and benefits to workers who do a good job are part of it, and lots of other things in between.

How, would you say, has your educational background affected the success of your businesses? Have you always wanted to be a business owner?

I have not always wanted to be a business owner. But having a background in economics is a pretty good place to start, as it gives me a good sense of how to make decisions, why things are the way they are, how things are likely to change -- in markets, populations, cities – in response to other changes, and so on. I’m a bit of a renaissance woman which is both a blessing and a curse. I have a lot of different interests. Before I found econ as a major, I sampled several disciplines and was on the path to get a degree in business administration. Now I’m drawing on stuff I learned in marketing, mass communications, accounting and organizational behavior in college, as well as on knowledge about architectural drawing, which I had in high school. I’m finding that knowing something about a lot of things is really useful in starting and running a business because there are so many aspects to it.

If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, what would that advice be?

I would say to learn everything you can. Read. Observe. Take mental notes. Think critically. Question everything. And don’t ever stop learning. Keep at it as long as you live. I don’t feel like I have ever learned anything that was wasted. But make sure you also learn to be a good communicator. Being able to get your point or your great idea across to others is as important as having a great idea in the first place.

So, to all of our entrepreneurs out there, let this be a reminder that persistence will reward you. And in the meantime: keep on learning.