“Holy shit, that’s ours!”
This is what Sabin said while we were in his car driving down Interstate 405 in Los Angeles on the afternoon of April 27, 2012. He was pointing to the big black food truck ahead of us, with our logo of a red lobster inside an outline of the state of Maine and the words COUSINS MAINE LOBSTER emblazoned on the side. It was a beautiful sight and Sabin was right: it was ours.
What a feeling.
We were on our way to our very first location. It was launch day, the culmination of nearly six months of planning, preparation, hard work, and endless worry. And for a brief moment on the 405, we were able to appreciate how far we had come—but only for a moment. In just a few minutes we would arrive at our first location, late and totally unprepared.
For now, we felt more alive and fulfilled than we had ever been in our lives. What had started as a slightly inebriated conversation between two long-lost cousins was now a real business. We owned that beautiful black truck; we had raised the money to purchase it and stock it. There were employees on that truck, our employees. There was real Maine lobster on that truck, the very lobster we ate as kids.
Like anything that is created, the final product often hides much of what went into its creation. Our customers are only supposed to see a streamlined, flawless operation that delivers them delicious lobster with a touch of Maine on the side. That’s the final product. But the making of it—the sausage making, so to speak—that’s the ugly part. Customers don’t care about that, unless you’re reading this, in which case we assume you do. And like any creation, the final product is so much more than what your customers, your readers, or members of your audience see.
Our dreams were on that truck. Even though neither of us was ready at that moment to make Cousins Maine Lobster our full-time job, we were both thinking about it. We had come this far, and we had had fun doing it, certainly more fun than we had anticipated. Well, maybe “fun” isn’t the right word. Is training fun? Is practice fun? Not usually, although there are fun moments. Rather, you train and you practice so that when it’s game time, you can win. The training makes the victory worth it. And that’s how we felt driving down the highway. The sight of our truck, filled with our dreams, our work, our sweat (more of which would be spilled in the hours ahead)—this was like our big victory. We had done it. Jim’s backyard, once just a childhood memory of the good ol’ days, had come alive; it was rolling down the 405 with cupboards full of buns, whoopie pies, and a refrigerator full of butter and Maine’s own delicacy.
How did that happen? How the hell did we get here from a booze-filled night eating sushi reminiscing about the old days?
LET’S START A BUSINESS!
Looking back, it was a mess. We were two guys without a clue in the world about what we were doing. It was also fun, but in that living-on-the-edge kind of way. Starting a business from nothing is probably the best experience you’ll never want to have again. The memories are great, we can laugh now, but good Lord, it was nuts.
How does one start a business? This isn’t some philosophical question. It was real for us. We had no idea. What do we do first? Do we register as an LLC? Do we buy a truck? Do we learn how to make lobster rolls? Do we build a web site? The questions seemed endless. At first, we just had a dozen to answer. Before long, we had hundreds. We couldn’t seem to answer one without raising two or three more. It was like whack-a-mole.
The moment Sabin called Jim to tell him that we were doing a food truck, our lives changed completely. We didn’t realize it then. It was like our lives were altered ever so slightly, so slightly that we hardly noticed at the time. But the farther we traveled down our new path, the larger the divergence became. And each question we answered, the farther away from our old lives we went. Each problem was like a rung in the ladder. To solve it, we had to keep climbing.
We’re going to try to break this down simply for our readers, but realize that it was anything but simple at the time. We approached everything haphazardly, without much direction or forethought. Eventually, we were able to streamline things into something resembling a coherent start-up strategy, but in the beginning, there was darkness. We wouldn’t see the light for many, many months.
THE TRUCK
If you’re going to have a food truck business, the first thing you need is a food truck. Don’t laugh. This was seriously how our thinking went at the time. This was our “strategy.” But so what? We had a tangible problem we had to solve. This rather elementary notion gave us our first task. How much does a food truck cost and where can we buy one? Jim did some research online and started calling truck manufacturers all over the country, from California to Florida. The difference in quotes was pretty large, but it all came down to how tricked out we wanted our truck to be. New or used? The best equipment, “good enough” equipment, or bare bones? Cheap and practical—these were our watchwords. Jim could hear his father in his head looking at all the options, saying over and over again, “cheap and practical, cheap and practical.” Even then, we learned that a used truck with no equipment from a respected manufacturer would cost between $75,000 and $80,000. You could say this was our first “Oh, fuck” moment.
We were each prepared to put down $25,000 of our own money toward the business, but that was all we could afford. The rest would have to come from a bank loan, which presented us with our second “Oh, fuck” moment: we had to put together a business plan that would convince someone to finance a food truck. You should understand that none of this was apparent to us at the time. We didn’t have a plan. Instead, we had a series of problems for which we had to find solutions. It went something like this:
Problem one: buy a food truck. Solution: get financing. Problem two: find someone who will finance us. Solution: create a business plan.
This is how we operated at the time. Problem, solution; problem, solution. And we almost gave up on this very first problem. After putting in twelve-to-fourteen-hour days at his sales job, Jim spent his evenings at a Starbucks across the street and worked on a business plan that he hoped would entice some investors. It didn’t. (Jim blames the lattes.) Over the period of a month or so, Jim reached out to some thirty investors, and none of them were interested. No investor was willing to take a risk on two guys without food experience or business credit, who, by the way, wanted a three-year lending deal. Eventually, Jim did find a group of investors, but the process was demoralizing. It exposed us to all the things that we hadn’t considered when deciding to start a company. It was like we thought we had to climb a simple hill, only to watch the clouds roll away and reveal Mount Everest.
Financing done, we made a deal with an LA truck builder, who would have our first truck ready in three months. We didn’t know that the truck would be several weeks late, but there was one bit of fortuitous news. We learned that the truck we had bought was an old Cape Cod Potato Chips truck. Sure, it was Massachusetts, but close enough.
THE FOOD
The next part of the food truck business is, of course, food. We’ll get to how we obtained our lobster supply in a moment. Before we could even think about that, however, we needed to know that we could make our signature dish, the lobster roll. We should add that we weren’t that concerned about getting it wrong. Our goal wasn’t anything fancy; in fact, we just wanted to serve the lobster rolls we ate as kids. As we mentioned previously, the lobster roll holds the same place in the lobster bake as does the turkey sandwich after Thanksgiving. It’s what you make out of leftovers—and in some cases, it’s better than the original meal.
Well, why the lobster roll and not the whole lobster? Fair question, but with a good answer. First, buying whole Maine lobster would be prohibitively expensive. The biggest problem with lobsters is that you need to ship them while they’re still alive, then you need to keep them alive until you drop them in the boiling pot of water right before serving. The whole process, from the shipping to the storing to the serving, just doesn’t work with a food truck. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it was beyond our means at the time. Moreover, the numbers just didn’t work for us then. For example, a two-pound lobster only yields about half a pound of meat; a one-and-a-quarter pound lobster yields a quarter pound of meat. But you don’t pay for the meat; you pay for the weight of the live lobster, or gross weight, as it’s called. As much as we would have loved to re-create the Maine lobster bake, it wasn’t feasible.
So, that left us buying fresh lobster meat wholesale. The choice of the lobster roll as the signature dish—and an award-winning dish, it would turn out—was relatively simple: a lobster roll is quick and easy to make, requiring few extra ingredients—a bun, butter, and lemon. We could churn this delicious little sandwich out by the dozens, and not need an experienced chef on the truck either. Easy, simple, yet we still had no real experience making them.
But our mothers did.
In what would turn out to be our preferred R&D method, we decided to go home to the Tselikis and Lomac families and turn Jim’s kitchen into a lab. With pounds of lobster meat, buns, and butter at our disposal, we learned the art of the lobster roll from the best, Julie Tselikis and Jeannie Lomac. In fact, the whole family got in on the R&D. The beauty of the lobster roll is that less is more; the lobster meat is the star and you need to let it do its thing. So, our job was to make sure we used just the right amount of butter and the right bun. Everything else should fall into place.
Now, of course there is a little bit more to it than that. But we can’t give away all the secrets to our award-winning lobster roll, now can we? The point is that it depends on the quality of our lobster—and we knew one thing above everything else. Our lobster, its quality, would be the best in the business.
The Personnel
This was a tough problem to solve. We knew that the two of us couldn’t run a food truck without help. We also knew that we couldn’t be on the truck all the time. After all, we both had day jobs and Jim’s was three thousand miles away. But how does one go about hiring employees for a food truck? We discussed multiple approaches to this issue and decided, essentially, to let someone else do it. Specifically, we put an ad up on Craigslist asking for a food truck manager, listing some of the skills we thought applicable. Once hired, this manager would oversee hiring the right employees for the truck.
And that’s basically what happened—and we learned a ton because of it. Slowly, the employees were added and we took them through our rigorous training process. Just kidding: there wasn’t a training process at all. We trusted that our manager had hired the right people—and we left it at that. We shouldn’t have. We’ve learned since that the most important piece of your business is your workforce. This might seem obvious, but we use the word “important” very literally here. So much depends on the quality of your team. It’s as simple as that. Yet putting together the right team is anything but simple. There is an entire field of psychology devoted to personnel management. Large companies have human resources departments for a reason. It’s all because finding and managing a team is really freaking hard.
And this is an important lesson that every would-be entrepreneur should know before diving in. You are only one person (or maybe two). In the beginning, you will have to do everything, wear every hat. But you won’t do that forever and there will come a point, assuming you’re successful, when you stop doing what you love and start managing people to do it for you. This isn’t an easy transition, and we’ll explore it more in the next chapter. But understand that being a boss of a team—being responsible for their performance—is probably the hardest thing you will do as an entrepreneur. You might discover that you hate it or that you aren’t good at it. That’s not a failure at all. Not everyone should be a manager.
When we started hiring our first employees, we didn’t know what we needed. We do now. But our knowledge wasn’t gained without a lot of pain. Now, we can talk with someone for a few minutes and know immediately if they have what it takes to work for Cousins Maine Lobster. No one can teach you that. You certainly can’t learn that in a book. You will only learn that through experience, through mistakes, through failures.
But you need to start somewhere. We did. And we managed to have eight employees on launch day. We had neglected to teach them anything they needed to know about making lobster rolls—or using the grill, if you remember. Given all that, they did an awesome job.
THE SUPPLY
Next problem: How do we buy a lot of Maine lobster? Seriously, that was our question. We had no idea how to go about it, a fact made painfully clear when Jim decided to drive up to Maine one day to find the answer. All either of us knew about lobster was that you could walk up to any lobster shack on a Maine pier and usually find your fill—whether it was one or several dozen. That’s how Jim’s parents bought lobster for the bakes in the backyard. We never even wondered where restaurants buy their lobster meat. It all comes from the same place, right? So, Jim’s plan to visit a local lobster shack seemed like an obvious solution.
Now, Jim knows that the look on Derek the Shack Owner’s face, when he saw this young punk asking about sourcing hundreds of pounds of lobster, was bewilderment. But at the time, Jim thought Derek was just interested in a pretty sweet business deal—perhaps overwhelmed that such a great deal had landed in his lap. Right. What was probably going through Derek’s mind was, “This kid has no fucking idea what he’s doing.”
Tough but fair. Jim didn’t.
Still, Derek offered to ship about thirty pounds of lobster to LA every day. Not bad for a single truck—except his price was ridiculous. As it should be. Derek didn’t have the margins to ship so much lobster across the country. That wasn’t his business. He would certainly try it, if this crazy kid could pony up the cash. Fortunately, Jim balked at the price and decided to try another way.
And as usual with these things, the solution was staring Jim in the face. Almost literally. The solution was Annie, Jim’s sister. It’s a bit absurd that it took us so long to go ask Annie for help. Why? Oh, because Annie has worked in the lobster industry in one way or another for nearly a decade, that’s why. We know: we’re morons. In any case, at the time Annie was working for the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, which advocates for a sustainable lobster resource and for the fishermen and communities that depend on it. It stands to reason that Annie would know a thing or two about where to buy wholesale lobster.
She did. She encouraged Jim to come with her to the Seafood Expo North America in Boston. The convention, held every March, is the largest seafood exposition in North America, where thousands of suppliers and buyers from around the world gather. That we had to be told that such a thing existed—by Annie no less—just goes to show that, again, we had no idea what we were doing.
In fact, that’s exactly what Annie told Jim. She didn’t admonish us for the business idea, which she thought was pretty good. But she was pretty sure that we were in over our heads. She even said to Jim one day, “I think you have no idea what you’re doing.” That’s verbatim.
Tough but fair. We didn’t.
The first thing Jim learned at the Expo was that the seafood world was far larger than he had ever imagined. To be honest, we didn’t even know there was a lobster industry outside of Maine. Jim spent a half day just talking to other suppliers, learning as much as he could about how the supply chain worked, whether it was lobster, crab, or fish. Eventually, Annie led Jim to the Maine Lobster Pavilion, where a lot of the state’s wholesalers had gathered. It was here that Jim first met our suppliers—our first and only suppliers. It was just a quick introduction at first, but Jim continued the conversation later at a happy hour on the wharf.
A deal wasn’t struck then. Deals are never struck on first meetings in the lobster world. Jim barely talked about our business model at all. Instead, the suppliers asked him where we were from, our parents, what schools we attended—the usual small talk, but there was a catch. Jim was being judged. Family, home, background—these things mean something to Mainers. They say a lot about a person who otherwise is unknown. Those things don’t mean much anymore in the modern world, for better or worse. But in Maine, very few outsiders are accepted into such a native industry as lobstering.
We didn’t know it at the time, but a company’s relationship with its Maine lobster supplier is special, almost sacred. And like any relationship worth having, it takes time to develop. Annie said as much to Jim, who finally began to understand the world he had only just entered. It was a world far larger and more complex than anything either of us had considered. The more we learned, the more we understood our own ignorance. We were from Maine and we thought that was enough—enough for us, for our customers, and for our suppliers.
It wasn’t enough. Lobstermen, from the fishermen to the wholesalers, don’t mess around with hacks. It doesn’t matter if you’re from Cape Elizabeth or Scarborough. It doesn’t matter if you’re a millionaire or a world-renowned chef or the president of the United States. They’ve heard it all before and they’ve been burned by it all before. If you want to do business with these guys, you need to bring more to the table than cash. A lot of people have cash. Few people have integrity, and even fewer have the interests of Maine and its communities at heart.
During our Shark Tank episode, Kevin O’Leary—“Mr. Wonderful” himself—asked us a tough but reasonable question: “What’s to keep me from doing what you’re doing?” In other words, what couldn’t a rich guy like O’Leary buy a bunch of trucks and sell Maine lobster just like us? What makes us so special?
Answer: our suppliers. Kevin O’Leary—or anyone for that matter—couldn’t do what we do because they don’t have the suppliers. More to the point, they wouldn’t get the suppliers, no matter how much money they threw at them. This is the one eternal truth about the Maine lobster industry: suppliers only work with those they can trust. It’s about whether their buyer will stick with them through the lean years as much as the good years. Too many of them have been taken by flashy, money-obsessed suits who promise them the world only to bolt the moment the price of lobster rises a buck or more. The suppliers are then left with a surplus of product which they can’t just off-load. They must eat the cost.
Jim would spend the next several weeks traveling back and forth to Maine to grow the relationship with our supplier. Eventually a deal was struck, and it wasn’t just because of our irresistible charm. As Annie explained to us, the lobster industry was looking for a business like ours. When the housing bubble burst in 2008, it took a lot of industries down with it. Lobster, as a luxury food item, was no exception. In tough economic times, the last things people want to buy are lobsters at forty bucks a pound. People aren’t going to the nice restaurants anymore, and those nice restaurants aren’t buying as much Maine lobster. The industry took a huge hit.
It became apparent to nearly everyone involved in the industry that Maine lobster had an image problem. It had become the Rolex of fancy food. People outside of New England only bought lobster on those special nights out. It was a bit ironic, because in Maine lobster is more like a Casio—dependable, uncomplicated, and versatile—lobster is food for any occasion, not just the big ones. The challenge was to maintain lobster’s status as a delicacy, but one that is available to anyone. There isn’t much that the lobstermen could do about the price—the fancy restaurants do give it a markup, but lobster is just plain expensive—but perhaps they could do something about how it’s served.
Then along come two guys who have a plan to serve lobster out of a truck.
Any successful business has had its fair share of good luck along the way. This was our first big break. We just happened to come along when the industry was eager to diversify lobster’s eating audience. This allowed us to obtain suppliers who maybe otherwise wouldn’t have taken a risk on us. It also meant we were welcomed by the industry, accepted almost. It was like these hard-boiled lobstermen said to us, “Good, now go do what you say you’ll do. Make us proud.”
It was another great moment for us. We had made our first strides in an industry we have come to embrace as our part of our mission.
Now we just had to deliver.
Which is a long way of saying: thank you, Annie.
COMING TOGETHER
One day you don’t have a business, the next day you do. At what point that happens is a bit of a mystery. Was it when we decided to work together on a food truck? Did it happen when Sabin registered our LLC or put together our first web site? Or how about when Jim, struggling to think of what to put on a PowerPoint presentation he was developing, wrote “Cousins Maine Lobster” at the top of the first slide? It was supposed to be a placeholder until we thought of something better. Or maybe you don’t have a business until you make your first buck. At whatever stage it happens, the way you get there is one big convoluted mess.
It’s kind of the same way Maine became a state. After the turbulent colonization period, Maine found itself on the outbreak of the Revolutionary War essentially under the authority of Massachusetts. Unlike how other colonies became states, Maine never had a single governing identity. It was a collection of tough folks living on a beautiful, if at times inhospitable, coast scraping together a living farming a few feet of fertile land and fishing the sea for everything else. The families who lived there thought they owned it. But through the vagaries of two centuries of English rule, the real owners of Maine were wealthy businessmen congregated around Boston. These so-called proprietors laid claim to vast stretches of Maine land, to the point that the government in Boston essentially decided to annex the whole damn thing. No one asked the Mainers.
Not even independence from Britain brought Maine any real freedom. The landowners in Boston only pressed their property claims that much harder. Meanwhile, when America and Britain were at it again in the War of 1812, Maine’s Boston masters didn’t lift a finger to defend their province from British invasion. Not even a British occupation could rouse Boston legislators from going to the aid of their countrymen. As one historian later wrote, “No event in the previous history of the union of Massachusetts and Maine so blatantly revealed the extent to which the interests of Maine could be sacrificed to those of Massachusetts proper.”4
If New England now is fairly united in its identity—particularly around its sports teams—it’s probably only because everyone wants to forget the past. Massachusetts’ treatment of Maine in the generation after the Revolution was pretty despicable. The British would eventually leave (again) and Mainers would rebuild (again). This time, however, Massachusetts discovered their backwoods brethren weren’t as easy to govern as before. A fever of statehood had taken hold among a populace that had had enough of being the pawns of more powerful interests. New politicians in the Massachusetts legislature also helped Maine’s statehood cause. But in the end, it was Mainers themselves who took their futures into their own hands and voted to go their own way, entirely free of any outside influence beyond the new federal government in Washington, D.C.
On March 15, 1820, Maine became the twenty-third state in the new nation. Forty years after the rest of the Union, Maine had achieved its independence. But Mainers would soon discover, as all entrepreneurs do, that creating something new is one thing, while sustaining it, growing it, is something entirely different.
LESSON
A MILLION LITTLE QUESTIONS
It was late on the night of April 27, 2012, and we were in Sabin’s car on our way home from our first location. We stunk like lobster and sweat. The whirlwind that had been our launch day had yet to fully dissipate. It echoed in our heads like after you leave a loud rock concert. We were dazed, but also strangely content. Jim smiled as he remembered how Sabin, moving frantically in the food truck, just kept asking him, “Dude, when are you moving out here? When are you moving out here?” Sabin knew he would never forget how Jim told one of our brand-new employees—who, let’s remember, hadn’t been trained at all—to “fuck the scales, just eyeball it,” in reference to putting the right amount of lobster meat on the bun.
It could have been the motto for our first day. We just went with it. Nothing seemed to have gone right when we arrived, yet everything worked out. We had been a success. Our customers had loved us. When we look back at how we arrived at the end of our first day, knowing that there would certainly be a second day, we asked ourselves what we did right—especially since it felt like we had done so much wrong.
We’ve since discovered that our greatest asset in those early, start-up days was our own ignorance. More precisely, we knew we didn’t know what we were doing. This provided us a with a good dose of humility. We weren’t afraid to start simply. It doesn’t get any simpler than asking, “How do we buy a food truck?” Humility also allowed us to accept mistakes and failures. After all, we didn’t know what we were doing. Of course we fucked up! Of course Jim walked up to a lobster shack asking if he could buy hundreds of pounds of lobster. Of course we drove to our first location without having trained any of our employees on making lobster rolls.
Most of all, humility gave us the freedom to ask questions. We asked them all the time. Simple, stupid, insightful. It didn’t matter. We saw no reason to fake expertise in front of others, and especially to ourselves. When Jim spoke with our suppliers at the seafood convention in Boston, the best thing he did was be completely honest. The experts didn’t care that he knew nothing about how to procure lobster; they wanted to know if this guy was sincere, if he cared about what he wanted to do. Everything else can be learned, except authenticity and honesty.
So, when you’re starting out, don’t make the mistake of thinking you need to know everything. It’s OK to know nothing, just so long as that pushes you to ask questions. Ask anyone you think knows more than you—and in the beginning, that will be everyone. You’ll learn, just as we did.