Is Your Food Truck Business Roadmap Incomplete?

As a food truck owner, you probably have a business plan that sets in place what you want your food truck businesses to accomplish, what threats you see, and how much money it will take to get you onto the streets of your local market. But have you created a business roadmap of how to get there, or just the story of what “there” looks like?

Over the years, I have had the privilege of helping many prospective and existing food truck owners since starting mobile-cuisine.com. In almost every case, the mobile vendors have a business plan, but very few have a business roadmap of how to achieve their goals or to monitor their progress along the way.

You need to create a one page, actionable business roadmap that your entire mobile food organization can rally around. This process will help you identify priorities, ensure alignment within your team, and commit to decisions long enough to judge results that move you towards your one, three, and five-year objectives.

What to include on your food truck business roadmap:

Create and enlist objectives

This list should drive pretty much every decision within your mobile food organization. It is important to set both long and short-range goals. Long-range priorities do not change often and include: core-values, risky goals and priorities in the three- to five-year range. Short-range priorities include critical quarterly ”bumps in the road” that must be accomplished to move your organization toward the defined one year and three- to five-year goals.

Track your progress

Setting goals is one thing, but you also need to vocalize them. Vendors need to identify key performance metrics that will help you know if you’re on the right track. Be sure to communicate your progress on your short and long range goals.

Meet regularly

Schedule regular meetings to build rhythm and ensure accountability of your food truck team. Hold a short meeting every other day to gauge your team’s progress and to remedy any problem spots. At these meetings, be sure to discuss good news, customer and employee feedback as well as other key performance metrics. Then, each quarter, review the past quarter versus the plan. The goal of this meeting is to update your one-page business road map with any new three-month problems or changes to your food truck strategy.

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