In covering the food truck industry for nearly five years, I have seen many examples of food truck vendors being burned out emotionally. Today’s article will touch on five signs of emotional burnout and five ways to avoid it.

How To Identify Food Truck Burnout

  • You’ve always been known for your entree presentation. You see a dish leaving the truck and you hope nobody takes a photo of it even if they do, you don’t care.
  • Three different people send back their orders. Instead of apologizing to your customers, you just retreat further into the truck’s kitchen. Talking is too much trouble.
  • A couple leaves your line after waiting 30 minutes just to give you their order. Either you don’t even notice or you curse them under your breath.
  • You’ve receive an awful review but instead of fixing all the things the critic complained about, you keep everything the same and write it off as the issue is with the critic, not your food.
  • You receive a number of complaints about the service your staff is providing. Instead of trying to make corrections to the staff actions, you defend the staff even if the errors were glaring. In your mind you can always get more customers but good staff is hard to find.

Sound familiar (we hope not)? If this sounds like you…here’s what you can do to fix the problem.

How To Avoid Food Truck Burnout

  • Get an outside opinion. Bring in someone you trust to look at how your truck is working (no, not a truck mechanic). This person should have the know-how to look at your food truck operations and systems and understand if they are working as planned. When they give you their feedback…listen and figure out how to fix the problems.
  • Hire Help. Hire a new food truck manager or, if you’ve been acting as manager, stop. You’re not doing a good job. Consider bringing someone in to handle the day to day operations.
  • Take some time for yourself. Once you’ve found someone to manage your truck, take some time off to think and refresh.
  • Better your business. Reread that awful review and start making changes so that never happens again.
  • Take control. When you return to the truck after your rest, vow to actually take charge and work as hard as you did when you first hit the road.

RELATED: How To Choose What Tasks You Delegate

The Bottom Line

If you don’t take charge, start acting like a boss and make the necessary changes, you risk the chance hitting emotional burnout and losing your food truck business.

Have gotten emotional burnout while running your food truck business? If so, how did you know you had hit that point and how did you fix the situation? We’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts on this topic in the comment section, our food truck forum and social media.  Twitter | Facebook