Most food truck owners continually look to grow their food truck business. But once success hits, how can you scale your food truck without shedding the shared values and culture that helped make you successful in the first place? Today I’ll discuss a few ways that you can keep your food truck’s small business culture and values as your mobile food empire continues to grow.

How To Keep A Small Business Culture

Keep a small business owner’s perspective

When you initially start up your food truck, it is easy to empathize with the pains felt by your customers. Empathy is important in more than just customer service. You will also need your employees to all be able to step inside the small business owner’s shoes and then focus on how to make your customer’s lives easier.

Build a foundation of shared beliefs

Every food truck business has its own culture, whether you define one or not. It doesn’t mean that all of your employees must think exactly the same way as you do. But by creating a set of shared beliefs, everyone has a framework for how to set priorities, make decisions, treat customers, and treat each other.

To keep your food truck’s core beliefs fresh in everyone’s mind, consider writing them down somewhere highly visible. Whether you do this or not, your actions will always speak louder than any words in the corporate manual.

Create open communication

When your food truck is small everyone wears multiple hats and experiences the business from multiple angles. As a food truck business grows, communication can become a maze of communication lines and employees get pigeonholed into certain roles.

A unique approach to keep a small company culture is to make sure everyone (ownership included) rotates through various positions within the truck, whether it’s the service window or on the line. A customer might get the owner one day or a line-cook the next day. This unorthodox approach forces everyone within the business to stay close to the customers.

Develop your food truck company culture outside of normal business hours

If you expect your food truck employees to love your customers, your food truck must show love to your employees. To do this, include activities outside of the truck and your commercial kitchen. For example, one day every year, take a scheduled work day off and take the entire company staff and their families and take a group trip (a sporting event or amusement park) or throw them a party.

RELATED: Don’t Stand In The Way Of Food Truck Innovation

The Bottom Line

Culture is a set of attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and customs. These cultural cues can be ingrained in the members of your food truck team, and then accepted as the norm. If employees don’t buy into the business culture, everything else is wasted. Keeping a small business culture in your food truck as it grows will help you keep company strong and your employees happy.

If there are any additional ideas you have used in your food truck business to keep a small business culture? Feel free to share them in the comment section or through social media. Facebook | Twitter