Benny Young grew up cooking. He cooked at the church where his dad was the pastor and he cooked at home for his family of five brothers. Cooking was never an issue. But business? Business was kind of an issue.
During Covid, Benny and Denise Young decided to learn how to run a business, and they knew they had to be intentional every step of the way. They started working with Sprout BC, an incubator kitchen and regional food hub in Battle Creek. There they got help with licensing, insurance, equipment, and branding and Mitts 2 Pits started hosting pop-up meals.
Their Sprout cohort lead them to their intentional next step, Northern Initiatives’ Business Plan Cohort, a wildly popular free class held four times a year.
“Denise and Benny came in to the cohort with a goal of learning everything they could so they could open a restaurant,” said Justin Andert, Business Coach. “They were sponges. The cohorts cover financial information, but also legal issues, marketing, and ways to get funding and the Youngs took it all in, then acted on it.”
The cohort ends with a pitch presentation that the Youngs knocked out of the park. They’ve since used the pitch, the business plan, and the skills they learned during the cohort to secure funding, including a loan from Northern Initiatives and startup grants tied to goals laid out during the cohort. Funds for the grants and loan came from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
Then they opened a restaurant. “We hadn’t really thought about bricks and mortar,” Denise said, “but you made us realize we could. You made us feel prepared. We can do this.”
“If we hadn’t gotten help from [Northern Initiatives], we’d be in trouble,” Benny said. “If we hadn’t opened when we did, we’d be in trouble.”
The space they found is not only within walking distance of their home and their kids’ schools, but the rent is truly affordable, which is why they had to pounce when they did. “The landlord had been through the Northern Initiatives cohort too, and gave us first dibs,” Denise smiled.
The catering business they started during the pandemic is still the mainstay of the business and the storefront is leading to even more catering, Denise said. That meant using more of the skills learned in the cohort, this time to calculate their bottom dollar, what it costs to be open for one day. “I had not been able to do that before the Northern Initiatives cohort. I was doing catering without charging that.”
Another big lesson learned from the cohort was pricing, Denise said. “We use a food pricing calculator suggested by Justin, but our prices are still low because all our food is scratch made.”
You read that right. ALL the food is made from scratch. Sometimes Benny’s days last from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. as he simmers stocks and bakes batches of macaroni and cheese. “Nothing goes to waste, and everything’s delicious,” he said.
