We recently connected with Ben Hernandez and have shared our conversation below.

Ben, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?

To be successful takes not only patience but desire, focus, a lot of confidence and especially strong desire to serve others!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

We started in August of 2019, one day my Wife Martha Pena told me that she can make really good Empanadas Argentina’s Style since she is a Professional Chef, so she asked me that if she make them will I go sell them, and I said of course, I’ve been in sales all my life and I can say it is my passion, so as she was getting everything ready to make the empanadas, I started working on a small menu to print, at that time I was working as Uber driver, the money wasn’t that bad, but it was a lot of risk, plus I had to drive all day and late at night to make decent money, the following day I went out to businesses and offices offering the empanadas making our first day sale of 18 dollars, then I went and drive the rest of the day, next day we sold almost 40 dollars, third day we sold over 80 dollars, by the Fourt day we sold over 100 dollars and people started calling to make bigger orders, so that’s when we saw the potential and that’s when we desired to take it as a real business and put all our energy in to it. We took that first weekend to find a name for our new business and take photos and videos for our publicity, so after trying and looking for the right name we chose “La Che Empanadas” and as we were choosing the name, we were also designing the logo we are using up to today and stipulating that our product was not going to be la any other product, our product had to be the best quality product, made with the best ingredients and the best flavor, and so we both combined our passion to make our business grow as big and as best possible.
Almost three months later we open our first location in San Pedro Ave getting really good response from our customers, but as everybody knows the pandemic came in and we had to closed the restaurant, as we notice that people keep calling us for our empanadas, we went back to work the way we started from home, transforming our living room in to a commercial kitchen which helped us grow even faster than we expected, and so I went back to visit and look for more customers around San Antonio especially car Dealers and Mechanic shops.
Almost two years later in November of 2021 we reopen again at Wonderland of the Americas Mall, now that we were reopening as new business and our goal was from the biggening to sell and distribute our empanadas all over the USA well we changed the name to “La Che Empanada Factory” and star working our way to have our own Empanada Factory.
Soon after we opened in the mall, we started having some problems within the building and because it was very old and most people didn’t know about this mall at least the new generation, our customers had trouble finding us, but soon we meet a friend how owned a coffee shop called Dos Hermanos, when he tried our empanadas, he loved them and desired to add them to his coffee shop, but soon people stared ordering more and more from the coffee shop until we decided to partner with hem and so changing the name to “La Che y Dos Hermanos” which still open till today, and now we just got our new location for our new Empanada Factory called only “La Che”

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

We build our business on a personal level, creating direct contact with customers, giving samples our product and collecting numbers, building a friendship with them, and because of that most of our customers have been ordering from us over and over for more than three years, but is all about keeping the same consistency and the same quality into the product and service, Publicity and social media has dementedly helped a lot to gain more customers all over San Antonio and the surrounding areas but the most important part of this is that once you get new customers you turn them into your friends and those new friends will bring more friends to you, creating a very big family.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

I meet my wife in January of 2018 I was in the process of separation from my ex-wife, at that time I had a business of Photo and Video for events and publicity, so from time to time I Just to take pictures in restaurants and different locations and one of this restaurant, she was working as kitchen helper with her brother Edgar Pena which I meet years ago when I had my first restaurant and somehow I was actually looking for him because I wanted to restart my business for catering and events and I knew how good he is as a Chef, so it turns out that the first day I went to take pictures at this place Edgar Pena was there and that’s when he introduce me to my wife now Martha Pena, a few days later we sat together Edgar, Martha and me to talk about business, we didn’t do anything about the business but we started a very good relationship soon after Martha and I started dating and then live together happily ever after!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.lacheempanadafactory.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lacheempanadas/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LaCheffMartha
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-hernandez-6a5375218/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lacheempanadas
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCI4ZlFvG8ZzHSFIH_XbddVQ
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/la-che-empanadas-san-antonio-4
• Other: www.lacheempanadas.com