We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Anthony Sanders a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Anthony, thanks for joining us today. Some of the most interesting parts of our journey emerge from areas where we believe something that most people in our industry do not – do you have something like that?

You can have a successful career and an equally successful side hustle!

I went to college and studied engineering and business, I graduated with my bachelor’s in engineering and my MBA. I’ve worked full time as an engineer for 11 years. I always cooked BBQ and quickly people knew where the spot was on the weekends, my house! I decided to start selling from home catering very small parties and even doing protein meal preps for bodybuilders and fitness gurus. After gaining a fairly decent following I launched my business – Prissy’s Barbecue as a passionate side hustle. We began as a mobile food trailer in January 2022. The business quickly grew, and our first restaurant opened March 2024, and yes I’m still employed full time!

What I want fans to know is your little side hustle can turn out better than you can imagine! It takes an incredible amount of work put in upfront to grow and establish your business. But once succeeded, you can establish processes to train any employee to deliver the same (if not better) products than yourself.

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?

I grew up my whole life either in the kitchen with my mom or grandmother or around the grill with my dad and his buddies. I loved EVERYTHING about cooking! Smells, sounds, ingredients, experimenting, but overall, the experience you could provide someone with. Food is EVERYBODY’s love language!

We are named after my mom Priscilla Sanders aka “Prissy.” Who passed away in 2019 from colon cancer. Our logo “Prissy’s” is actually her handwriting! My mom was only 50 years old when she died, and I was 31. With cancer being a hereditary illness, If I met the same fate and was only alive 19 more years, I needed to take a chance on myself! We opened our first mobile food trailer in 2022 as a side business to my full-time job, and just opened our first restaurant March 2024. I am still employed! My mom always taught me there was a difference in chasing dreams and chasing purpose. And when I blended my unique talent with customer service, I found my purpose.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

As much as I would love my side hustle to be a full-time career, I am still employed full time. My side hustle started from my backyard on a $100 smoker from Walmart. I started cooking for friends and family then catering small parties and cooking proteins for meal preps. A few milestones we reached to grow, the first was a social media following. We grew almost 1,000 followers on our “just for fun” business page before we opened our first mobile food trailer. We then began advertising, “boosting posts” heavily to increase our following and get our foot in the door for catering. The second milestone was growth in catering, once our business became split between street sales and catering, I hired employees to help me divide and conquer. The last milestone was processes and training, I began mentoring my employees on my cooking style for BBQ and sides, after that I was ready to open my first restaurant.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Relentless was the word I told myself EVERYDAY. My full-time job required 40 sometimes more hours of work. So, in order to be successful every moment away from work was spent growing our business. Also, I am married with two kids! I worked Monday – Thursday. After work on Thursday, it was the same routine for 2 years – pickup supplies, prep, cook meat (all night) and sides, sell it on Friday. Rinse, wash, repeat for Saturday. Some weekends I stayed up for 48 hours to get everything done. We took most Sundays off to spend time with my family. You can search long and hard but never come up with enough motivation to put in the work that’s required. It requires relentless ambition and a simple philosophy – you have a job, get it done.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://prissysbarbecue.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/prissysbarbecue/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/texasmeatengineers

Image Credits

Spothopper