We recently connected with Bambi Pride-huff and have shared our conversation below.

Bambi, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today One of the most important things we can do as business owners is ensure that our customers feel appreciated. What’s something you’ve done or seen a business owner do to help a customer feel valued?

We pride ourselves on our customer service. We did have a customer when we were in brick n mortar before we transitioned into our concession trailer. This customer was a regular, he came in and ordered every Thursday for himself and his wife. He had a daughter that was almost 2 and had become friends with our daughter. When his daughter started eating food like Mac n cheese and he was adjusting to that new normal….. he would order the food for him and his wife and then forget to order the Mac n cheese and remember right before he was gonna leave when he would get a message from his wife. I caught on to this and started to just include a side of Mac n cheese for the kid and didn’t charger for it. He would fight me on it but I always told him that we appreciated his loyal business and to tell the kid we said hi.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

South of 20, LLC started out as a joke between me and my now husband when we started seeing each other. both going through rather difficult divorces. we had known each other through my now ex husband as they had been room mates in college. I lived in north dallas and my now husband lived in Ennis about 45 min. south of dallas. having to drive through the heart of downtown on 45, most of the time in the middle of Rush hour traffic. I would be on the phone with him and jokingly say “oh my just get me south of 20.” this is was so traffic would get better. when he got sick and lost his CDL loosing his career and our only income with our daughter on the way we had to figure something out. I was running our E-Commerce Amazon FBA business Southern Small town goods. It wasn’t making enough to support us though. My husband dream his whole life was to own a restaurant/ food truck. a family member had a cafe in Historic Down town Sanger ( I know most people dont know where that is… its 15 min north of denton and 45 min. south of Winstar World Casino at the Oklahoma boarder.) with this now being added to the business that we were going to run, my husband said we need to do an LLC for the businesses. we went right back to that joke that we would always say to each other, it just worked, and south of 20,llc was born. my mother in law made the choice to purchase that cafe and we opened Aug.4th,2023 with a 1 month old with us all the time. it was a rough road with a 2 month closure due to unforeseen equipment problems and an insurance claim that had to be filed. we didn’t quit though we redesigned our menu, tested out new options, got new equipment and figure out how social media could become our best friend for being a community that did not want outsiders in to become a profitable cafe. we reopened and made a lot of friends with the regular customers that we had. it was a fun journey. in that we were asked to do catering for corporate events a lot and being that we had a little human with us on a 2.5 hour drive to the cafe 6 days a week, we just couldn’t do the catering to. when our lease was up we looked everything over and made the choice to move into a food trailer under the same name Bear’s cafe, a name sake to our late dogs, my husbands service dog, and my late grandfather Norman Pride who had Big Bear in Indiana when my father was a teen. we now operate out of a 20ft concession trailer for Bear’s cafe serving catering needs for events as well as residents events at apartment complexes around the DFW and Austin

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Starting in a recession a cafe is not something that most people would say is gonna be easy. Let alone starting that cafe in a tiny town that you are considered an outsider in and then topping that off with having grand opening with a 1 month old 4 weeks post c-section delivery wearing the baby in a moly wrap for the whole day. If that is not resilience i am not sure what is. To make it even more difficult and a time of having to show resiliency we were open in that brick n mortar building 5.5 weeks before the city decided to do an everyone is effected rolling black out that as a result took my walk in cooler out and all my refrigeration. I had to call insurance to work through that process to get that payout to be able to reopen the doors and serve guess. But we redesigned that menu and reopened the doors, we dropped prices and ran specials, widened the cast for the advertisement to make more people see our menu and lego and turned things around to a profitable business.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

For us with the cafe sector of our businesses, it has shockingly been social media. We pride ourselves on our customer service but we also do a lot of our outreach to be seen on social media and we ask every customer to message us and give feedback and ideas of things that they think will make us better or they would like to see added. We respond to the real messages we get on social media and we value what the customers are saying. When we go back to that area we make sure to add something that was a customer idea in a creative way to the menu. We post about it and hope we see that individual come by to try their idea out.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Www.bearscafesangertx.com
• Instagram: https://Www.instagram.com/bearscafesangertx
• Facebook: https://Www.facebook.com/bearscafesangertx