We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Carla/Tiffany Kessell/Walker a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Carla/Tiffany thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Alright, so we’d love to hear about how you got your first client or customer. What’s the story?

We had purchased a hot dog stand and we were in the process of converting it to our crepe cart. Our cart was not complete, but Carla could not wait to book an event. She signed us up for a small town festival about an hour away in Macon, MO called the Macon Cork and Fork. We had no idea what we were doing or what to expect. We have two crepe makers that run on propane. We now know that we could cook crepes for 16 hours straight off one propane tank, but we took 5 propane tanks for that first event. Once we arrived and got set up, we discovered that only one of our crepe makers was working. We were both a nervous wreck. Finally, the gates are open and festival is starting… and here comes our first customer. I greeted her and started to tell her about our menu and she interrupted me and asked if she could buy a Diet Coke. A Diet Coke. Carla had spent over 20 hours preparing every ingredient for our crepes from scratch and our first customer wanted a Diet Coke. It was hilarious. We told her that we were not selling Diet Coke, we all laughed and she promised she would return later and try a crepe.

Carla/Tiffany, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We both have full time jobs and wanted to start a small business for supplemental income on the side. I work as a Neonatal Nurse Practitioner and Carla works as a New Business Developer for Sysco Foods. We both love to travel and both love food. We wanted to start a small food truck and recreate all the exciting food we had during our travels. We both love crepes. Carla wanted to design our business and brand around a menu that she could change with the availability of seasonal produce. So we designed our logo with the face of our French Bull dog Bennie and we came up with the name eat.crepe.love because food is love for us. Now, six years later, our business has grown into something we never dreamed it could be. People recognize us everywhere we go, they call us the “crepe girls.” We receive so many messages and requests for events that we could never have enough time to do even half of the events, It is really an incredible feeling to know that we created something that so many people love.

If you have multiple revenue streams in your business, would you mind opening up about what those streams are and how they fit together?

We really wanted to do one of the biggest local festivals in our state called the Hartsburg Pumpkin Festival. It can draw a crowd of up to 60,000 people over one weekend in October. Since we make crepes to order, we knew Carla could never make crepes fast enough to keep up with the crowd, so we bought a donut maker. Our donut maker makes 2400 hot, fresh mini donuts per hour. Carla made several signature toppings including homemade caramel with bacon, birthday cake with sprinkles and a port wine berry sauce. We sold hundreds of orders of donuts that weekend and now we book several events per year that are exclusively for donuts.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

The original goal of starting eat.crepe.love was to supplement our full time job income. Our goal was to not take out any loans and to pay cash for all the start up, so the budget was limited. We found the used hot dog cart at a salvage yard and the asking price was $2000. I offered $1800 cash and we were on our way. The crepe makers are made in France, so we order ed those and hired a friend that was a plumber to run the gas and install the crepe makers. We painted and refurbished the cart and we were up and running. Our total investment in the cart was under $5000.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://eatcrepelove.wordpress.com
• Instagram: @eat.crepe.love
• Facebook: @eatcrepelovemo
• Other: e-mail: [email protected]

Image Credits
No photo credits. The picture with the three of us includes our very first customer-the one that wanted the Diet Coke.