We recently connected with Chad Smith and have shared our conversation below.
Chad, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.
Year is 2020 Covid was going strong we changed our mindset at restaurant and started adapting to new rules and regulations due to no service inside restaurant. We moved all tables outside cause there were no regulations on outside dining other than no more than 6 unrelated people at a table together. We we’re staying busy keeping all of our specials that we always have had but changed them to Togo only, The city of Newnan changed alcohol laws so you could purchase drinks Togo so we started selling margaritas by the gallon to take home with your tacos, nachos, burritos or quesadillas. We noticed people weren’t getting out as often as they normally do, so we decided to purchase a food truck snd go to them. We bought a used truck with all the equipment on it we needed got it wrapped and started going to subdivisions and setting up and serving food. We only served tacos, nachos and salads on the truck. We learned real quick that simplicity was the key, people wanted good fresh food snd fast. We were also allowed to piggy back on our alcohol license and do margaritas only if we were within the city limits. It was an instant success. We were not only open for Togo’s at restaurant but on truck every night. Our Mad Mexican brand was everywhere. Since then we started doing weddings, private parties, corporate events and whatever people wanted. Our business has doubled without a second location and no headaches!! We are truly blessed with good employees at restaurant which made it easy for me and my wife to run the food truck, heck we have all of our friends that come help out too. Crazy from thinking we might have to close the restaurant to adapting to the changes and adding a food truck to get to people that don’t won’t to get out, it was all the my wife’s Angies idea!! Now we are looking at more food trucks instead of another location.
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’m a graduate of Georgia Southern University with a degree in Restaurant, Hotel and Institutional Administration with a minor in Business. My family has had a restaurant in Newnan, The Redneck Gourmet for over 30 years. After graduating I opened a few restaurants and sold them then got into the one we have now, The Mad Mexican. While trying to figure out what to open my wife said every time a restaurant closes what moves into it, a Mexican restaurant and what southern food is big in Georgia, BBQ. So we decided on a BBQ/Mexican fusion. We smoke all of our meats and make all of our sauces homemade, shred all of our cheese and we pair or Mexican meals with southern sides, Brunswick stew, collard greens, pinto beans and smoked Mac and cheese. We’ve added liquor over the past 2 years and have added margaritas frozen and on the rock with the watermelon margarita our top seller, we have Jack snd coke slushees and a wide variety of specialty tequila and high end bourbon. Not a bad place to get a Brisket Bubba burrito with a side of collards and a 18 year whistlepig bourbon on the rocks!!! We have been open for over 8 years and it’s our awesome little town just outside of Atlanta and our customers that make it so easy to love working every day.
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
On March 26th was a day we will never forget. We were at home about 7 miles from downtown Newnan where our restaurant is, I was in bed and my wife told me to get up a tornado was sighted just west of downtown. We watched the radar and it was headed right to downtown Newnan. We had our best friends that live across from Newnan high school 1/2 mile from downtown, my wife called them and they said their house was gone it was 12:05am, we threw a generator and some chainsaws in back if truck and headed that way, we got a phone call from the local church and the pastor said our Endor at the restaurant got busted out and they were going to put a sheet of plywood up to keep things from going inside. We headed to our friends house first and it was difficult getting there but I had a four wheel drive, once there our saws and generator was of no use it was a category 4-5 tornado and devastation was bad. We started putting everything we could they wanted to save in our trucks, once daylight came up around 6ish we saw that it was worse than we thought. Roads were impassable with trees everywhere. I called the police chief, fire chief and city manager and told them if they could help me get my food truck to the high school I wanted to feed anyone I could. The power was out everywhere so we took all of our food we could and started to the high school to set up, the 1/2 mile took 1-1/2 hours but thanks to the city fire department we made it and started serving we served 900 meals that day and had some of our customers helping out, I sent the employees that could get out to restaurant with the use of our generators they prepped food and we went out the next day and fed over 1100 meals. We were feeding city workers, police, fire department, utility workers and people that lost their homes. Our city came together and it is amazing living in a small town it’s been a year and the devastation is still very noticeable but it’s getting better every day. Our friends Jadon and Ashley got their house rebuilt and got to spend thanksgiving in their new home this year.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
My wife Angie does all of our social media, Facebook and Instagram. We post on it everyday our specials. We ask our customers to share our post and photos. During the tornado we had over 1.5 million people that saw and shared our locations giving food away to first responders. Post everyday and keep posting and it grows.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: the_mad_mexican
- Facebook: The Mad Mexican
- Youtube: The Mad Mexican
- Other: We feed the city fire department every Wednesday for free and they advertise for us, Anyone driving thru town and sees a fireman they say go to the Mad Mexican!!
Image Credits
Chris Martin, tornado photos of Mad Mexican