We were lucky to catch up with Eric White recently and have shared our conversation below.

Eric, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So, let’s start with a hypothetical – what would you change about the educational system?

I whole heartedly believe that we need to tech children about finance and real life situations. Of course they need to learn the basics of math, science, history, etc, however we teach nothing of real life situations that they will 100% encounter. Things like doing taxes, dealing with a mortgage, basic business sense, and investing. I truly think we are not taught these things because they don’t want people to know how to make it themselves and be financially independent. They want us all to be good little workers that just squeeze by with the bare essentials.

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

I’ve been a chef for about 14 years now, classically trained in culinary school. I decided to become a chef after a month spent in jail actually. The food was so bad thatvI thought “anybody can make food better than this” so I decided to do just that. After 8 years in the industry and working my way up to Executive Chef at 26, I decided I needed a break from the restaurant scene. I wound up moving to Denver and began working in the cannabis industry out there. After about a year I began to miss restaurants, but I didn’t want to work for someone else ever again. So I decided to start my own venture. I struggled with a concept for a while, and eventually landed on doing Nashville Hot Chicken in Denver, since there wasn’t any Hot Chicken out there. I ended up getting laid off and had to move back to Nashville, but continued to build my business. I finally got the food truck finished and began my entrepreneurial journey. This was a journey filled with more pot holes then I ever imagined. I was a victim of predatory lending, I was royally screwed over by my food truck builder, ended up in massive debt immediately from having to rebuild the truck, among other hindrances. But I’m still here dammit, and serving some of the best food in the city “according to our customers”

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

There are more of these moments than I can count, haha. After 3 months in business, I was already about 25 thousand dollars in credit card debt. From the predatory lending, to having to pretty much completely rebuild most of the food truck after receiving it. And with any brand new small business, debt equals death alot of times. I had to rely on several loans, both from banks, and family members, just to survive.

And then, we signed off on our new brick and mortar location in January of 2020. Perfect timing to expand a restaurant, right. Covid brought a set of challenges not seen in our industry ever before. Entire cities completely shut down! It was insane. There are only 2 reasons why we are still running today. One, our new brick and mortar was a totally outside walk up/take out location, so we were able to stay open during the lockdowns and still serve. And two, our food truck was able to go directly into neighborhoods and serve people while they were all stuck at home. So the food truck paid to keep the restaurant running at the beginning.

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

We are actually just about to list our Hot Chicken Spice mix on Amazon. We’re hoping it brings in another solid stream of revenue for the business.

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.reds615kitchen.com.
• Instagram: @reds615kitchen
• Facebook: @reds615kitchen