We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Joaquin Hernandez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Joaquin, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?
I believe that today to be successful you must necessarily have built a wall with blocks of failure, that wall is called success, sometimes people do not take risks because they are afraid of failing; and I understand, failure is hard but when you get up you are full of wisdom and you don’t repeat the same mistakes. Of course I have failed, I am an immigrant and I was the owner of two businesses, a butcher shop and another one that sold hamburgers. I made many mistakes and failed. I came to this country with nothing, just wanting to learn and grow as a person; develop my skills as a cook and I had the idea to create I PANINI. The important thing is to learn and never give up, I know it sounds easy to say but applying it is very difficult but that is the formula for success without a doubt for me
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?
Well, as I already said, I am a migrant. I arrived in this country with nothing. I arrived working for a company that had 8 food trucks with various food concepts in Austin, Texas. I worked 11 hours a day for 2 months with that company. The truth is, I learned about fast food procedures, but I understood that there was no opportunity to grow. I was hired by another company that had Italian food trucks, the owner was from southern Italy. I learned a lot with this man, he was a rude person, but the truth is that I learned to do things with passion, dedication and quality. He cooked very well, but he had a mistake; A food truck is not a restaurant and he treated it as such, there was a lot of waiting time for customers, he needed a lot of time to train the staff, he needed a lot of staff too. The worst part is that he was reluctant to change the procedures and the dishes. After 1 year he sold his company to a person who understood that it was necessary to change the procedures in order to move forward, that person wanted me to run the company. After a few months I realized that I could do things by myself and I saw the opportunity to develop a concept with what I had already learned, which was to make sandwiches with bread made live and from scratch with ovens called GOZNEY, which accelerates the procedure to make breads in 1 minute. I brought all this up with the owner of the company I worked for and a friend for help and they were completely supportive. We started at the Farmers Markets, then we applied with the City of Austin and won to be with I PANINI at Zilker Café, from there doors were opened from Festivals such as Dripping Spring pumpkin festival, Austin Trail of lights, events with the circuit of the Americas, Nascar, motoGP, etc. Today we continue working hard so that people continue to know I PANINI, we already have a second location at the Pease Park in Austin Texas.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
There is a lot of competition today, the most important thing is to have an innovative product but that people know or recognize the flavor when they try it. Sometimes being very innovative is not the best option. It has to be a quality product. Doing good marketing on social networks is undoubtedly part of the strategy; invest in good photos.
Where do you think you get most of your clients from?
Be at the Zilker Cafe, no doubt has been a great opportunity. Definitely this spot and marketing with the social media has been the source.
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