We recently connected with Maxwell Buskey & Gretta Stack and have shared our conversation below.

Maxwell Buskey & Gretta Stack, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about your team building process? How did you recruit and train your team and knowing what you know now would you have done anything differently?

At the beginning, The Ugly Onion was a two-person team in Orono, Maine. Max & Sam (friends from Vermont) bought a wood-fired oven while studying at The University of Maine. With the wood-fired oven in the back of their pick-up truck, they first started by driving around and making pizzas at local parties and events. Max and Sam both worked on a veggie farm in Vermont in the summers. Their boss, Wendy, had wood-fired pizza experience from working at American Flatbread in Burlington Vermont. She shared lots of tips with them in the beginning about how to cook using wood fire.

Max & Sam had a make-shift set up at the first event they catered. They unloaded the wood-fired oven and placed it on top of two saw horses in the client’s back yard. What they didn’t realize, was the bottom of the oven got VERY hot. As the fire in the oven began to heat up, the wooden saw horses started to catch fire! Max and Sam quickly put on gloves and moved the 250 lb oven off of the saw horses and placed a large rock between the saw horses and the oven. Where they left it and cooked pizzas out of it for the rest of the event.

Eventually, they outgrew the pick up truck. Their friend John helped them design a beautiful wooden table set up (using Vermont Maple wood) that would be versatile and take their business to the next level. Their goal was to have guests interact with their food in a new way. Max & Sam recruited some of their friends to help them cater events (mainly Sam’s brothers and Max’s girlfriend, Gretta).

After a few successful summers catering in New England, Max & Gretta decided to move to Bozeman, Montana and take the business with them. Sam kept an oven in Vermont and continues catering on a more part-time basis under a new business name. Once in Bozeman, MT – Max and Gretta had to get creative during the Covid-19 pandemic. They set up an outdoor hunting tent and sold pizzas through curbside pick up (in the back parking lot of Treeline Coffee Roasters coffee shop). They also started a wholesale side of the business – selling baked goods to coffee shops, while they couldn’t cater large events due to the pandemic. Initially, they looked to hire employees with “many years of kitchen experience”. However, they quickly learned that some of their best employees were the ones with no kitchen experience. They had more willingness to learn, sometimes a better team attitude, and they were happy doing things The Ugly Onion way. Both Max and Gretta strive to empower their employees and create a respectful, welcoming working environment (very unique in the world of food service jobs). During the catering season, The Ugly Onion has 10-12 employees. There is no hierarchy and all employees work together to serve delicious, local food at all kinds of events all over Southwest Montana (weddings, rehearsal dinners, graduations, retirement parties, birthdays, company events, etc.).

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Max & Gretta are a husband & wife team who own and operate The Ugly Onion. Max always knew he wanted to own a small business. Growing up, he watched his dad create his own successful HVAC company. Before starting The Ugly Onion, Max started a painting company, as part of an internship program through his college. This is when he learned many of the ins and outs of business management. When Max & Gretta graduated college and moved to Montana, Gretta became fully involved with the business. Gretta says = “I kind of fell into becoming a business owner during Covid, when I didn’t feel comfortable working a “regular job”. I never pictured that for myself growing up. However, I have always thought I was a hard worker, independent, had good leadership skills and creative gifts”.

Max worked on a small vegetable farm in Tunbridge Vermont while he was in college. He noticed how many seconds veggies (also known as ugly veggies) were wasted because they were too big, too small, dented, bruised, or blemished. While he was working on the farm, he was simultaneously catering and learning to cook with wood-fire. Max did his best to use these “ugly veggies” on the wood-fired pizzas, and the name “The Ugly Onion” was born. To this day, Max & Gretta use ugly/seconds vegetables from local farms in the Bozeman area to reduce their food waste and support local farmers.

Max & Gretta (owners) describe the mission as follows “The Ugly Onion offers an unconventional approach to catering with our mobile kitchen and wood-fired oven. Our outdoor setup allows for a unique connection to local food and provides a one-of-a-kind experience for guests. With our friendly staff and our open-concept design, guests are able to interact with their food in a new way. Our mobile wood-fired oven transforms any outdoor space into a full-service kitchen. The versatility of our set-up makes it the perfect kitchen for any event. ” We are most proud of the unique experience we provide for guests and we pride ourselves on how we interact with guests. It’s rare that guests can talk with the caterers/chefs directly and ask questions about the food as they are eating it. They can also see as pizzas are made from scratch, outdoors, in the middle of the event. It’s usually a set up that guests have never seen before.

We deeply care about the Bozeman community and the connections we have formed with other local businesses. We are intentional and thoughtful with every business decision. We are both highly sensitive, approachable, dedicated, and loyal human beings which translates into our business practices. We want to help our clients create the event of their dreams. We take time to meet with them individually and make sure we are able to meet all of their needs. We treat our employees with the same kindness and respect. We want our employees to feel comfortable and feel at home working for us. We also want them to have fun and feel proud of the work they are doing!

Our business brand seems to fit in very well in Bozeman, a very active/oudoorsy community. With the capital we have built over the last many years of catering, as well as a partnership we have created with two local investors, we are building our dream work-live space in Bozeman so we can sell food to the public 7 days a week, while also catering. Bozeman lacks healthy, quick, consistent, to-go food. We are hoping to fill this niche and also offer wood-fired pizzas in the evening, like we used to do at our curbside pick up location during covid.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Managing a team is arguable the most difficult part of our job. We learned most of our management skills through experience (the good and the bad). We want our employees to have the same level of dedication and commitment that we do to The Ugly Onion. The reality is that most of the time, your employees might not care as much as you do about the growth of your business. It is important to set expectations for your employees from day 1 (job posting/description and interview). Be clear about what skills/characteristic you are looking for when hiring. Ask your potential candidates how they work with others and how they stay positive during long work hours or stressful situations on the job. Create mutual respect between you and your employees. Talk openly with them about their progress, what they are doing well and what they could work on (have check ins often). Hold employees to a high standard and also be kind when they make mistakes. Max learned a lot of his management skills from his dad (who started his own business) and from his internship experience (running a painting business) in college.

The most important advice we could share for maintaining high morale is to just have a positive attitude and to lead by example. If you are someone’s boss and you are constantly complaining or acting grumpy/negative, that energy is contagious and will spread throughout your team, creating a bad work environment and essentially leading to more turnover, etc. Working in the food industry is extremely difficult, especially catering (with long 12-15 hour work days). It’s important to provide times to take breaks, have a laugh, or chat about your personal life. We see our employees as whole people, who have lives outside of work. Gretta came from a very community oriented background (having grown up in a co-housing community) which taught her how to work with a team, and how to problem solve by looking at issues from multiple perspectives. It also helps that Gretta & Max are young business owners. They were employees at other companies recently and they know how they wanted to be treated at those jobs.

Have you ever had to pivot?

We moved to Bozeman, Montana during the Covid-19 pandemic. We had booked catering events before covid (weddings, graduations, etc.) and those were all cancelled. All of a sudden, we had moved ourselves and our business across the country and we had essentially no revenue stream. We were left with the decision to shut down the business or find another revenue source. First we decided to offer curbside pick up wood-fired pizzas, instead of catering. We reached out to local businesses to see if we could find a spot to set up outdoors and serve pizzas to the public. Treeline Coffee was the first business to say “yeah, you can set up in our back parking lot and sell food!”. We operated out of their kitchen and set up our wood-fired oven outside. Our curbside pick up business became successful. We had amazing regular customers and were able to sell to the public safety during the pandemic. We also grew our relationship with the coffee shop. They wanted us to create a food menu for the coffee shop and sell wholesale baked goods to them. With the help of our friend Nora, who had recently graduated from culinary school, we started the wholesale side of our business. We baked quiches, burritos, donuts, muffins, and scones and sold them to the coffee shop, while simultaneously selling pizzas out of a hunting tent 12 months out of the year (yes, we stood outside in Montana in the winter and sold pizzas). This was a challenging time for us and our business. We were operating out of a very small shared kitchen and our outdoor restaurant was VERY cold and very unpleasant during many months of the year. Sometimes we would have to hide out inside the coffee shop while there was a huge thunderstorm and it was not safe to us to be cooking in a large metal oven outside. We would have to call our customers on occasion and say “your pizza pick up will be delayed for 30 minutes due to weather”. We also didn’t have the best ventilation in the hunting tent. Most of our customers were extremely understanding and kind during this time. Eventually, we were able to start catering again. By that time, we had created 3 businesses (catering, wholesale, and retail). The creation of the wholesale and retail sides of our businesses wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been forced to pivot during the pandemic. We still sell baked goods to local coffee shops and we are now working on building a brick and mortar restaurant space for public sale!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://theuglyonion.com/
• Instagram: @theuglyonion_mt
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theuglyonionmt/

Image Credits
Opal & Ox Photography and Film Lucy Rath Jenna Rice Creative Nathaniel Bailey