We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nick & Anthony Payne a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Nick & Anthony thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

Growing up, we always loved cooking with our parents. Our mom would make her buffalo chicken dip from time to time, and we became obsessed with it. That is where our love for all things buffalo chicken and cooking began. After we both finished playing D1 college football, we started working at a digital marketing company together in 2018. We would make our mom’s buffalo chicken dip recipe for our friends and co-workers, and they were all blown away. It became more and more popular and got to the point where we had co-workers asking us to make it frequently.

Once we had people asking us to bring the dip into parties and work events, a light bulb came on, and we decided to start Buff Chick. So, in March 2020, we launched Buff Chick as a pop-up catering food service, and we have been on our journey ever since! We were able to take advantage of Covid shutdowns for restaurants because at the time, we were one of very few food services still operating. Since launching, we have been featured in Black SD Magazine, Yelp San Diego, San Diego Reader Magazine, and attended the 2022 San Diego Reader Magazine Tacotopia as a food vendor!

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?

It all started with our parents home cooking. Growing up, our mom would cook various meals during the week and our dad would throw down on the grill during the weekends. This is where our love for cooking good comfort food began.

Currently we are both full-time Senior media buyers/Managers at a marketing company based in downtown San Diego called Smashtech. We actually love what we do, and working in marketing has really helped us build Buff Chick to what it is today. Working full-time and running a business on the side is very challenging, but we have accepted that challenge and love the grind.

We are most proud of believing in ourselves to start the business. We started Buff Chick with zero business experience, so we have had some bumps along the road, but we continue to learn and grow along the way! We would say some of the struggles we faced initially were all the logistics to operate as a legal business in CA. But once we did our researched and checked all the boxes to operate our business, things became a lot easier.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Starting our business with zero business experience was definitely a challenge because we had to learn everything on the fly. All while learning to be profitable. The legal logistics and business operations were our biggest struggle. We had to quickly learn timing, inventory, and our schedule. There were times where it all seemed too overwhelming, but we took every mistake as a learning opportunity and never made the same mistake twice.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

We built our audience on social media organically! With us both having years of experience in the marketing/media industry, we were able to grow our social media audience fairly quickly.

For those just starting to build their social media presence, we recommend being authentic to who you and your brand really are, and making sure to post creative content at least twice a week.

Contact Info:

• Website: buffchicksd.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/buffchicksd
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/buffchicksd?mibextid=LQQJ4d