We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Saphir Grici a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Saphir, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Has Covid resulted in any major changes to your business model?

We simplified our business by pivoting toward a 100% focus on catering and stopping all the other ”food truck” activities, like festivals, ”parking, and waiting” for customers, This gave us the opportunity to do less but do it better, going up on upscale services and menu and having better control on our return on time and investment through prepaid contracts

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

I was born and raised in France, to Algerian immigrant parents. For a while, I felt lost between two cultures. In France, I felt (and the people made me feel) Algerian. And in Algeria, I felt (and the people made me feel) French.
Creating your own identity when young and insecure in this context is not an easy task. For years I felt lost in translation until one day I realized something. I don’t need to choose. I am both. I can respect and honor my cultural roots while embracing the culture I was born in. I realized that we should embrace our differences instead of fearing them and that when we open to them, those differences make us so much stronger and allow us to live so many more amazing life experiences. Holy Crepe is the extension of this idea. It was conceived in France, born in America with the mission to create bridges between cultures.
That is the reason why some of our crepes are called ”Ze American” (Ze, because we don’t take ourselves too seriously), ”Ze Italian”, ”Ze Almost French”, ”Ze CrepeDog”.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Covid hit us as hard as anyone else and we had to make some choices. When observing the restaurant and mobile restaurant industry I noticed there were all doing their best to survive (deliveries, curbside, prices, promotions, etc). I didn’t want to survive, I wanted to thrive and thought it was all-in. We thrive or we put an end to Holy Crepe.
So I asked myself the question, what can I do, and by doing it, Holy Crepe will be even in a better position than if we weren’t going through this global crisis?
The answer was going 100% catering, stopping all festivals, ”park and wait”, anything that wasn’t a sure source of revenue and going up on offers/menus/quality/prices to reach out to an upscale clientele with maybe fewer guests and contracts but more time to prepare something that feels excellence and high quality even if served from a trailer.
Since I started Holy Crepe, that was the best decision I took. Less is more.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

In the beginning, near-death moments were a constant and I cannot count the number of times our business account was below $300. Sleepless nights, resilience, fear, and at the same time, a total refusal to give up, that ‘it’s going to end this way”, made us move forward one inch at a time, always trying to focus on the solution, not the problem.
The day where I almost give up was on my way back from an event, a 1993 Chevrolet p30, our food truck was old and every trip was challenging, especially going to Atlanta. Right when I was leaving the I85, 30 minutes from Athens, the truck stopped and I had to call a mechanic etc. When you are born here in the US, it is maybe an easy task but when you are a French guy lost in Georgia it’s different. The bill was $4700. This day was the closest to giving up and if it wasn’t for the support of family and friends I would have to. The lesson for me was, don’t be cheap, take care of your belongings and try to get as much quality as you can reasonably afford. And be grateful for your friends and family, we cannot accomplish anything alone.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.holycrepecatering.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/holycrepecatering/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/holycrepeathens

Image Credits
All pics were mine Saphir Grici