New Game Breakdown: A Food Business Seen from the Inside

Every Saturday in South Florida, a BBQ trailer pulls up in a parking lot and draws a crowd. The food is excellent. The reputation is strong. The business sells out almost every time.

But behind the scenes, it’s fragile.

The man who runs it is a full-time teacher. He’s been doing this one day a week with his wife and a few helping hands. He’s planning to retire soon and take the business full time.

There’s real demand—but no infrastructure. No margin for error. No room to grow.

This is the first in a series of short case studies where I analyze real-world small businesses through four lenses:

Customer experience. Digital experience. Internal operations. Financial readiness.

Let’s break this one down. I’m excited to share my notes, so get your pen and paper (or AI note-taking tool if you’re fancy) and let’s get into it!

Customer experience: What It Feels Like to Buy

This business spreads by word of mouth, Instagram, and event appearances (heavily relying on large catering gigs). People know the food is good. They seek it out.

But when they try to buy?

• The website doesn’t support online advance orders.

• Customers call the owner’s personal phone number to place catering orders or ask questions (especially during his full-time job working hours).

• If no one answers, they leave a message and hope he gets back to it.

• There’s no formal waitlist, queue, or follow-up system.

• Communication is scattered across social media and phone calling

• Customers show up at the food truck location on Saturday and hope it isn’t sold out

• The credit card reader is currently broken (for at least the last month)

The experience is inconsistent and not repeatable. It relies on persistence and luck.

Pattern: The value is in the food, but the customer experience suffers from a lot of friction: timing, memory, inconsistency, and effort.

Takeaway: This is demand without capture. Every customer has to “find their way” in. There’s no funnel. No reactivation loop. No way to reliably turn interest into income.

Digital experience: What It’s Like Online

Online, this business is nearly invisible operationally.

• The website is built on GoDaddy but has no real functionality.

• There’s no dynamic menu, no online payment, and no pre-order system.

• Orders happen through Cash App, Zelle, or DMs.

• Credit card processing hasn’t worked in weeks.

• There’s no CRM, text list, or email collection.

Pattern: Every digital piece is siloed. The website, payments, and scheduling systems don’t work together—and most don’t exist.

Reference: Baymard Institute found that 27% of users abandon a checkout if it’s too complex. In this case, the checkout doesn’t exist.

Takeaway: This isn’t a marketing issue. It’s a visibility and infrastructure problem. Before anyone “gets more clients,” the system needs a front door. It should be easy for someone to give a business money and receive value.

Internal Operations: What It Takes to Run It

Here’s what happens behind the scenes:

• Inventory is sourced from three different stores: Restaurant Depot, Home Depot, and Walmart.

• Prep and seasoning take two full days.

• Calls come in constantly—with no one available to answer them consistently.

• Payments are split across personal Cash App, Zelle, and a currently broken card reader.

• Staffing is informal: friends and retired community members who help out when asked.

• No real documentation. No repeatable training. No backup plan if the owner isn’t present. The friends that help have enough experience over the years to handle catering jobs without the owner, but a new hire would be tremendously underprepared.

At one point, a staff member tried to take over prep—but changed the recipe. The owner pulled back. He’s the only person who can run the operation end-to-end, and that’s the core problem.

Pattern: The founder is the system. Which means there is no system. In software engineering, we have a (rather brutal) way to assess this idea, called the “hit by a bus” test. If a key player gets hit by bus tomorrow, will the business/team/department survive? Will it continue on as normal when someone fills their place? Or will it crumble immediately?

Reference: SYSTEMology recommends documenting 7–10 core systems that deliver your product. In this case, none are written down or transferable.

Takeaway: You can’t scale what lives in someone’s head. Without documentation, every new hire or expansion effort will collapse under inconsistency.

Financial Readiness: What the Bank Sees

If this business wanted a loan to buy new equipment or expand to three days a week, could it get one?

I spoke with someone who spent years managing assets at JPMorgan. He put it plainly:

Here’s how this business performs on that score:

• Consistent, reliable management:
  Not yet. The business depends entirely on one person.

• Good debt behavior:
  No credit history to speak of. That’s a visibility issue, not a moral one.

• Positive cash flow:
  Likely—but it’s spread across unlinked systems with no clean reporting.

• Clear plan for the funds:
  The owner has goals, but no written growth plan or operating model that would support a funding request.

• Collateral (assets):
  The business owns a food truck and a trailer

Takeaway: This business is profitable—but not fundable.
It’s not undercapitalized because it lacks income. It’s undercapitalized because it lacks legibility. Money is not necessarily going to solve any of the critical problems we’ve identified in this breakdown.

Final Summary: A Business at Capacity

This BBQ operation has everything people think you need:

• A product people love

• A loyal customer base

• A strong brand

• Passion and skill

But it’s missing what most businesses are missing:

• A system for turning interest into revenue

• A structure that doesn’t rely on one person

• A digital experience that supports what customers want

• A financial narrative that makes it fundable

Want to Go Deeper?

Here are a few of the systems and insights that informed this analysis:

• Baymard: Checkout UX Friction Patterns

• SYSTEMology: SOP Extraction Framework

• CloudKitchens: How Pre-Orders Improve Profitability

This is what small business friction looks like—up close.
These are the gaps that create burnout, stagnation, or failure.
These are also the places where real leverage begins.

If you're studying small businesses, building one, acquiring one, or trying to help them win—this is the stuff to watch.

— Elgin
Founder, New Game