In this episode of ‘Why Wednesday’ we’re going back, way back, back to how we got started during our undergraduate years.
It was our junior year.
As our friends started locking down internships and plotting the course for their careers after college, we were asking ourselves, “what the hell do we want to do with our lives?”
Every time we’d start thinking about our career prospects or through the day-to-day at some of the corporate positions our friends were applying for, we’d start daydreaming about traveling, seeing the world, doing something that excited us each and every day.
Instead of buckling down and starting the interview process, we did what most collegiate males do best: we procrastinated.
But this procrastination was different. Rather than idling and biding our time, we decided to try to make some money to help pay for post-graduation trips by solving a pain point for our friends and ourselves — underwhelming food options on campus.
We started messing around in the kitchen, having fun, testing recipes on friends. Jack had the idea to spiral-cut a hotdog and the first swizzler prototypes got rave reviews, with our tasters demanding seconds and thirds. We were on to something.
We decided to use an entrepreneurship class challenge to “launch a business on campus for three days” as our foot in the door to serve swizzlers to the campus at-large and gauge the response — to the dismay of campus dining services, we might add. That’s when it all changed.
The response was amazing.
Weeks after our three day test we had friends and people we barely knew seeking us out at bars and asking where and when they could get another swizzler. We all scrapped any applications we had begun and found ways to stay near campus for the summer to continue working on what we realized could be a real business.
It was at that point we decided to double major in business and pleasure or, more specifically, change our major to grilling (and minor to chilling).
Our senior year took a complete 180-degree-turn. Lectures on business, marketing, operations went from snooze fests we barely survived to insightful workshops for our business. We’d leave classes with notes in the margins, texting each other new ideas as fast as our fingers could type.
We applied for grants from the entrepreneurship department to fund websites, domain names, marketing materials, and plenty of good ideas gone wrong that we’d rather not think about…
We catered tailgates and events, slang swizzlers at local bars, and did just about anything we could to get everyone on campus involved with what we were doing.
As we approached our final semester and all of our friends were getting offer letters and signing bonuses, we made the decision to take our major in grilling to the working world and bought a food truck. The rest is history.
As we have come to find out, juniors in college aren’t the only people asking themselves, “what the hell do we want to do with our lives?”. Some of our friends and so many other people we’ve met in our journey, young and old, are still figuring out what they want to do and what excites them.
So if you’re in that boat or know someone who is, remember: it’s never too late to teach an old dog new tricks. If the hotdog can change, so can you.
Yours truly,
Team Swizz
Wake Forest University ’14 | Major: Grilling Minor: Chilling
