We Are Here
There are a number of food truck owners’ associations around the United States, and a number of other similar organizations for all manner of businesses and business types and geographical business areas and so on, and so we of the Nevada Mobile Vendors Association are taking that ball and running with it, and here we will tell the story as it unfolds.
Rather than a timeline presentation about how we came to form this association, this tale will likely wander a bit in focus and in time, between how we did get to this place of agreement (a long story in and of itself), how we are moving from “we are thinking about doing this” to “we are doing this” to “we did it, now the fun really begins,” and how we take on some of the challenges of a large business league advocating for a cadre of businesses and business people with geographical and business diversity connected by the key factor, Mobile.
There are a few particular areas that we think make the NMVA not only different, but noteworthy. A project to watch and take something from, perhaps.
Governance
The obvious way to form a business league is to have some particularly motivated business owners gather together to take on some challenge. It might be regulatory, it might be legislative, it might be cultural, it might be some of these and other factors, but the motivation to work together gets the group over the hurdle of cooperation with competitors for the benefit of the group. This even happens with some food truck owners’ associations.
The challenge in forming the Nevada Mobile Vendors Association began with the goal of advocating for Mobile Vendors, whether they are operating a food truck or a craft tent or a coffee bicycle, and whether they are in the Las Vegas area, Reno area, or somewhere else. While each of these likely has particular concerns, there is enough commonality to form the foundation of an association that can serve a diverse membership such as this. The next challenge, then, is how to drive it?
Our founding group took the time to work through a brief SWOT analysis and the main Weakness and Threat were well-known and are likely issues elsewhere. Cliques.
In order to enable an association of such diversity, avoiding the instant FUD that might come from an association founded by and managed by Food Truck Owners became a high priority. The highest priority, to be honest. There would be no future if Doubt was hanging over the organization from its inception. Our mantra, then, is simple:
Directors and Officers shall not compete with Members.
If the governance of the organization is made up of interested and interesting people who they themselves have no vested interest in a mobile vending business, but who will instead pursue the success of the organization as a personal and professional achievement, we remove the opportunity to doubt the motivations and the uncertainty about fairness and bias, and instead look at how the organization can be the best at what it was formed to do.
Part of this experiment, then, is to steer it toward the success of its membership with those at the proverbial wheel being versed in related fields and areas of expertise, but without an actual stake as a member. The value of the trust placed in this idea by the founding and early membership is not to be understated by any means, it is no small matter as an entrepreneur to trust something like this undertaking to people who are not themselves in the same trenches.
Data
That the loudest non-vendor voice chanting for the founding of this organization, Dan Hugo (แดน), is a software engineer with a fairly nerdy background [and, full disclosure, has written these words you are reading] will figure prominently in some of the practices and methods which the organization will employ to measure such things as engagement, geographical market analytics, social network influence, and a host of other signals that Mobile Vendors are in a unique position to collect, because they are in multiple positions to collect them!
There’s an old adage in the Real Estate game, that the only things that matter are “Location, Location, and Location.” Well, the same is true for Mobile vending, except that two of those Locations are variable. Think about that. Your favorite food truck or soap tent which you might find at a farmers’ market on Thursday might be somewhere else entirely on Friday, and you yourself might be somewhere else still on that Friday. Two of those Locations are changing, quite frequently. Sometimes they overlap at the third, and these are the sorts of things we want to examine… and this entire subject will most definitely come up many times in future articles, so please stay tuned for that at least.
Markets and Marketplace
At the end of the day, each and every day, business is business, and elevating the marketplace is the typical mission of any Business League. No less true here, except that once again, the marketplace for the Mobile Vendor is a moving target. Literally!
Actually, it could be that the marketplace itself is one large geographic region, whatever the localized licensing and permitting and other regulatory and legislative influences are. Nevada is a marketplace, each county is a marketplace, maybe each city is a marketplace. That is something we will measure over time.
A market, though, has a definite local feel to it. A Farmers’ Market is exactly that, and similar events and gatherings, whether one or two vendors at a lunchtime employee team building event [eg Lunch] or 200 or so at a large parking lot turned into a festival of family fun, the market is that convergence of the three Location components into one combination of Portable Variety and Social Activation, and it is these which we will look at most closely. What works, what enables success for our members and satisfaction for their customers, and ultimately, an elevated Marketplace made up of these successful Markets.
The Game
Finally, we will introduce Game Theory into the mix, as part of our governance and market and marketplace analysis. What does this mean? Surely this will figure into many more articles in the future, so this is merely an amuse-bouche, if you will:
If the marketplace is a game context, and if each market is a component of that marketplace and thus that game, then each individual market can be analyzed as a game and as part of the overall game. This is where that Data will come into place over time.
If cliques are an issue to consider, and if geographical market forces are at play, and if social activation is undervalued by protectionist legislation, along with any number of other elements of the environment in which we have formed, then we need a framework in which to consider the impact of these various factors, and whether we are succeeding at improving the status quo of our members. The success of the organization comes from their success, after all.
We can look at this as a competitive game. Each mobile vendor competes with every other, not to mention non-mobile vendors, to achieve business success, or in game theory parlance, “to minimize pains,” and so we can include the ideas of John Nash and others to consider a Nash Equilibrium, for example, in the competitive analysis of markets and marketplace.
We can also look at this as a cooperative game. Each mobile vendor contributes to a collaborative effort to engage the mobile consumer marketplace and localized markets, and ideally there is some value in the way non-mobile vendors might also collaborate in these efforts for their own benefit (from Social Activation, of course). Starting with ideas from Lloyd Shapley on Cooperative Gaming, we can apply cooperative analysis to markets and the marketplace with consideration of this cooperative element.
The simple way of describing this, that “we cooperate on marketing and compete on sales,” has more to consider than those, but the statement remains true. We shall endeavor to determine just how true, and why, as we build our membership and data models and analytical methods over time.
To be continued…
Our filing with the State of Nevada was accepted on 10 May 2019, and this article was written on the evening of 14 May 2019. Clearly we have only just begun, and with luck, effort, and support from communities and that Marketplace at large, there will be much more to write about.
In the mean time, by all means, go and visit your favorite Mobile Vendor, and meet some others you’ve never come across before!
