What a wild ride this business can be. Year One was brutal in its slowness and unpredictability. I understand that. It takes a while to establish street cred. People drifted in slowly. Word of mouth spread just as slowly. New in the business as we were, it took a while to convince the community we were here to stay.
Year two is proving to be just as brutal, but for different reasons. I guess I thought we would trend up over time. No such luck. We exploded, and it caught us off guard. Suddenly, what we do is no longer a three-person show. We’ve taught ourselves to work with an efficiency I wouldn’t have thought possible, and yet we’re just barely staying afloat somedays.
Luckily, it didn’t catch us unprepared, just off guard. We have a plan, we just didn’t realize it was time to pull the trigger until… well until we pulled the trigger. Now we’re calling in backup, buying new equipment, giving up precious days off to rebuild the house we built not so very long ago. One day. One smash-and-grab day, and we will transform The Roux into a lean, mean, Po-Boy makin’ mosheen.
Of course, if you’ve been with us any length of time at all, you know that this is how we roll. We started small. Exactly how small is hard to describe, but photos exist showing the evidence. Remember no dining room? No A/C? No dishes? And with each new milestone reached, another one is always in sight.
The excitement of having seemingly half the community in our doors for lunch, and the other half for dinner, cannot be overstated. We long for the old days, sometimes, when we could stand around and chat with new friends, old friends, and regulars, because the line wasn’t out the door, and the dining room wasn’t overflowing. In fact, that’s generally what we talked about.
And we eagerly await the day when we transform our operation in such a way that we can once again stand around and chat with new friends, old friends, and regulars. Only this time we’ll be talking about how cool it is that the line is out the door, and the dining room is overflowing.
