One Truck.
Then Five.
I've never been much good at sitting still. I was washing cars at 11, paying a mate twenty bucks to help and keeping the difference. By 14 I was running pamphlet routes for a pizza shop and a bakery at the same time. Nobody taught me any of that. It was just always there.
The sensible version came later. I ended up at the Commonwealth Bank chasing debt, doing well at it, and slowly working out I was never going to fit. So I left. After that it was HSBC during the week and a saj manoush stall at farmers markets and soccer games on the weekends. Two grand over two days, cooking in the cold, and the first real sign I was onto something.
There's a part of this I don't usually lead with. Before the trucks I was a weightlifter, and a serious one. I'd been selected to represent Australia at the Junior Commonwealth Games. Then it ended in the worst way I could picture. I dived into the shallow end of a pool, hit my head and broke my neck. Three slipped discs, and just like that the Games were gone, and so was the sport I'd built my life around.
That's the moment most people would play it safe. I went the other way. I quit the job, and my dad lent me $100,000 to back me. He didn't have it sitting around, he just believed me, and I've carried that every single day since. That money bought the first truck, American BBQ Kitchen, back in 2016.
It didn't work straight away. I'd smoke meat for hours and still run out of brisket by midday, which meant service was over whether the queue agreed or not. So I pulled the whole thing apart and rebuilt it. Better suppliers, a smarter way of prepping, a kitchen laid out around getting food out fast without letting the quality slip. That rebuild is the reason we can handle the volume we do now.
Since 2016 we've grown to five trucks and fed more than 1,500 events, everything from Formula 1 and Vivid Sydney down to a primary school carnival in the rain. It's still family run and I'm still in it most days. Food should make you feel something. That part was always the point. The rest of it we built the hard way.
