It’s here. A new season is upon us and with it comes a clean slate, a chance to make your hot dog vending business bigger, better, funner (yes, I said funner) and more profitable. I want to introduce you to a concept that has the power to take your business to the next level with very little effort or investment.

The concept is called “critical non-essentials”. There are certain things in your business that are essential. Things like your hot dog cart, propane or electricity, the food you sell. These are just a few but you get the idea. Remove any of these essentials and your business grinds to a halt.

Then we have non-essentials. These are things that make our business better in some way, but if push came to shove we could live without them. Things like music, professional signage, uniforms.

In any business, the number of non-essentials far outweighs the essentials. As a business ages and matures it has a tendency to accumulate a large quantity of non-essentials. This is not necessarily a bad thing, unless a particular non-essential outlives it’s usefulness or hinders growth.

This is a good time to evaluate the non-essentials in your own business. Make a list with two columns. List your essentials on the left and your non-essentials on the right. Then go through the right hand column and evaluate whether each non-essential is contributing to or hindering your business growth. Keep the good ones and cut the ones that have outlived their usefulness. Weed out the under-performers.

You can benefit from this exercise even if you haven’t started your hot dog biz yet. I know that I had a pretty clear picture of my business long before I served my first dog. I had been dreaming about it for years and I knew what I wanted it to look like. Go ahead and do the exercise using the picture in your head. I know you have one, 😉

Now let’s talk about the game changers. Every once in a while we add something to the business that is nothing short of transformative. Some non-essential that makes a huge difference in the bottom line. I call these things critical non-essentials (CNEs for short), because while they are not strictly essential to the fundamental functioning of the business, they are absolutely critical to sudden, massive growth spikes and monstrous, overnight leaps in profitability.

One of the greatest CNEs that I have ever witnessed was at Double D Dogs, a local hot dog biz here in St. Louis with multiple carts at many Home Depot stores around the city. At each one of his locations he has a small table off to the side of the hot dog cart and it has one purpose. It holds what I would estimate to be at least 70 different bottles of hot sauces. No kidding. There’s a you-know-what-load of heat on that table.

The visual effect is stunning. It’s like finding the holy grail of hot sauces and it’s totally overwhelming. Folks just stop and stare at them all because they’ve never seen anything like it.

That table is his CNE and it freakin’ works! But not for the reason you would think. It’s doesn’t work because people want that much choice in their condiments. In fact hardly anyone actually uses any of the hot sauces. It works for two other, much subtler reasons.

First, it stops people dead in their tracks. If they hadn’t had a compelling reason to stop, inertia would have carried them on past the cart like a stick in a river current. But once they were stopped, they had a chance to get curious. They started to look the cart over. They had time to look at the menu and to smell the food. And a large percentage of those people (who never would have stopped had it not been for the hot sauce shrine) end up buying a hot dog. Or two. And a coke, oh and some chips too…

The second reason is the word of mouth it generates. People love to be the first to share something new and different with their family, friends, and co-workers. It’s human nature and we all do it. I have heard about “the hot dog cart in Home Depot with like a thousand hot sauces” from many, many people over the years. It’s the best form of advertising there is. And it’s free.

Critical non-essentials are usually something done on a whim with little forethought, and therefore can be tricky to purposely engineer. This is why it is so important to constantly experiment with your business. We all want to believe that our success is the result of our superior entrepreneurial mind, meticulous planning, and razor sharp foresight, but the reality is that most of the time we just stumbled onto something super cool that worked a lot better than we thought it would.

-Steve

P.S. Got a cool CNE that you use at your cart, or maybe just an idea for one? Share it in the comments! And if you enjoyed this article please share it on your Facebook by clicking the blue “f Share” button at the left. Thanks!