Empower Your Business with Automated Selling in Mexico

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I got a little cocky Long Island in me like I always thought it was going to be successful right from the start. I knew we were going to put everything into it because we thought we had something that was unique. There were no barbecue restaurants here in the city. We are so close to the United States. Mexicans love meat. There was a great opportunity to open up a new food category in a city of 23 million people. And when you have that window to be able to do something like that, you have to seize it. So that was it. You know, bing, bang, boom, done. A lot of money. Millions, millions in brisket, guys. I'm Dan Defossey. I'm 44 years old. I live here in Mexico City. My Texas-style barbecue restaurants brought in over $9 million in revenue last year. We have the best damn mac and cheese in Mexico City. I promise. In total, we have seven restaurants. Pinche Gringo BBQ, Pinche Gringo sandwich shops and Pinche Bar are part of Grupo Chilangogringo, which is the umbrella parent company of these three different concepts that are here in Mexico City. We actually opened this restaurant to share with Mexicans an authentic part of our culture so that we can bring the two countries together. Mexicans think that our food is fries and hamburgers and fast food and frozen things that are microwaved. So if I was able to open something uniquely American, really beautiful tasting because our guys are working all throughout the night to make something delicious, this is the power of being able to share my beautiful American culture with Mexico. And this is how I can give back to the country that has embraced me so much. I grew up in Copiague, Long Island, New York. I'm a proud Long Islander. I got a job at the Apple Store in Soho, New York. I was teaching the iPhone on stage, and then over the three years I grew in my position, I became head of marketing in education for Latin America. One day I was sitting on the mountain with my friend who also worked for Apple and I said, "Hey, let's do something else and let's change our lives." My partner is from Mexico City and he's brought a lot of local insight to the business. So I decided we're going to do something more iconically Texan. And of course, there's nothing more iconically Texan than an Airstream. We found one that was being sold in Edinburg, Texas. We drove there and we bought this 27-foot trailer. We hooked it up to a truck and we drove that thing 15 hours from Edinburg to Mexico City. I decided that I wanted to offer authentic American lemonade. They don't have lemonade in the powder, so I bought 50 cases of country time lemonade in powder form, and it probably wasn't a good idea to drive 50 cases of white powder in a shiny truck in states in Mexico that have definitely been ravaged by the drug trade. We got stopped 11 times by police who were just trying to check out what the heck was going on. They went inside. They opened the boxes, they found this white powder. I was like, why would I be driving it down to Mexico? Like, we're driving it back to the U.S. - and they opened the lemonade, they tasted it, and they found out it really was lemonade. So it took us a long time to get down, but it was definitely a journey that I can write a screenplay about. About a week before we were about to open, I had literally $100 in my bank account and I needed to pay my rent. So I called my dad and my dad in his strong New York accent, I asked him, you know, "Dad, please, can can I borrow $1,000 so I can pay my rent?" And he says to me, "Son, you got your master's degree at Columbia University and you're down in Mexico opening a barbecue restaurant." And yeah, he didn't give me the money. I think because of the name being Pinche Gringo, it means darn American, and I think it gave us a bit of humility, and we were making fun of ourselves a little bit, which I think brought down a wall and allowed our Mexican customers to be more open to something that was very unique and different. I was the cashier, my business partner was the guy cutting the meat, the butcher, and then the security guard smoking the meat overnight. And the three of us just kept on learning how to make the business grow. And it was tough. No one's here. We were outside of the restaurant passing out brisket samples to people who had no idea what brisket was. Those first couple of weeks, making $30 a day was definitely challenging. I was nervous and the food didn't taste so good at the beginning, to be honest. This is our first night and our official barbecue brisket. We gave a sample of our food to some dogs. Dogs didn't eat it, and that's when we were like, okay, this is a problem. We kept on practicing over and over. And one day a reporter came. She saw the restaurant, she brought her cameras in. We were on public television in an episode of her show. And since then, lines everywhere. One of the greatest things about Pinche Gringo BBQ is that the restaurant was received in open arms. I did not tropicalize anything from Mexico. I do not have tortillas. I do not have agua Jamaica, agua horchata. I don't have chilies toreados. And the most sacrilegious thing is that I do not have limes and Mexicans love limes on things. And why? Because I wanted to offer something that was unique, that was different than anything has ever seen before. When we started Pinche Gringo BBQ, we really wanted to make sure that it was authentically American. So we were hiring a lot of people that spoke English, that maybe had lived and worked in the United States. Then after a couple of months, we started realizing that a lot of those employees that were working here were deported from the United States. So I considered that Pinche Gringo was a safe haven for them to be able to be here and to talk about it in a in a very open way. A typical day in the life of a restaurant owner is always crazy. You're a firefighter. You're putting out fires everywhere. Everything else is going okay today? It's very dynamic due to the complexity of what we have here. I'll send you an email with all the updates. Are we going to lose next week? No. We are a place that sells 15 to 20 metric tons of meat per month, so meat is absolutely the biggest expense in the business. Labor cost is not as high as it is in the U.S. and so our margins are a bit healthier to be able to offer our product at a lower price point so more of the city could be able to afford it. Being an entrepreneur is definitely much more challenging than working in a structured company that you are not fully liable for. Pepsi put our logo on the back of a can to advertise our stand up comedy nights. We were very excited about that. This is our brand of mezcal. It's called Pinche Mezcal. I can't stop thinking about it if I'm on vacation or if I'm resting. I'm always thinking about what is happening in the business, and that definitely takes its toll on some people. My goal is how do we grow but still be able to make businesses that really touch people's hearts? That's a very, very hard thing to do. But my validation in life of knowing that when people come in, they are not just excited about what they see. They love it. They want to come back. They tell their friends and family about it. And that is when you have a beautiful business. It's not about your margins, your profit line. And so my challenge is being able to sustain that over the long term as the number of people in our company expand. It makes me very happy every day to go to work. I love going to work. I love my people. I love the restaurants. I love being here. And that's really, really great because when you love your work so much, it doesn't feel like work anymore. And I'm living that dream.