Today we’d like to introduce you to Erik Kugler CPA.
Hi Erik, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I started out at 7 years old selling tomatoes on the corner outside my house. I didn’t sell so much, so I loaded up my wagon and went around the block knocking on doors and sold out! My path to becoming “The Food Truck CPA” wasn’t a straight line, and I think that’s why it works. I earned my CPA in 1995, but never felt the credential alone gave me what I needed to actually help independent business operators. So I spent over a decade in the bicycle retail world, where, in conjunction with the National Bicycle Dealers Association, I developed the KPIs that became the industry standard. Then my wife and I opened our own shop, with her keeping the books. Momentum Magazine named it the #1 bicycle shop in the USA; we grew it to four locations and had a successful exit. That experience taught us a hard truth: the independent shops that thrive don’t just have great product and service. They know their numbers cold.
When we started our CPA firm, I went looking for that same type of scrappy independent operator and found them in food and beverage. We’ve laid the scaleable financial foundation to build local, and even national legends in this space.
But where we find the most satisfaction is with the people who didn’t start with the best family or university connections. Instead, they were wildly innovative, hugely ambitious, and blessed with a great sense of taste, and they chose a food truck or a stand in a food hall as the vehicle to fuel those ambitions. We like to say we need to be at least as great as our clients are in their kitchens. They’re doing some incredible stuff, so it’s a constant challenge, and it’s so satisfying to see these people succeed.
It’s not enough to just do accounting and present financial statements every so often – it doesn’t resonate and it’s not actionable, and more frequently than not, it just triggers rationalization. We’ve developed an app called CFO Wiz that takes the key information from the point of sale system and financial statements, and presents it in a visual form – it’s flipped a switch and our clients are becoming financially savvy, reviewing results with their staff and engaging their teams. We’re still in beta, but plan to roll it out to the public by the end of the year.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Are you kidding me?! I’d be suspicious of anyone who built something valuable from scratch and called the road smooth.
The hardest stretches didn’t come from inside our business, although we’ve had to learn to make the transition from being a sole practitioner to becoming a firm with a team of 12, but that’s a different story and at times it was painful, but also it was controllable. No one teaches you how to build a firm.
The toughest times came from watching our clients get hit by things none of us could control. When the pandemic landed, it didn’t slow our clients down, it stopped them cold. Dining rooms shuttered overnight. Trucks that lived on office-park lunch crowds and event bookings had nowhere to go. These are operators running on margins where a slow week is a problem, and suddenly they were staring at months with almost no revenue at all and calling me asking what they should do. Talk about pressure.
We made a decision early on that we’ve never regretted: for several months, we stopped charging our clients. It wasn’t a marketing move, and it wasn’t something we advertised. It just wasn’t right to send an invoice to someone fighting to keep their staff employed and their doors open. They had it harder than we did, and we were in a position to absorb it, so we did.
We thought that was the storm. Then came the wave of federal layoffs across DC and all the knock-on effects that rippled through the local economy. For food and beverage operators in this region, that hit landed almost as hard as the pandemic. Foot traffic dried up. Catering orders evaporated. The customers our clients had built their businesses around were suddenly tightening their belts or leaving the area entirely and their employees were afraid to come to work. Twice in just a few years, the ground shifted under an entire industry, and our clients were standing right on the fault line.
Here’s what those years did to us, though: they forced us to get dramatically smarter. We’d been known in the accounting world as innovators from our first year in business when the AICPA featured us in a presentation about the future of the industry. We were the small firm doing things differently. But when your clients are fighting for survival, “different” doesn’t cut it. We rebuilt how we deliver financial intelligence, how fast we get numbers into operators’ hands, and how we proactively flag trouble before it becomes a crisis. The pressure didn’t break us. It sharpened us.
Because here’s the thing about us, and about the operators we serve: we’re always up for a fight, and it made us and our clients stronger.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
The Food Truck CPA helps food truck operators, food hall vendors, cafe and quick service restaurant owners to build a solid financial foundation to grow upon. We know what it takes to grow and can save the operators years of banging their heads against a wall. We’re the financial force behind some of the most well known local restauranteur and F&B legends, and they all started small.
In contrast with the accounting industry, we go small and look for growth opportunities – a food truck producing fantastic food, with great margins or a low labor cost is the basis for a knock-out success. We’ve been there over and over. Once the financial house is in order, we can work on margins and from there we can help people expand as far as they want to go. Once you know how to operate 5 locations, you can operate 15, and when you get to 15 you have what it takes to get to 50. Some people open more food trucks, some go into food halls, others open their first brick and mortar, or second and third, and once everything is dialed in, some even go the franchising route. We’ve done it all.
The thing we’re proudest about is that we get to help real people, with families and sometimes with kids, who’ve invested their life’s savings into a food truck. After a few meetings and once they get on our CFO Wiz app, you can see the gears turning in their head as they come up with brilliant strategies. They’re not limited by their formal education and work experience in a big company. Sometimes no one thought much of them because they didn’t get a traditional ‘good’ job, and we get to fast-track them into becoming not only innovative business leaders, but also the pride of their family. I get to see their birthday parties with their toddlers with the whole extended family, a petting zoo, and all of the cool stuff they do for their kids that they never got when they were young. It gives me a great sense of satisfaction to see the generational transformation. People who never imagined themselves buying commercial real estate or multiple businesses, and their families are like – wow! It makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something important to guide them along the way and see them, in turn, helping people close to them.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
Oh man, sure. The first is “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Whatever you do, do it well. “Sapiens” for an understanding of who and what we are. “Buy Then Build” for business acquisition and growth. Right now I’m reading “The Habsburgs” and learning how they patched together their empire. “Breakneck,” for insight on China and its growth. And also “The Warrior Within,” a book about Bruce Lee’s teachings.
For podcasts I keep tuning in to Lex Friedman’s show because I get my dose of history, tech, and also get to hear the perspective of extraordinarily successful people, and it’s surprising because the people I respect the most, who’ve done the most to advance our civilization are also the most humble.
Pricing:
- Our services are priced for the long term, and that means we need to be accessible in the short term.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://thefoodtruckcpa.com
- Instagram: @thefoodtruckcpa
