Lola Leighton

Hello SMCC, this is Lola Leighton who is studying Business Administration here at SMCC. I’m very passionate about business and entrepreneurship. My goal with this column is to pick the brains of people in the Portland area, as well as SMCC alumni, who are now working for themselves. My first interview is with the owner and operator of a food truck that is typically parked in East Bayside, in Portland.

First things first, who are you?

My name is Jonathan Holmes. I own Lola’s BBQ, which is a food truck in Portland, Maine. I’ve owned Lola’s for seven years. It was a taquieria, but it’s now a BBQ truck. I’ve had the truck here in Portland and also in Brunswick, Maine.

Before you owned and operated a food truck, what were you doing?

Before opening up Lola’s in Brunswick in 2010, I had spent most of the prior decade working on sail boats as a cook. My partner, who I had opened the business with (I had been cooking, and she had been working on sailboats) had been doing that for a number of years and we were looking to settle down, so we came to Portland. The truck was a natural progression, because it’s sort of like a little self-contained kitchen, which is what the galley is like on the ship. It was natural for me to want to work in a small, confined and possibly moving space.

Who is ‘Lola’?

So, I had decided that I wanted to open a food truck, but I didn’t have one yet, nor did I have a location for it. I was spending a lot of time on Craigslist looking for food trucks, and even more time thinking about food trucks. I finally found this trailer up in Brunswick, Maine and it was cool, but I hadn’t thought I wanted a trailer. I thought I wanted a truck. It’s called a food truck not a food trailer, you know? But I really liked it. I didn’t have a truck to tow it with, though. Luckily I was able to work out a deal with the woman who sold me the trailer to buy her truck, too. She used to sell Greek food out of the truck in Brunswick, right between the green where she set up and where Bowdoin College is, but then it closed. And I was like, “I could open a Mexican restaurant!” And that was kind of that. I thought I was going to sell sandwiches, but they didn’t need sandwiches, they needed burritos. “Jonathan’s Tacquiria” doesn’t sound that compelling, so I decided to name it after my friend’s dog Lola. I’d lived and sailed with Lola a number of times over the years. She’s about as cool as a dog gets. My friend adopted her off of the streets of Tijuana, Mexico while working on a boat. He kind of smuggled her back to the US. She’s legitimate pedigree as a Mexican street dog. It just made sense that it would be “Lola’s Tacquiria.”

Are you from Portland originally? If not, why did you pick Portland, Maine as a place to live and work?

I’m not originally from Portland, Maine. I’ve been living in Maine full-time for about seven years, but I’ve been in and around and through for about twice that. I’m originally from New York, on Long Island, but I moved up to New England to go to college in Rhode Island in the 90’s. The summer after I graduated from culinary school, I came up to Maine to work in Castine, which is a small place at the end of a small road. I really liked it, but I ended up going back down to New York and then I ended up working on sailboats and I kept ending up on sailboats that were coming to Maine. Then my sister moved up here and I realized that after I was done sailing I was going to move to Maine and move to Portland.

I noticed you went to Johnson and Wales University in Rhode Island. They’re known for their culinary program.

Did you have visions of operating a food truck after graduation?

I graduated from Johnson and Wales with a Bachelor’s degree in culinary arts in 2001. I don’t think the word “food truck” was really in the lexicon yet. There were obviously people selling food out of trucks in places, but it hadn’t become a pop-culture phenomenon. When I went to school, I didn’t have a clear vision of what I was going to do. I just was going to cook. That’s kind of still where I am. I don’t always know what I’m going to do but I always know it’s going to be with food. It’s been a journey through a lot of different things. I like to cook, but I haven’t necessarily taken a traditional path through restaurants and restaurant kitchens.

Did you anticipate becoming an entrepreneur? Or did it happen more organically? If so, do you prefer entrepreneurship to being an employee with a boss?

I don’t think I anticipated being an entrepreneur. It makes sense with who I am and the way I approach things. I like being in control of my own destiny. I like having the ability to control my work environment and what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. Knowing that now, it’s pretty clear that that’s not the skillset that makes you work particularly well in a corporate environment! So it makes sense that the place I was going to thrive was going to be in a more entrepreneurial environment. I think it did happen more organically. In the 8 or 10 years that I was cooking on boats, I had a great deal of autonomy to do my own thing. Because to be honest, the captain doesn’t know how to do your job… so you’re very much there succeeding or failing based on what you put into it.

Coming out of that environment where I was working independently, but still around people, made me realize that I wasn’t like a hermit. I didn’t want to go make violins in a barn by myself for 50 years, but I did very much just want to be doing my own thing. I would absolutely say that I prefer entrepreneurship to being an employee with a boss. I imagine that I will work for myself for the rest of my life, because the longer you work for yourself, the less employable you become.

What is a typical day on the truck like?

Having done this full time for six of the last seven summers, the constant thing about days is that they are long. It’s a lot of work. People don’t realize all the parts of it. Currently I am open 3 or 4 days a week for a total of 18-24 hours. Even when I was open five days a week for lunch people would still ask me, “What else do you do?” Which is incredible, because it’s like, “I dunno, I’ll try to get a couple hours of sleep before I get up and start working again!” I live near where I sell from, but then I have a shop in Westbrook. I’ll come down here at 6 am and start smoking stuff, then stop at the bakery, and then I’ll drive to my shop in Westbrook. I have a commercial kitchen where I do the majority of the food production. That’s also where I prep for my wholesale business, where I wholesale salsa and guacamole to local stores.

Do you love or hate your job?

More days than not, I love my job. I love knowing that I’m doing what I want to do, that I charted my own course. Whether I succeed or fail, it will be because of the things that I did. I hate that that means that I can’t really call in sick to work. I can’t just go on vacation and leave it to somebody else. It’s a little bit of both (love and hate), but at the end of the day, entrepreneurship is about loving what you do and if you don’t love what you do then you probably shouldn’t be pursuing it. It’s a self-directed, self-motivated course.

What three pieces of advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs?

One of the most important things is that you need to be honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses. If there are areas in which you lack experience or knowledge, you need to make a plan to either gain that experience, or identify who or what is going to fill that gap for you. You can’t just pretend that you don’t know how to do something, like your bookkeeping. When you put those receipts in the drawer they’re still going to be there, someone else isn’t going to do your bookkeeping just because you don’t know how. You have to figure that out.

Make sure that whatever business you decide you are going to do, that you really look into it. Look into what it means before you get started.

Fully research any laws, building codes, permits, etc. that apply to your venture. They’re not all clear-cut or even common sense. Some of the technical and legal barriers are immovable.

And try to find places to interact with other entrepreneurs and people in your field. You’ll be surprised at how willing others, who have been where you are now, will be to share their knowledge and experience.