Torchy's Tacos

“I ended up taking a loan on my house and using that to help Kind of get the trailer painted and get our logo on there and buy some of the equipment.”

“We took some of that money to kind of help just hadn't had a paycheck yet. Right. And so I took a little bit of that cash and just kind of like kept my house from getting foreclosed on and got Caught up a little bit on some bills.”

“They had actually asked like, do one of you guys want to be the CEO? And we all kind of said no.”

“Oh, no, we were at 35 at that point.”

“Our first Taco of the Month was called the Trailer Park, which is our number one selling taco today all these years later.”

“The restaurants started to get Away from our core, you know what I mean? Like, we're a cool local taco shop, right? Like, that doesn't look like 5000 square feet. That looks more like 3000 square feet. Like, cool, funky, graffiti on the walls not this big…”

“We got a big write-up in Austin Chronicle, and that really helped change things, so we were definitely on our way to, like, we were having lines, 20, 30 people long, every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.”

“We ended up for a week literally cooking out of Bill's driveway. We Took the trailer, and we hooked up the power to the trailer at his house, which was totally illegal at the time, but, you know, we were trying to stay in business and, you know, keep some cash…”

“Now if we go open a new restaurant, I always make sure there's at least one internal hire that's a manager in that restaurant, versus just everyone being new from outside.”

“Unbeknownst to me, he puts, you know, I think it was around 15,000 dollars worth of pumpkins on our business Amex card.”

“And I think out of the 300 articles we got only two people agreed with the article, so you can't please everybody, but that's a pretty impressive vote change there, so.”

“Hey, look, this is a great way to start, but it's not a good way to sustain. It's very weather-dependent, It's a lot of heavy lifting every day of like shipping food back and forth. And so I was really like, hey, we got to get a brick and mortar.”

“I mean, immediately, I think we'd like to be a national brand in most, if not all, 50 states. International, that's probably above my pay grade at this point but definitely, definitely nationally we definitely want to expand more up and down the east and west …”

“I never wanted a place that, like, had my name on it because I always felt like the place needed to be bigger than me”

“We definitely went to the lawyers, and the thing went on for about 18 months, but we were able to get them to close everything down, so thank goodness for that.”