(upbeat music)
- When you walk into a fast food joint,
you're just a number.
When you walk into Sweets & Meats, you're a person.
And we want to know you on a personal level.
(upbeat music)
- Kristen and Anton are the owners of Sweets & Meats BBQ
out of Mount Washington in Cincinnati,
and they serve amazing homemade barbecue to that community.
- I'm Anton Gaffney, co-owner of Sweets & Meats BBQ.
- My name's Kristen Bailey.
I'm the co-owner of Sweets & Meats BBQ.
- We started having cook outs
at our house every other weekend.
We were paying for all of the food, so it gets expensive.
So they were like, we'll pay $10 ahead.
And then you can buy the food with the money.
When they started to pay for it,
that's what made me think,
like if they're willing to come here to pay for food,
then it must be actually pretty good.
- Small businesses have a connection with their community.
And I really love seeing the connection
that Kristen and Anton have with theirs.
What makes these people so special
is they have not only a passion for their business,
but they have a passion for their people.
They care so much, which speaks to that connection
that an entrepreneur has with their employees.
- During the shutdown,
I actually wanted to close our business
and have people stay home
'cause I was fearful they were gonna get sick.
I had lost so many relatives in a short span of time
that I was just completely full of grief.
And everybody basically protested
and said, "No, we wanna work."
And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact
that they believed in us.
And so we took the food of the people
and we literally hit two neighborhoods for lunch
and two neighborhoods for dinner every single day.
And it meant a lot to me
because I had liquidated my retirement
going into that season.
I lost my sister in January,
and I had lost my parents two years prior.
And so for me, I was on the brink of losing my business.
I was on the brink of losing something
that we created together, and we couldn't let that happen.
And to have people basically stand up against me
and say, we got you
because we're a part of this fabric in this community.
I think us being in the trenches together,
we grew as a family and it's empowered us to know
that if we can get through that,
we can pretty much get through anything.
(upbeat music)
- As an entrepreneur, it's important to connect
to the community around you.
And you can see with Kristen and Anton
that they definitely have done that.
- So we launched Sweets & Meats November 2nd, 2014.
We had the smoker that's out in our parking lot today.
And literally that was it.
And then we started getting a lot of catering requests,
so we did actually move indoors
and we had a commissary kitchen.
So that all happened within like the first 30 to 60 days.
We were mobile.
We were renting kitchens from third parties.
We were set up in the parking lot.
People had no idea where our home base was.
So by having a website, they were able to find us.
They were able to find our location.
They were able to get in touch.
We ask people all the time how they hear about us
when they're trying to book us for an event.
And most often it's because they did a Google search
and our website came up.
We can use GoDaddy Payment on both of our food trucks.
We actually have two devices, one for each.
- To ring up transactions that quickly with a new tablet,
it was just so much easier
because there's a facing display for the customer.
And once you, whatever you put it in the tablet,
it pops up on the thing.
The customer sees it.
They confirm it, they sign it, do everything on their side.
So it's a great system.
The advice I would give someone
that wants to be an entrepreneur
or open their own business something like that
is never give up.
Never let people naysay or...
It's your dream, not theirs.
So you fight for what you want.
It's that simple to me
- [Kristen] There's a lot of challenges,
but I think we've risen to the occasion every single time.
And we couldn't do it without the staff
and the people we have in place.
And we've made the impossible possible.
(upbeat music)