This story is the 13th in a series that features students and graduates who are using their MBAs and EMBAs in unique fields other than the traditional ones of finance or consulting.
What do you call two food truck operators with MBAs?
Although it sounds like a bad joke, the recent success of Matt Lindzon and Zach Fiksel, both MBA graduates from Ryerson University and the co-owners of Chimney Stax Baking Co., means they’re getting the last laugh.
Mr. Lindzon, 32, founded Chimney Stax in April of 2014. He was in Austria working as an exporter of ski wear to Canada the previous winter and came across a Christmas market selling chimney cakes – spiralled dough baked in a cylinder, eatable on their own with sweet toppings or filled with savoury sandwich staples. He was “blown away” by the simplicity of it, and something clicked.
“I thought it was so awesome and simple,” he says. “I tried it and it was so unique. The [production] set-up ... was small and could be operated by just two or three people. It was something that I thought could be really interesting in North America.”
Mr. Lindzon immediately texted his friend Mr. Fiksel, 36, about the idea. While doing other jobs after graduating from Ryerson – Mr. Fiksel was a freelance photographer – they continually met for lunch and chatted about wanting to start an unconventional venture.
“I had to sell him on the idea, but I had to sell myself on it, too, and my wife, and my family. I have my MBA but I was going to go and start this food venture,” Mr. Lindzon recalls.
Mr. Lindzon has a bachelor of arts in history from the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ont., while Mr. Fiksel has BA in philosophy from Toronto’s York University along with their MBAs from Ryerson’s Ted Rogers School of Management.
Although there wasn’t an official concentration in entrepreneurship MBA at Ryerson, Mr. Lindzon says he always gravitated toward those kinds of classes. He had run a couple of small businesses while in school, such as sourcing high-quality gloves and selling them out of his car.
“I was just looking to get into something,” he explains. “I tried to focus my classes around entrepreneur stuff. They had classes that focused more on building a business plan, pitching to investors, bookkeeping, stuff like that.”
After putting together a business plan for Chimney Stax, the pair approached the Canadian Youth Business Foundation – now called Futurpreneur Canada – and received $45,000 in funding. That helped the pair buy the truck and the equipment.
They decided on a food truck because it allowed them to get in front of a lot of people without a large initial investment. They bought most of what they needed from a Hungarian baker in Windsor, Ont., and spent a day in her kitchen learning how to actually bake the Eastern European pastries, as neither man has formal culinary training.
The truck, painted like an old black-and-white photograph of an industrial area with (what else?) lots of chimneys, can now be found at sporting events, concerts or festivals, and even weddings and private events.
Their logo is a circle with the Chimney Stax Baking Co. text wrapping around it.
The branding of Chimney Stax was important to Mr. Lindzon, who researched similar vendors in Chicago, New York and San Francisco.
This is where having an MBA was important as the business idea started to get off the ground, they say.
“It’s not whether I thought about where the product could go, it’s about the proof, and how to find case studies of that model working,” explains Mr. Lindzon, who was critical of the marketing and branding of the Chicago cake makers, who went out of business. “I had to find out what went wrong there, and figure out why mine wouldn’t go in that direction.”
Thanks to a healthy six-figure investment from Joseph Mimran after an appearance on Dragons’ Den just more than a year ago, the two men are expanding their food truck offerings into malls across the country. They plan to open their first bricks-and-mortar location in Toronto in about four months’ time. (Chimney Stax had a temporary kiosk at the Yonge Eglinton Centre in Toronto last December.)
“We needed mentorship, we needed money, we needed everything basically,” Mr. Lindzon says of their appearance on the popular television program. “There were a number of missing pieces to our team we needed.”
Chimney Stax’s revenue tripled from the first to second years, and doubled from the second to third.
Mr. Lindzon says, smiling, that there are “not many” other food truck vendors with MBAs, so they’re taking full advantage of what they learned about scaling up a business and planning accordingly.
“A lot of food trucks out there focus on great menus and diverse foods,” Mr. Lindzon says. “They come from culinary backgrounds. Our business and product are so different that having an MBA has helped us see the business grow in stages.”