$1K a Day From This Simple Side Hustle (Here’s How to Copy It)

Hi, In Hume Cameron, Missouri, population 8,500. And I found a little pizza shop in the parking lot of a hardware store. And this pizza shop sells authentic Italian pizzas for 15 to $20 each. I need to go find out how much money they make, how much it costs to start the business, and how you could copy this as well. Stick around after this interview because I'm going to bring you home to my kitchen and my outdoor pizza oven and show you exactly how to make pizza that will sell for 80 to 90% profit margin. So why don't you start by telling me who you are and what you do.

My name is Clayton Bowman. This is my wife Hailey Bowman. We just started a small pizza business, just a small part of it so far.

We basically just got sick of coming home every night and seeing each other long enough to say goodnight and go back to work. So we decided to create our own business. We're kind of both jacks of all trades. But one thing that really stuck out to both of us and we always have a good time doing is cooking and being in the kitchen. From there it kind of just unraveled into. Pizza is our favorite food. Everybody, it's something everybody can help with. We have three kids who all help out on the tent. Right now we're doing a tent and we hope to work up to the truck that's sitting in our driveway.

We got a 24 foot truck that we're building right now.

Good for you.

Trying to custom build it. It needs quite a bit but we're still working on it. So that's the dream.

And where did you learn how to make pizza like this?

Self taught. We started two years ago and I mean our first pizza was horrible, terrible. It took time and we slowly got better and better at it and over, over some time, you know, we perfected it.

What is an average day like as far as volume is concerned in this parking lot?

It's a little slower here. Whenever we're not doing events, this is just more like we're just trying to make a decent living here. We might serve 30 to 40 people in a day. Just right here.

It's like $500, right.

If we do like 20 orders in a day.

Yeah.

I mean that's usually about 6 to 700 bucks. 20% is cost.

Yeah.

And that's what food costs.

Yep.

So then we probably have like another 15% on you know, all of our gas and all of our other stuff. So we're looking at, I would say at least roughly 60% profit.

Nice. That's awesome. And then what do you pay to be here?

They have been nice enough to just let us come out. We just trade them for some lunch every now and then.

Well, also like if you bring in people for pizza, they might say, ah, I need some hardware.

Yes, yes.

Yeah. So it's symbiotic promoting each other.

That's the gist.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How do events normally go as far as volume or profits as.

Well, here's the thing. We're. This is going to be our first event.

Okay. Wow.

We did1 for 4th of July. That one was a little bit smaller. This is a larger, hopefully event.

Thousand bucks is the goal at least. That'd be cool.

That'd be a dream. But yeah.

So I mean, we've made, I mean we've made that here.

Yes.

There's been some nights we've made over a thousand just sitting right here.

Yeah, yeah. Kids come help.

They're usually here full time with us because we homeschool or we do alternative school. We basically just all travel together.

So the goal is to work into your trailer, open a brick and mortar restaurant. What's the goal?

Well, the goal is to. We definitely want to get into our food truck. It's already built. We just got to start putting all the appliances and the big wood fired oven in and all that stuff. Once we get that done, we do want to open up a brick and mortar. Well, that's mainly for. So that we don't have to deal with being in a commissary kitchen.

Yeah.

And then we can have our always have dough readily available. Not necessarily open up a brick and mortar to do pizza. We want to actually open up a brick and mortar to be a bakery and then run all of our dough out of the bakery.

Okay.

Because eventually we want to have multiple food trucks that we're running out of.

That'd be amazing.

Yep. They'll all be ran out of ours. This is 10 year, 15 year dream. But yeah, that's, that's the goal for this place. Yeah. That's what we see when we look at it.

If someone is watching this in another state and they say, I want to sell pizzas, what advice did you give them? What headaches could they avoid? Based on what you've learned, take your.

Time and start local and then work your way out to the state.

Okay.

And you don't got to buy brand new starting out.

Yep.

Get started and you know, slow, slowly buy the stuff as you need it because if not, you're going to just be sitting and waiting A long time. So I think that was a big thing I learned. I tried to say, oh, I need everything brand new instead. You know, to be honest, everything here is brand new. But it took a longer process.

Yeah, Sometimes we're thinking we should have just got whatever.

Yeah, we would have gotten, you know, just use stuff and we probably would have gotten out a little quicker and been promoting ourselves a little quicker. Probably would have helped us out a little bit. And then slowly as we're building the company, then you start replacing the, you know, the certain stuff that you need to replace.

Okay, what's your most popular pie?

If we're talking red sauce on the pie, people really like the pepperoni and the green peppers. If you're gonna get an Alfredo pizza, it's gonna have to be sausage with probably. I'd say mushroom is usually the go to with that.

Okay.

Sometimes banana peppers feel like it's spicy or zesty, so.

Well, I need to.

Absolutely.

Let's get it.

Let's get you going.

Okay. There's a guy, I think he's called Doughboy. He's in the uk. He makes thousands of dollars a day with two of these in a little trailer in the uk. This guy in California, he work at two farmers markets. Every weekend he's a full time professor and on the weekends he's making $175,000 in net profit. Slanging pizzas on the weekend. All right, so I ended up with eight 200 gram dough balls. I've already eaten one. So we're going to start with number two. You want to be sure that the entire dough ball is covered with this mixture. This is 50% 00 flour, 50% cornmeal. Now most important part is you don't want to touch the edges. The reason that people use their fists to flatten it out is because you're basically letting the weight of the dough do all the work for you. Right. So you're going to take your fingers and your fist and you're going to kind of naturally stretch it out like that. Some people like to put it down here and press it outward. That's just not my style. You can see I'm being very careful to not pinch the outer edge because you want it to puff up. That's why you would never take a rolling pin to this bad boy. If you do end up pushing it out from the countertop, then you want there to be plenty of this flour cornmeal mixture. That's about how it should look. It could be a little bigger, I could be thinner. In the middle, you can see, right, that you can kind of see through the center of it, kind of like parchment paper. That's how you want it to be. Now I'm going to go ahead and get my peel. One of the trickier parts of this whole process is getting the thing on and off the peel. So when it comes time for me to put the sauce on it, I prefer to put it on the peel at that point. So we'll put it on there. You can see it's the crust is nicely elevated. You're usually putting less sauce on there, so that is just about right. And then I'm using this fresh mozzarella right here. So I'm gonna give the old shake test. All right, cool. That tells me that when I put it in the oven, I'm gonna be okay. It's gonna come off. All right. All right. So we're here on the Gozney, and this display will turn off every 20 minutes or so just to preserve battery. So we'll turn it back on. Look at the temp. 836. Perfect. Anything over 800 is good enough for me. When it starts getting to 925, turn that sucker down. So if you get up in there, if you want to look up in there, see how the flame comes across the top? Looks awesome. All right, so you want to angle it down. You just want to kind of jerk it. Perfect. So the pizza peel is cooking it bottom up, and then the flame at the top is cooking it from the top down. Now I'm going to get this little bad boy, and as soon as it starts to look a little too dark on the side closest to the flame, and they get in there, and you just kind of. You just kind of lift up one side, jerking it. You just kind of lift up a side and then move it to the right or left. So we've got some really even browning in there. Oh, yeah, that looks great. It cooks in about 60 to 90 seconds. And you see how it's puffing up on the edges? That's because I didn't pinch the edges. All right, now, there we go. Look at that. So it's a little smaller than I'd like because I didn't quite get it as thin as the. The experts might. But let's bring it in and give it a taste. So this is a 65% hydration dough, 1 kg of flour, 65 grams of water, 25 grams of salt, 2 grams of yeast, little splash of olive oil. Mix it all up together, let it sit on the counter for an hour, cover it, put it in the fridge for two days, pull it out, split it into eight sections, put it in your proofing box, and then about two hours later, it's warm, it's risen a little bit, and it's good to go. So we'll cut this one into fourths. That is beautiful. So if it were 70% hydration, it'd be a lot more airy, the crust would be bigger, and you can see all the moisture there. This is pretty wet, but frankly, I don't mind it. I think it's going to be delicious no matter what. So, time for the big reveal. What you've all been waiting for. I forgot the basil, but my taste buds don't care. Go start a dang pizza business already. Your taste buds will thank you for it.