Current status

Posted on July 14, 2026

What’s going on lately?

Seven months ago I learned a lot about operating a coffee trailer in intense cold. This month I’m learning a lot about operating a coffee trailer in intense heat!

On Friday I retook my food manager’s certificate test and came back to the trailer to find the fridge running above the required temperature. When the inside of the trailer is getting to 100 degrees, that’s no big surprise, so I (finally) put in some ventilation to pull hot air out of the trailer. By Sunday I had that sorted out and found that it wasn’t enough. Monday I put in a warantee claim and found that my extended warantee doesn’t cover my fridge because I’m not operating in a brick and mortar. So I made some calls and found a company willing to come check things out (tomorrow morning).

So two big lessons:

1. Heat brings problems.
2. Using a cheap fridge (the one I could afford when finishing my build out last year) brings problems.

At this point, my plan (more accurately: my hope) is to get the fridge fixed well enough to open back up, make some money, then buy a better fridge.

Other lessons

This year has been an educational one! Frankly, too much has happened for me to pull out of my head right now. But let me get a few things down…

Overwhelm and rest have been a recent lesson. As much as it pains me to close, it was actually quite nice to have a real weekend the last few days. My usual weekly schedule involves five days a week in the trailer, plus prep and maintenance work on my off days. It’s a lot, and the effects build up over time.

I would like to start bringing in help so that a) I can keep the trailer open more, and b) I can get some rest. But of course that will involve a whole new set of challenges around payroll, worker’s comp, training, delegation, and I don’t know what else. But given my bootstrapping approach, I’m not there yet.

Marketing will be a part of the puzzle to figure out soon. In order to pay myself, let alone an employee or three, I need to sell more cups of coffee! And to do that I’ve got to get more people to visit the trailer. My current approach has been to provide a product that’s good enough for word of mouth to do most of the work. I’ve thought about advertising, but I’m not willing to give money to Silicon Valley to boost posts or sponsor map results. Frankly, I don’t even like using Instagram for free because even without giving Zuck money, I’m giving his platform content for him to make money off of. Over the next few months I’ll be looking for smaller, local options.

Time is something I struggle with. I have to keep reminding myself that it hasn’t even been a year since I’ve opened. GSBC is still growing! But growing means that right now I’m smaller than I’ll be in the future. And given my refrigeration problems, it’s actually a good thing that I’m small enough I don’t have to make payroll while learning about the importance of dependable refrigeration.

2026 is a year I’ll look back at as The Good Old Days when GSBC was a scrappy little upstart coffee joint operating in a state of anarchy. I’ve never run a marathon, but my take on them is that a marathon is something that’s fun to have done more than it’s a fund thing to do. Running GSBC is similar (although it actually is fun to do, in addition to being hard and stressful).

Fingers crossed the fridge issue gets sorted out quickly and I can get back to work building things up!