Hank Murphy quit his corporate job about two years ago to sell frozen bean and cheese burritos out of a defunct Taco Bell in Phoenix. In a recent (1)TikTok (1) chronicling his company’s near-death experience, the Bad Hambres founder talked about the harrowing experience of getting his business off the ground.
For Bad Hambres (2), Murphy wanted custom packaging: boxes, wrappers, and labels. The price tag, though, to make everything look the way he wanted it was an eye-watering $106,000. Murphy said it was “more than the cash in our bank account.”
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Murphy says Bad Hambres is now a million-dollar business (3), built on the back of a two-ingredient burrito and a scrappy operation held together with, as Murphy put it, “DIY stickers, baggies, and paper wrappers.” That original setup “got the job done, but it wasn’t gonna work at scale.”
No margin for error
“When you’re bootstrapping, custom packaging isn’t even on the table,” Murphy said in the video (1). “Order minimums are massive. Thousands of everything, and all in.”
Bootstrapping, which is building a company on personal savings and reinvested revenue rather than outside investors, describes the vast majority of new businesses (4) in the U.S. Founders get complete control, but it also saddles them with all the risk. In Murphy’s case, investing $106,000 would mean there was no fallback…