Meat smoking is the process of flavoring, browning, cooking, or preserving food by exposing it to smoke from burning or smoldering material, most often wood while cooking it at a low temperature for an extended period of time. The prolonged exposure to smoke allows the meat to take on a smokey flavor, giving it a tasted that can’t be matched any other way.

Just before the COVID lockdown hit my friend bought the house next door to his pub in a residential neighbourhood. While the house was still in the transfer phase he met this guy across the road an engineer who wanted to start a smoked meat business or "Smoke Pit & Grill" like he called it. Not the traditional smoked meat that has been used for centuries as part of a preservation process but the modern "social media" smoked meat.

WTH (what the hell) is social media smoked meat
If you spend a lot of time on social media you might have come across "meat smoker influencers" who use pellet grills to smoke rib eye and smoked brisket and then show the meat squeezed between their fingers while wearing nitrile gloves and they get millions of views. This is apparently part of the "BBQ" culture in the US which is a rabbit hole in itself with terms such as "competition BBQ" and "backwayrd BBQ". Apparently this is the business this guy wanted to start.

Even though the house was bought for communal accomodation (to rent the rooms out) my friend thought that this smoked meat business (operated from the front of the house) could be complimentary to his pub, like a suburban Mzoli's, maybe attract more people and they spend more money at the pub (the salty meat will make people thirsty after all). So the guy started building this elaborate equipment in the garage, apparently it was equipment to prepare the meat and some other equipment and there was going to be a fire pit for smoking (which I was told is superior to wood pellets).

Business Model
This guy in fact wanted to start a B2B meat smoking business as in he wanted to supply supermarkets like Spar and other large retailers and he could sell what was left to people at the pub - he even built a pizza oven so that the meat offcuts could be put on pizza and sold to bar patrons.

This went on for many months. And I used to regularly troll my friend like when is this guy launching. When I go there I would listen to this guy lay out his plan, he had even moved into one of the rooms in my friends new house and he would explain how after launch he would have to stay up late or get up early to smoke the meat. When I ask "when" he would say that he did not have money for the meat, although the machines looked nowhere ready, at this stage he hadn't even made samples yet.

Long story short I have seen how not to launch a modern meat smoking business. His plan just had too many moving parts.

In his book The E-Myth (Entrepreneurial Myth) Michael E. Gerber explains:

The Entrepreneurial Myth is that businesses are started by entrepreneurs seeking profit. In actuality, businesses are started by technicians (employees) who decide to work for themselves. The problem is they understand the technical work, not the business itself.

Gerber explains that we're all composed of 3 personalities. For your business to succeed, you must play each role:

1. The Entrepreneur: a future-focused visionary who pursues opportunities
2. The Manager: a past-focused worrier who plans and organizes
3. The Technician: a present-focused worker who concentrates on the task at hand

Now an engineer maybe think too technical on his own and ended up over-enginering from the start. Where a better strategy would have been to just start - improvise - adapt - overcome, considering he already had a busy sales channel next door that wasn't going to hold him to a high standard (it's a neighbourhood dive bar).