Growing A Mobile Bar Business During COVID [Tap Truck USA Update]

Corbin O'Reilly

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Published: March 30th, 2022

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Corbin O'Reilly

Founder, Tap Truck USA

$30K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Tap Truck USA

www.taptruckusa.com

from San Diego

started October 2016

$30,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools Corbin recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Corbin recommends to grow your business!

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Other... Jim Collins

Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck--Why Some T... Jim Collins

Want more updates on Tap Truck USA? Check out these stories:

1. How Two Friends Started A $30K/Month Business Selling Craft Beer From Vintage Trucks (2020) ➜

2. We Hit A Major Milestone And Surpassed 100+ Licensees Worldwide (2023) ➜

This is a follow up story for Tap Truck USA. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 3 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

This all began when I was 22 years old. I bought a 69 Chevy pickup, I rebuilt the motor of the vehicle and gave it a paint job as well. This project turned out great and that led me to weld and paint my first Santa Maria Style barbecue pit! It was a solid steel trailer with brick lining to keep my fires hot!

Pick-up and Pit complete, I began the process of getting into farmers' markets in San Diego. It was so tough to get a good market where there was solid foot traffic. There were so many different learning curves but I enjoyed that process all along the way. What was needed so that I could just be totally compliant is really important in the foodservice industry. That's kind of the nature of business, you are always rising to a challenge and overcoming an obstacle.

My ability to learn and adapt in the BBQ business led me to put on another hat really quickly, I started Tap Truck! It was just an idea that I was rattling around. I brought it up to my good buddy Taylor Steers. Down the road, we sped off with cash from the bank and bought a classic truck with about all we could afford.

My name is Corbin O'Reilly, co-founder of Tap Truck USA. In August of 2016, my childhood friend Taylor Steers and I partnered up and found a 1952 Chevy panel truck we bought off a really cool biker dude in Los Angeles. We drove it from LA to Carlsbad but then we couldn't start it for a number of days. Once we got it running, we started bodywork on the vehicle at the side of my house. Those were some fun days we spent together playing old tunes, sanding away and dreaming about the idea of starting a beer truck. So that’s what we did! We began creating that business in sunny San Diego, deciding to name it Tap Truck! When the time came, we boldly installed 5 beer taps down the side of our freshly restored Chevy.

Once we researched all of our requirements and licenses, we began serving craft beers and other craft beverages like margaritas and hard lemonade down the side of our sweet truck. Some of our first events are really exciting like the San Diego State football games and the San Diego Holiday Bowl at Qualcomm. The exposure and experience led us to book lots of weddings.

At the beginning of the business, we focused more on truck rental and bar staffing, but over time we worked hard and learned how we could get our liquor license, to become full-time beverage caterers. This way our clients did not need to lift a finger or supply the alcohol. This license helped us book corporate parties for happy hours where they just needed us to show up with everything so they could socialize over a beverage, after a long work day.

Our main product is showing up and serving folks a good time. That is ultimately what got Taylor and I so involved in this business. It is where we carry our pride and passion, and I always believed that those are the driving forces for anything that you pick to do in life and especially business. After a long hard day, you're going to have to wake up early and get to work on that next project so you need to have those key motivators.

The coolest thing about Tap Truck is how people's eyes light up when they see our cool classic trucks! In addition to the amazing craft beverages we serve, the trucks are naturally a unique item that people just want to hang around, talk about and take photos with!

With those positive experiences under our belt, we next purchased and restored a 1965 Chevy panel truck putting four taps in the side of that next thing! This was just in time to be ready for our next event in March of 2017. At the time here we were really diving deeper into our pocketbooks, but we viewed it as investing in something we believed in! It has really helped our passion for buying and restoring classic vehicles because now we could fix up a car to have as another great piece of equipment to help support us.

This was our justification as I had to explain spending the money to my wife, Ha!. As people started to take note of what we were on to, we started getting calls about expanding our brand. We decided to do so in the form of Licensing, setting the stage for TAP TRUCK USA.

The Tap Truck name and brand have continued to grow and expand. Our Tap Truck San Diego now has 6 to 10 vehicles on deck because we are constantly building more classic trucks for our growing family of licensees. We often have double, triple and even quadruple bookings that take place so it's nice to have a variety of vehicles for our clients to pick from. It is so cool how a beautiful Ford classic or Chevy vehicle can make people feel so nostalgic and comfortable at a party. We enjoy showcasing them on all forms of social media including Instagram, Facebook and even TikTok. Showing our journey on all these different platforms and tailoring them in a marketing sense to the audience, has really helped our brand explode.

At the core of Tap Truck is the story of each classic vehicle. If you are a fan of vintage Americana, craft beer, or classic trucks you are a fan of Tap Truck! So giving this old workhorse, this old rust bucket, this old barn find, this forgotten but once loved prized piece of transportation a new life is the real focus. With that grain of salt, a lot of our success as a brand is not about the Corbin and Taylor story, but yet the tale of each and every local vehicle you see built.

We plan to continue our growth and expand the business by building more vehicles and turning them into custom-built Tap Trucks for licensees. We are currently in the northern hemisphere but have plans to expand internationally. This will be exciting in Europe Australia, South America everybody needs a Tap Truck; we believe they're the icing on the cake at a really fun party!

The excitement and challenge for us are just getting our Tap Trucks in front of different audiences. There's always a celebration, ball game, or social event that needs an extra level of service and style! Our Tap Trucks offer all of that and more.

Just like you have an incredible and unique business to tell the world about, you create and think about how you portray that business to the world when it comes to marketing.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

Our biggest lessons have been measured to us through all the changes with covid. The catering industry got hit really hard, especially for mobile beverage catering, but as time went on, more events had to be held outside so it also gave us an opportunity. Many in our Tap Truck family wanted to grow and expand.

Although the pandemic offered challenges we and our family of licensees added changes that were needed to accommodate the shifting business models. Our support of them just gave everyone more opportunity for others to get different types of business. One other bonus is that we had renewed interest in opening new Tap Truck sites as people reevaluated what they could and should do to support themselves.

That's the root of a lot of joy! Those that have trucks can benefit from our ability to tell the Tap Truck San Diego story. People can take the lessons we've learned and apply them to their own businesses. This can be as simple as sourcing beverages to the more complex such as profit margins and business development ideas. There can be a lot of logistics and a lot of stress building up to someone's wedding and so taking a lot of our knowledge and experience and passing that to a licensee can really help.

The gnarly thing about catering is at certain times your meet event planners and they might not have any clue about what to do or how to do it so you have to stay calm, cool and collected. Be ready to not only work with them but also make the decisions so that guests have the most enjoyable time and the host is not left with any curveballs.

One of my favorite skills and abilities is teaching licensees how to better market themselves. I like to help them figure out where they can take photos and videos and learn to showcase and build their business with them. In today's world of TikTok building out videos it's just that much better in explaining to the customer what you do and how to do it.

Just like you have an incredible and unique business to tell the world about, you create and think about how you portray that business to the world when it comes to marketing. I think it is very important to keep a focus and build upon that to stay sustainable and always be selling your business. Your story is yours alone to share with the world!

I think mobile bars are a trend and you see that in terms of Piaggio Ape and horse trailer conversions. Beer trucks carry a strong American theme behind them so it's the perfect balance of old mixed with something new. Classic Cars can almost never go out of style. Drinking beer, wine, and cocktails at a party is definitely not new. so maybe the focus is being able to take photos with such an amazing beverage distribution system!

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

Our plans for this coming year are to continue to build the brand through sales, marketing and social media. We will continue to book more events here in Southern California and support our licensees across the nation. Further out, the goal is to build our own auto shop and one day have our own brew label. . Could we start our own Tap truck whiskey brand or even tequila? Yeah, that would be awesome! We even might have plans to film our own TV show getting the brand out there that much more! We need more out there that’s fun.

Always though at the core is the constant search for the next big event for Tap Truck to appear at. Before that step can be made, many months prior requires the build of an actual Tap Truck. Some trucks are full restorations and upgrades while others might be more simple. Regardless we need to start with the art of the look for each truck prior to reaching the party. So much to do!

Have you read any good books in the last year?

I actually read somewhere that drinking was bad for me, so I quit reading, just kidding! That's my go-to bar joke whenever someone asks me if I read something. I cannot say I enjoy reading a whole lot in life. I'm more of a hands-on type of guy. These days, sadly I feel like most of my reading gets chewed up on emails. It can be very cumbersome: I hope your business can get you to that point as well. Not a bad problem to have.

Now that I have rambled on a bit I can tell you that I do enjoy audiobooks and my one big guy that I will mention is Jim Collins. He's a fascinating author but what he writes is so much more than just that. He and his team do an in-depth analysis with different stories about businesses, numbers, and stock markets to see what's being built and why it is performing. I feel like it is an incredible resource for businesses like mine to help build a frame for the decisions we need to make. The stories indicate how it's worked for them today which can help navigate and provide good examples for current owners and entrepreneurs.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

The advice I have for other entrepreneurs whether they're just sitting on the couch thinking of what to do or if they're behind the desk reading all the emails is to just attack things every day and that you can do it! Dream and do! Nothing can ever stop a focused man or woman. So knowing that sentence and believing in that sentence can make you a force to reckon with. I don't think I'm the smartest and I'm definitely not the best looking, but on most days I decide to accomplish all that I can before I'm worn out.

I have a variety of skills and talents that you see in the “accomplished Corbin” today. Because I've been around the block a time or two in business, I like to call it prestige, or veteran status, which to me means that I can get through just about anything. When covid started none of us knew what was happening or how it was happening.

We definitely had no idea what today would look like, but I'll tell you that I just kept showing up at work because I had nothing better to do. I was there by myself or with a buddy of mine and we would have breakfast and go to work at my barbecue restaurant. In between orders, I would go to my office. One project I worked on in my office was that I had snagged my old family photo albums and I went through scanning every single photo. I made giant digitized albums I could share with my family. Sharing these albums brought tears of joy because we couldn't hang out with each other or see each other to keep safe.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We are looking to expand staffing in a number of ways! Flatout, we are always looking for the next great tap truck licensees nationally and internationally to join in. We have so much to offer and we enjoy chatting about the business. It’s that simple so don't be shy just send us that email. We're the kind of guys that you want in the corner with you

and I have always enjoyed hiring and working with focused individuals.

So maybe you, or some friends, family are looking to build something to be proud of. Tap Truck just might be a great idea! We know some people that can save you money… or maybe more importantly time! Our family waits with arms wide open!