How a Burrito Stand in a Home Depot Parking Lot Earns $2.3 Million a Year

I think the location at The Home Depot was one of the biggest sells for us. Just to have that built in foot traffic, where you have hundreds and hundreds of people walking past the store every day. So it enabled us to start and also gave us a lot of promise to be able to at least sell hot dogs and cheeseburgers and then whatever else we want to add on to that, to give our own little spin on whether it be sandwiches or burritos. I'm Lydia Holmes and I'm 36 years old. I'm John Clark, I'm 33 years old. And we started our business, LJ's Lil' Café in a Home Depot parking lot in Orange County, California.

You have low overhead, low rent compared to an actual brick and mortar, and you're right in front of a Home Depot. And everyone has seen the Costco food court. So we were like, we have to get in here. The burrito has 25 tater tots that are fried extra crispy, so every bite has a nice big crunch. Next is ridiculous amount of cheese. We put about a cup of cheese in every single burrito, cause we felt like most breakfast burrito these days were lacking that extra cheesiness.

Yes, that one actually is really good too. Alrighty, and that's it for you? Yes. Okay. Can I have your name? Biggest expenses, food costs, of course, just like most restaurants. We've been lucky that we haven't had any crazy out of nowhere expenses. I mean, we have equipment we have to replace occasionally. Yeah on the weekends, we're doing about 6 to 700 burritos a day. So with that profit, we pay off loans and we also reinvest a lot of it back into the business. We also have tried to really take care of our team with some of that as well.

We just threw a very fun Christmas party for everyone and then, you know, pay our bills. I think restaurants have been a huge part of our lives and trying new places and finding these hole in the wall places or super extravagant places, we would go home and try to make whatever we had there and put our own little twist on it, and it led into, hey, maybe we can do this one day. I think we always knew, but it wasn't really a reality, maybe till after Covid and then when we found the shed.

We did get the money to purchase the shed from a family loan. So that we are very thankful for that they believed in our vision. They are not charging us interest. We are still paying it off. We've just been slowly increasing the amount we pay off every month. We opened LJ's in September of 2021, hired my brothers actually, who are our two very first employees. And then we had our son Jack in November of 2021, two months prematurely.

We stayed with my parents and my family just to get all the help that we could get at that time. We thought we were going to be more of a hot dog stand type place. The breakfast burrito was on the original menu as well. We had one breakfast burrito, just the OG. In the beginning we were doing $2 to $300 a day in sales. $150 of that may have came from Home Depot employees coming out to get their lunch at the store.

A freelance writer came by. He was in the area, wanted a breakfast burrito, found us on Yelp with our 13 reviews, decided to give us a try and he asked John, actually, can I write about you guys? And John said, sure. A few weeks later, find out that it's for Eater LA, and that completely changed the trajectory of our business overnight. That's when we realized, okay, people want the breakfast burrito. That Thursday, we probably did maybe $300 in sales. After the Eater article came out that night on Friday, I think immediately we hit our first $1,000 sales day. And then I don't think we've done less than $1,000 sales day after that.

I got a phone call that day from my brother, frantically asking me to come in and they needed help. We were not expecting it. I remember the first day it got crazy. Yeah, that was-- that was a fun, fun day. Like up and up since then, so. Our wait times on a Saturday at one point got to 2 to 3 hours. We would take your cell phone number on our paper ticket. And then as that ticket got towards the front of the line, we would call that cell phone maybe ten minutes before the order's about to be ready to get them to come back to Home Depot from wherever they were and then come pick up their order.

We're trying to softly cook like a soft scrambled egg and create this really gentle omelet, while we're also firing some hot beef on one side. It would be a lot of grill scraping and cleaning, and it would push burritos back. The hood is only six feet in there, so we were limited. It's not like we could go and get a larger grill or throw another grill in there. We had to work with what we had and we made the decision, okay, we have to choose what people are coming for.

We did take out a somewhat traditional loan. It was a bank loan, but it was through my grandparents. They own a duplex and they were able to refinance on it. That has set interest, monthly payments and we completely took on that loan. They just helped us acquire it. I think the big moment for me, I was driving to work about six months after we opened our Orange location, and I don't know what happened, but it just hit me. We made it possible in this little shed in front of a Home Depot.

We felt like an actual storefront was a huge risk and test for us. And that was the moment where I was like, this is it. Like, we're good. We've made it. So this is the spicy. It has the jalapeno in there too. He handles more of vendors and communications with that, the equipment-ordering. I'm more of HR, payroll, social media. I'd say we both do R&D. It's nice to have you know both of our opinions on things. There's a lot of pros and there's some cons, obviously, you know, like you might vent a little

to your spouse and then that's that and you move on with your night. Whereas with us, you know, we're talking about work till we go to bed at 11:00 at night. But it's also really nice to be able to share this success with the person that you love the most in the world. Our burrito, when we put it on the menu, I think started around $8.75. After the Eater article, we realized our numbers aren't quite right and had to change some prices.

Slowly, the price has also been going up as the price of eggs has gone up, the price of meat has gone up and the price of cheese has gone up. The biggest challenges as we're scaling and opening new restaurants, that we can't be there. So trying to keep that, that consistency in every single restaurant, making sure the burritos are all going out the same. We'll never be able to step away. It's fun, keeps us on our toes and we like being involved. It's those little things like the customer telling you that's the best burrito I've ever had in my life. On those $200 sales days, those are the comments that

keep you going, keep you pushing. If we could do it, anyone can do it. We had no kitchen experience professionally, no knowledge of how to run a business. There was a lot of learning in the process and growing from that and then finding some good help. You can go through some hard times, but you're resilient. It teaches you resilience and you keep going and, and you'll get there.