Meet Jerrod Lemmons | Founder of Kitchen Combine

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jerrod Lemmons and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jerrod, what role has risk played in your life or career?
Nothing taught me more about risk than my experience starting, stopping, and restarting our restaurant.

Opening a restaurant is one of the most expensive, exhausting, scary, and risky ventures any entrepreneur can start because it requires an immense amount of time, money, equipment, and people. Even if you overcome all of that just to get open, the restaurant industry has some of the highest failure rates and lowest profit margins. Kitchen Combine is helping foodpreneurs at the beginning of their journeys when risk is greatest in order to support them in managing risk when it matters most.

While we’re excited about our revolving restaurant concept, no one has ever done something like this before. Where we see a lot of risk, we also see tremendous opportunity, and I’ve always liked to live my life and launch businesses that sit right in the sweet spot between the two.

What should our readers know about your business?
Kitchen Combine was literally born out of what looked and felt like failure.

I realized fairly early on that the first restaurant my family and I opened was not going to be as successful as we hoped as early on as we had hoped, nor was our partnership with our franchisor going to be a long-term fit. Rather than drag it on any further, we decided to shut it down to regroup and focus on finding a more sustainable model.

We had the work ethic, the product, and intentionality surrounding customer service, yet there was still something missing. When we closed, our customers were confused by our decision because things seemed to be going well. Our employees – many of whom are family members and close friends – were worried as we tried to find work for them in our other businesses. Everyone looked at us like we were crazy for months. Regardless, we leaned into the hard lessons we learned and began to think critically about how to move forward.

As we sat looking at our restaurant and all the potential it possessed, we realized there were some inherent challenges to the brick-and-mortar restaurant model that would be hard for any new restaurant to overcome, including us. Food and labor costs are often rising more quickly than prices, and with all the money that goes into getting a restaurant off the ground, in addition to ever-increasing overhead expenses, breaking even can take a long time, if it ever is achieved at all. This can be especially difficult when a chef or restaurant owner does not already have a significant customer base.

Some of our mentors in the food industry saw success with alternative models like ghost kitchens and pop-ups, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. This idea, connected with our desire to see other small business owners succeed, ushered us into a thought about how great it would be if you could have the best of all worlds: a restaurant that is as visible as a brick-and-mortar storefront, as easy to open as a ghost kitchen, and as trendy as a pop-up.

We quickly realized that it didn’t exist, and that’s when we focused our energies on ironing out the Kitchen Combine concept.

This opportunity may have been born out of failure, but we managed to do what any good entrepreneur would: we failed forward.

The decades of experience my wife and I have owning businesses have taught us this harsh reality about entrepreneurship: having the strongest work ethic, the best product, or the best service still aren’t always enough to make a business successful. There was no industry where that proved to be more true for us than the restaurant industry. Support is critical, and if you are at the place where your talent, passion, and work ethic are all in alignment, support makes the difference.

Kitchen Combine is that support for rising chefs who don’t yet have the resources and connections they need to launch their own restaurants, but care deeply about the food they serve, the people they employ, and the communities they feed.

We back entrepreneurs who get overlooked by bankers and investors by giving them access to a turn-key, brick-and-mortar restaurant operation along with all the equipment, technology, and front-of-house staffing they need. We assume all of their startup and overhead costs, and we work with them to find their own location once their time with us comes to an end.

Restaurants have always been staples of the communities they employ and feed everyday, and we are helping empower and launch the next generation of foodpreneurs in North Texas and beyond who will carry that mantle forward.

Kitchen Combine also provides fundraising opportunities to schools, churches, and nonprofits, as well as training opportunities for students interested in business, entrepreneurship, and the culinary arts.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
A huge shoutout goes to Kitchen Combine’s staff and chefs. Without them, nothing I do is possible or worth doing.

Website: kitchencombine.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kitchencombine/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kitchencombine

Image Credits
Kitchen Combine