A lot happened this year. Some amazing, some frustrating. So, let’s run down the good, the challenges and the future.
Like all good stories, the beginning is not necessarily confined to a single year or date and definitely not a clean set of events. What 2025 did was more proof of concept than anything else. Let’s start at the beginning….
In December of 2022 I was involved in a business deal with a ton of potential but ultimately it went nowhere. The bright spot in this waste of several weeks of time was one person. Trooper Earle. He was introduced to me by a builder.
We had hours upon hours of conversations about the industry. Trooper was the one to suggest our industry needs an Association. I had already had that thought in 2017, just had no idea how to make it happen.
Fast forward to August of 2023 where I first met the folks from https://www.ftoexpo.com/ Casie and Sheldon. They were trying to determine the viability of a food truck owners show. Our industry is full of good honest people that work extremely hard but have little to no real support outside of gurus and pretenders hawking get rich schemes. I offered FTO my full support. I introduced them to people I knew and suggested other people I thought would be a good fit.
Houston in July and Orlando in November of ‘24 were the targets for those first shows. I was asked to be an educational speaker and do what they called “campfires” which were mini-education classes. I couldn’t say “yes” fast enough. Then…
In March 2024 Trooper called. He wanted to help get the Association off the ground by providing the support and office staff to make the dream a reality. When I told him about the FTO Expo he said those fateful words. “A perfect place to announce the Association”. Now everything went from a nice thought to we have a hard deadline to meet and it’s a few months away.
Zig Ziglar says – “Anything worth doing, is worth doing poorly… Until you can learn to do it well.”
We filed the paperwork to become an official nonprofit at the end of May 2024. The race was to have a working membership website, get something of a booth set up to introduce us to the world and figure out all the details for, well, everything.
I invited everyone I could think of to attend Houston as an exhibitor because if Houston failed there would be no Orlando. Easy Eats was an exhibitor, Justin Prestidge from Custom Trailer Pros helped man our booth. Giving us the all-encompassing industry feel. I had my wife, Melisa, there as a food truck owner, two of my coaching clients there, as well as Trooper and his wife Larkin as well-established business leaders.
Houston was enough of a success to allow Orlando to go forward. But our website was doing poorly let’s say.
November ‘24’s Orlando show was amazing with Custom Trailer Pros exhibiting and Easy Eats returning. We had a larger booth manned by Nancy Price from Trooper’s Office. More clients helping man the booth as food truck owners. I gave more classes and had more people needing, as Justin calls it, “Bill time”. It was fun and exhausting. And our website was still doing poorly.
Now into 2025. Custom Trailer Pros and Easy Eats became our first and second sponsors. Words alone cannot express how I value their support of the Association and what I do.
We started our official twice-monthly newsletter. We changed website developers thinking that would solve our problems, (spoiler) it didn’t.
I had surgery in May on my left shoulder making most of the summer hazy memories from the pain killers and PT abuse. The July FTO Expo in Las Vegas was busy and I got to meet a bunch of people I didn’t already know. But…
Still no functional membership site. We were testing it on the day of the Expo to find it still could not process membership after months of assurances it would work properly.
Trooper and I had a long talk about the help I needed. Being a one-man show is like a one lane bridge – everything gets across eventually, but nothing gets across fast. He suggested his daughter, Kaleigh Hagan, become a part of the leadership team. After a very short conversation with her I knew she would be exactly what we needed.
Kaleigh came on shortly after the Vegas show and began fixing literally everything. Website issues were fixed to the point that, for the first time ever at a show, we could sign people up live. Our 4th FTO show in Edison NJ earlier in December was a rousing success.
I was less stressed and able to give my classes without worrying about where I needed to be. The running joke at the first three shows was “who is Bill’s handler today and will he be able to eat?” I was able to eat, and no one had to guard the door. This Expo was fun!
Thanks to Kaleigh we added more paying members and new sponsors. Our Learning Management System (while not perfect, yet) is stocked with my full 2025 MasterClass series recording for paid members.
Things are changing for 2026. FTO Expo is considering some improvements, and I hope I am right in the middle of it all. When they make the announcement, you’ll be the first to know. The Association has plans for more live education with 48 mini classes and 100 group coaching sessions already scheduled. More webinars, more advocacy, more helping you succeed. We are adding a second long-form podcast for interviewing industry professionals. Look for its debut in Spring ‘26.
We are on the path to “learning to do it well”. Please join us.
