We had the good fortune of connecting with Hill (Hillery) Sawyer and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Hill (Hillery), what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
I started Speakcheesy as a late-night food truck concept with my two best friends in 2014. It was my 27th birthday, and three financially challenged young women prepared and gathered to celebrate with a dinner in lieu of expensive gifts. 

I had been a vegetarian for nine years, and really I should say cheesatarian with some veggies thrown in. Cheese had been a passion and obsession of mine since middle school, so naturally, grilled cheese was an excellent vehicle for feeding myself through college and into my first career as a freelance marketer. I graduated from Kraft singles pretty early and found my passion for cheese after having my first bite of a four-year-old aged white cheddar at the age of 13 on my first visit to Whole Foods with my aunt. It was life-changing.

So back to this birthday dinner, my friends Caroline Atkins and Lillian Shaw were also financially challenged, so they offered to make me whatever I wanted for dinner. I told them, “I wanted the best, most gourmet grilled cheese ever.”

Lillian set the stage with a beautifully set table on the sun porch, colorful napkins, vintage plates, and glasses. Caroline curated the most astounding sandwich with feta, green pesto, and mozzarella – complete with our initials cut out of Havarti and placed on top of perfectly toasted sourdough bread.

Lillian was in branding and marketing and Caroline was in culinary school, studying to be a chef. It was at this dinner, delighting in the nostalgia, crunch factor, and stretch factor due to the sandwich Caroline had built, that we began to talk about a need in our small town.

There was no late-night food in downtown Rome that wasn’t WaHo, Krystal’s, or the usual fast food. Those establishments weren’t anywhere near where people were hanging out and enjoying the beautiful downtown strip and its eclectic and unique late-night establishments. What do you need more than carbs and fat when you are out enjoying a late-night celebration?

It was at this dinner that we came up with the complete concept of a gourmet grilled cheese food truck. Within two weeks, we had the name, the LLC, and the social profiles.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Ben and I are efficiency nerds and so instead of fundraising to create a grand vision, we find out what we need and just jump in.

When I started Speakcheesy I had a $5,000 quick pay loan from a local small business incubator in my small town to get started. That $5,000 plus a few hundred cobbled together and borrow from friends getting me to $6,250 is what I started Speakcheesy with. I bought an almost new hot dog trailer from a guy off Craiglist, enlisted some friends to help me build out the minimum of what I needed to get started, and got the trailer finished and ready for inspection in 10 days so I could get started working and begin paying the weekly payments on the loan. My first day of business with the trailer was December 3rd 2015.

I had previously worked at a development shop where the Agile concept of minimal viable product was in full force and I took that mindset as my mantra when starting Speakcheesy. What did I need to have to be able to get through today.

That same efficiency and survival would become the back bone of the business and though it was extremely hard to start a business without capital we made it through each season reiterating to be able to handle new growth as it came. In some seasons we experienced big growth, in others slow and steady trickling growth.

Somewhere in year two a chef friend of ours introduced us to the concept of sous vide and we were able to change our single sandwich preparation times from 7/8 minutes to one minute. That act of efficiency alone transformed the growth of our business.

Bootstrapping Speakcheesy was nerve racking and definitely difficult. Most of our early years were spent pushing pennies around, buying product from the sales of the day before and just keeping the truck running 24/7 so we could have any kind of money in the bank.

There have been times where we have both wanted to walk away, but we would instead come together and problem solve how to get to the next growth step and set our minds on making they happen.

We definitely made sacrifices like having to say yes to all events and not being able to attend family gatherings and important events in those you loves lives. And we had some unexpected challenges along the way like the 5,000 pound trunk of an old tree falling on our food truck at the start of 2020 and trying to get it repaired during the pandemic.

Luckily we had already expanded our business and we’re trying to grow a little kitchen inside of a brewery when March 2020 hit. We streamlined our menu, recruited bar staff from the brewery, and went entirely virtual. Our business increased 500% for those two months of shelter in place.

We had a full crew of employees who were supporting their families and even hired our own delivery drivers to handle the temporary growth.

We made the business lean and became a grilled cheese production machine. It’s during this iteration of our business that we fell in love with the idea of a virtual restaurant and though the brewery didn’t make it we began searching for a home for our next Speakcheesy iteration by fall of 2020.

This iteration of Speakcheesy is what led us to look for space in Atlanta to open a wholesale space with a virtual retail aspect like a ghost kitchen. We didn’t have a massive budget so I began searching for unexpected places that I could get licensed by the Georgia Department of Agriculture. While searching, Neighborhood church in Candler Park reached out about about a kitchen space they had and the rest is history!

We opened our wholesale/retail/virtual restaurant on October 10th part-time and will be opening full-time with new weekend hours the first week of January. We spent about a year, here or there readying the space for inspection. Got our cheese blends approved by the the Department of Agriculture for wholesale and started selling sandwiches through our website, ChowNow, and DoorDash. We currently have one restaurant partner and one market partner, but are looking for more connections and places to sell our 36 different cheese blends as well as vegan cheese blends made for melting.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
For friends visiting Atlanta, we suggest they check out the Indie Craft Experience. The Indie Craft Experience is a series of craft and artisan markets happening around Atlanta. They also have a huge holiday vendor market each year.

I’ve always felt at home with crafters and artisans. My first business from 19-25 was a craft business. The Indie Craft is filled with all kinds of vendors selling beautifully curated items and really setting that vibe. You’ll have to grab a bit from one of Atlanta’s talented food trucks and a coffee or delicious bevy from Birdhouse Market.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
To be honest, my journey as an entrepreneur what not have been what it has been without my partner, Be(n).

Ben came into my life when I was in my first year of business with the actual food truck and my second year of business with the concept.

Ben was immediately 100% in on Speakcheesy, and having a partner who wants to work as hard as you do and supports the dream as if it was their dream is the cornerstone of while Speakcheesy has been able to be successful.

I also want to thank my co-founders, Caroline Atkins and Lillian Shaw, for creating this company with me and then knowing when it was important for them to step away. I thank them for trusting me to take over and make this dream come alive, even when they both realized that entrepreneurship wasn’t a good fit for them at that time.

Speakcheesy is the biggest gift anyone has ever given me, and that just keeps repeating for me every few months with new adventures and new challenges.

Website: https://www.eatspeakcheesy.com/

Instagram: @Speakcheesy

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/speakcheesy

Twitter: @speakcheesy

Facebook: https://facebook.com/speakcheesy/

Yelp: https://yelp.com/biz/speakcheesy-rome

Youtube: @speakcheesy

Image Credits
Mary Claire Photography

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