The Rolling Oven

Sofia Reyes had always been the friend who made pizza from scratch. When she decided to turn it into a business, she chose a food truck instead of a restaurant — the startup cost was far lower, and she could take her wood-fired oven to festivals, breweries, and busy street corners.

Even a truck wasn't cheap. A used truck, a wood-fired oven, equipment, and permits added up, so Sofia took out a $45,000 small-business loan. The loan came with interest, which meant a fixed payment every month whether business was booming or slow — her first lesson in how borrowing works.

To price her pizzas, Sofia had to understand her costs. Some were fixed — they stayed the same no matter how many pizzas she sold: the loan payment, insurance, permits, and rent on the commissary kitchen where she prepped. Others were variable — they rose with each pizza: dough, sauce, cheese, toppings, and the box. She figured the ingredients and box for one pizza cost about $4.

Sofia set her price at $12 a pizza. That left $8 per pizza after variable costs — money that could go toward covering her fixed costs and, eventually, profit. Her monthly fixed costs came to about $8,000.

That raised the key question: how many pizzas did she need to sell just to break even? If each pizza contributed $8 toward $8,000 in fixed costs, she needed to sell 1,000 pizzas a month before she earned a cent of profit — roughly 35 a day. Knowing that number changed how she thought about every event she booked.

Business was seasonal. Summer meant festivals and long lines; a good month might mean 1,400 pizzas and a healthy profit. Winter was quiet — some months she sold only 700, well below break-even, and lost money. Sofia learned that cash flow mattered as much as profit: she had to save cash from busy months to cover the loan, insurance, and rent during the slow ones, because those bills came due no matter what.

Her numbers taught her to make sharper decisions. When an event organizer offered a flat $500 to park for a four-hour festival slot, Sofia compared it to a normal night's sales before saying yes. When she read her monthly income statement — revenue, cost of ingredients, then fixed expenses, then profit — she could see exactly where the money went and which events were worth repeating.

By her second year, Sofia understood her cost structure well enough to add a second truck — and to know, before she signed the lease, exactly how many pizzas that truck would need to sell to pay for itself.