Mexican food is the 🐐

Yesterday was my wife’s birthday. She’s on the heels of getting over the creeping croupy crud, which is unusual for us because we are seldom sick. Perks of being “that” homeschool family from the country.

We have a family tradition of going to the local-ish Mexican restaurant in a semi-neighboring small town. But first, here is a little backstory on why this place is so important to us. The restaurant is in a rural, agrarian county south of my county. I live in the county where Topeka, the state capital, resides, so it’s a fairly large county (~250K) for the Midwest, and it is politically purple.

Back in 2020-2021, our county had the typical retarded mask mandates, while the surrounding small rural counties did not. We were non-compliant, but it got pretty old trying to go out to dinner and getting glared at the whole time because we like to breathe fresh air.

Anyway, we were looking at restaurants in surrounding towns on Google Maps one night and saw that one, so we loaded up the Sienna and took everyone down there.

It was as if we were transported back in time to 2019. Nobody was wearing a mask. The place was packed with the local ranchers and rednecks, drinking beers and margs. Everyone knew the owners because they live right in the middle of a small town. Their kids went to school there and played football and baseball, so every local kid who worked as a waiter or waitress already knew the family. And best of all is the outdoor patio.

It’s a small town of around 3,000 people, and the patio faces a cornfield. It’s exactly what you’d expect in small-town America, and it’s exactly as it should be. After a few months, they got to know us. They recognized us and knew us more or less by name, and it was just warm and comfortable.

We can learn a lot from this. The restaurant owners knew how to cater to their target audience because they were part of it. And lord knows that they got plenty of my money because they were an oasis of normal in a sea of fear and nonsense.

No matter what we do vocationally, we can emulate this behavior. We can be warm, friendly, and welcoming. We can understand what makes our ideal client tick. And most of all, we can make sure they leave our services satisfied, because we all know all to well how hard it is to find good service.

If you figure out who needs what you have to offer, are friendly and personable, punctual, and deliver a good product or service, man, the sky is the limit today. So, if you are on the fence thinking about minutia, just stop. Get yourself trained up in something useful, put yourself on the market, and prosper.

If you don’t know where to even start with marketing yourself, try Upwork. There is more money floating around on there than you can imagine. And thankfully for you, I wrote the book on getting started there, so check it out.

Later dudes.