By the time the team at Kitchen on Klinton Wings and Things built their food truck, they were already a popular joint.
Having gotten their start in the backyard of their rental home on Clinton Street, the four friends set up shop in the parking lot of Cupid Daiquiri on the Evangeline Thruway. But then they had a problem: They were so popular that the owners of the nearby hair salon said they had to go. They were bringing in too much traffic.
“That was like a slap in the face because we didn’t really do nothing wrong,” Avery Bell, co-owner of KOK, said.
Years later, the four behind KOK — Bell, Corey McCoy, Tre’Jan Vinson and Jared Johnson, each of whom has yet to reach his 30th birthday — now own three locations and will open locations in Baton Rouge and New Iberia.
Their progress earned them the Young Entrepreneurial Business of the Year award from the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Louisiana District in May.
The group recognized the young entrepreneurs for refining their business and continuous growth, said regional director Heidi Melancon, who helped the four come up with a plan for the restaurant that would offer their fried chicken wings, fully loaded fries and a full-service bar.
None of the four had prior business experience. Melancon helped the group come up with business plans, navigate the banking system and show proof of income.
The journey was not always easy, Bell said.
“When we first started at the house, we didn’t get paid,” Bell said, “We all had our separate jobs on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and selling wings on Tuesday, Thursday. That was money we didn’t touch.”
“We were trying to build a food truck. We just kept saving money. We couldn’t take from the pot. We barely got paid from the food truck. We were eating ham sandwiches and chips.”
As the business grew, the four divided up the work, which may have helped them avoid the pitfalls of many small restaurants when owners burn out by working too much. According to the National Restaurant Federation, about 30% of all restaurants don’t survive the first year.
They remained hands-on but focused on building a team to avoid the burnout phase.
“People get burnt out because they try to do everything themselves,” Bell said.
Bell said they owe a lot of their success to Melancon at LSBDC who nominated them for the award.
“We just felt like these are four outstanding young entrepreneurs that we want to honor,” Melancon said. “I think in Lafayette we are very fortunate of having a very cohesive entrepreneurial ecosystem.”
KOK has also beaten the odds and succeeded as a small business so far. The failure rate of minority-owned businesses before the pandemic was 80%, reports indicate, and data from the U.S. Census showed 58% of Black business owners described their business as “at-risk” or “distressed.”
In Lafayette, Black-owned businesses make up only 3% of small businesses while Black residents comprise of nearly 30% of its population. That business number could be even higher, said Brandy Landry, president of the Greater Southwest Black Chamber of Commerce and owner of 1123 Matte Black Design Group.
“Sometimes people are operating a business before they know they are operating a business,” Landry said. “I’m very excited about any Black business succeeding. They (KOK) are young and consistent. I’m very excited to see the Black youth in the community really start the entrepreneurship journey young.”
Bell said they hope to open two more locations this year and another two the next year. They have long-term goals of opening up different Southern food concepts in the future, but the focus is on making KOK self-sustainable.
“That (award) was really big for us because we’re just like working, trying to improve the company,” Bell said. “Sometimes we don’t take the timeout to be like, we came a long way. That was that moment for us.”
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified one of their early locations. It has been corrected.