Clyde Foods began with a broken air conditioner and a complete inability to solve a small problem at the appropriate scale.
It started with an aging little car whose air conditioning had developed an irritating habit of giving up whenever the vehicle came to a stop. The obvious solution was to take it to a shop, pay for the repair, and move on with life.
That was considered briefly.
The real problem, we decided, was money. We needed enough of it to diagnose the car properly, repair whatever obscure component had failed, and perhaps purchase a respectable digital multimeter along the way. And if we were going to make money, we might as well build something.
So we started planning food stands.
Burgers first. Hot dogs too. Then more burgers. More hot dogs. Somewhere between the first imaginary grill and the projected forty-thousandth meat stand, the original objective became slightly distorted. Earning enough money to repair the car was no longer sufficient. We needed enough money to own the company that made the diagnostic equipment.
That way, if the multimeter couldn't tell us what was wrong, we could simply employ the people who designed it.
This seemed reasonable.
From there, the plan escalated exactly as responsible corporate planning tends to do. Build the food empire. Generate unreasonable amounts of cash. Make one extraordinarily confident financial decision. Acquire the diagnostic-equipment company. Fix the air conditioner.
And once the air conditioner finally blew cold at idle, there would really be only one logical thing left to do:
Buy the company that built the car and make sure nobody ever had to deal with this again.
Somewhere during all of this, Clyde Foods stopped being a way to pay for a repair and became something considerably more interesting.
The car still mattered. The multimeter still mattered. But the burgers and hot dogs had developed lives of their own.
And that is why Clyde Foods exists today: because sometimes the best response to a minor mechanical inconvenience is to build an unnecessarily ambitious food company around it.
Fix the problem. Build the business. Never underestimate what can happen when someone refuses to just take the car to the shop.
Owner Mentality.