3A - Your Entrepreneurship story "Homemade Jerky"

My parents have been making and selling homemade beef jerky for about ten years know. Every time we make jerky we start with anywhere from 50 to 80 lbs. of meat that we buy wholesale. We slice, marinate, dry, cut, weigh, and bag the jerky right at our kitchen table. The first step is to cut and marinate the meat. Through trial end error my parents came up with four homemade marinade recipes that people love; Original, Honey Teriyaki, Hawaiian, Hot Mustard. Over the years there have been other flavors that they have tried, but none of them were as successful as the first four. When the opportunity presents it's self they even make Jerky using deer meat. After the meat has marinated for at least a day it's time to dehydrate the meat. At the beginning they started with small plastic dehydrators but once the demand increased those dehydrators took too long to dry the meat and didn't hold enough per batch. so, they upgraded to two stainless steel box dehydrators which dry the meat faster and can hold more meat per batch than the previous ones. Once the meat is dried it is moved to a big bowl where it can be trimmed and cut to size. although some pieces disappear before they reach the bowl. After the fat is trimmed off and the pieces are cut to size it is time to bag the jerky. The bags that we sell are 3 oz and fit in a snack size Ziploc bag. The jerky gets weighed, bagged, and a homemade jerky label stuck to the bag. Before we make jerky we take some pre-orders in order to get an estimate of how much meat to buy. These pre-orders are usually for a half pound or a whole pound of jerky. Our jerky sales are limited to friends, family, and coworkers that we know. The last couple of years we haven't made jerky as often as we used to but people still always ask "When are you making jerky?"


Honestly I enrolled in ENT 3003 because out of the limited sports management electives that I need to take for my degree this class sounded far more interesting than that of managerial accounting or the legal environment of business. Also,I love Motorsports and many of my favorite race car drivers are also entrepreneurs.