By sampay BRATTLEBORO — A husband and wife team that got its start making dosas (thin crepes) behind the Hooker-Dunham Building on Main Street was the grand prize winner of the 2022 business plan competition hosted by the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation.
“The finalists were all incredibly strong entrepreneurs with great passion for their businesses, and I am looking forward to seeing all of them grow and develop,” said Ed Sheldon, Key Bank’s business banking relationship manager for the Vermont market. “Dosa Kitchen in particular did a great job of articulating their growth strategy and how that plan would create new jobs and bring outside dollars into Windham County.”
Sheldon was one of six judges of this year’s competition, along with Bronna Zlochiver of the WCEDP Council, Sara Powell of the Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship, Meg Streeter of Southeastern Vermont Economic Development, Jeffrey Thomas of Lever, Inc., and Dena Moses of Vermont Weaving, last year’s winner.
“We learned a lot just doing the business plan,” said Leda Scheintaub, who started Dosa Kitchen in 2014 with Nash Patel.
Scheintaub said that in their eight years of running their food truck, they’ve never written a business plan.
“Somehow we managed to miss that. We bought the food truck and just started running it. I still had another job, so it wasn’t like a huge risk to start that. So we just went and did it.”
But now, hoping to get their dosa batter in even more stores, they’re measuring space in the Winston Prouty kitchen for all the equipment they need.
“We’re really good at doing the food truck, we know how to do that really well,” said Scheintaub. “But with the production, there’s a whole lot to learn about how to do the pricing and doing [profit and loss] projections for the year going forward.”
Lisa Whitney, director of campus operations at Winston Prouty, said they are delighted to have Dosa Kitchen on the campus.
“Sometimes the right people just come along at the right time,” she said. “We’ve got a great community here, and they’re just gonna fit right in.”
Whitney said she wasn’t surprised to learn Patel and Scheintaub won the competition.
“They’ve been so thoughtful about this process and making sure that they were dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s,” she said.
Another person who wasn’t surprised was Nancy Cain, co-founder of Against the Grain, who helped Scheintaub and Patel with their business plan.
“They’ve done this very deliberately,” she said, spending the past eight years “truck testing” their product. “The two things that make these things work are one, you have to have a good product, and second, you have to have a sustainable business. They have both of those.”
Cain has known the couple for a while, as Patel worked on the production line at Against the Grain in the Brattleboro Business Park, formerly the Book Press, on Putney Road.
Patel and Scheintaub also gave thanks to Debra Boudrieau, business advisor at the Vermont Small Business Development Center located within the BDCC.
The kitchen at Winston Prouty not only gives them space to increase production, but also hosts pop-up events or even offers take-out food during the winter, when the food truck is shuttered for the season.
“You cannot operate out of your home,” said Cain, about having a commercial kitchen. “You have to have the freezer, the refrigerated storage. You just can’t do it out of your house. If you can’t buy in bulk, you’re paying the retail rate.”
Twenty-six entrepreneurs submitted applications for the competition in June. Applicants consist of both startups and expansions for existing businesses in a wide range of business sectors.
To be eligible to participate, applicants had to be based in Windham County, they had to have a clearly identified target market, and they had to have plans to hire at least two full-time employees in fiscal year 2024.
Eight businesses met all three criteria and moved forward to the final round of the competition. Those finalists included West River Coffee Bar in Londonderry, Hayden Rowe Candle Co. in South Londonderry, Earthen Co. in Putney, Home Grown Edible Landscaping & Nursery and Wicked Clean Grooming, both in Guilford, and The Inventory, Forestopia L3C, and Dosa Kitchen, all of Brattleboro.
Finalists were asked to produce a full business plan utilizing online software provided through the Windham County Economic Development Program and on Oct. 14, they pitched their business plans for seven minutes and fielded questions from a panel of judges.