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It can be scary to make a career change as you approach your 50th birthday, but Bethesda’s Kevin Gash is among the many federal employees who didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.
He didn’t just lose his job when he was fired this year by the U.S. Agency for International Development — he concedes that the entire industry he worked in had essentially collapsed when the agency was dismantled. He needed a Plan B after his Plan A — a long career in the federal government, was over.
“I’ve always loved cooking,” Gash said. “I’ve always loved making a sausage, being like, ‘Hey, try this.'”
And that’s how Plan B Sausages came about. In fact, the sign on his truck and the logo on his hat even says, “Plan B Sausages. Because Plan A didn’t work out.” Coming up with the name was the easy part.
“I put a lot more thought into the sausages and the concept,” Gash said. “So as I was getting ready to launch, sitting around with my neighbors drinking a beer, and they’re like, ‘What are you calling it? You keep calling it your plan B. Well, why not plan B?’ So we stuck with Plan B.”
He learned how to make sausages himself because, after having spent time living in Germany and other parts of Europe and Asia, he didn’t like how bland the stuff was that he would buy from the grocery stores here. But even after renting a food truck and some commercial kitchen space, he wasn’t certain he could make a career out of it.
“To rely upon $12 a plate to pay the mortgage and pay the bills and everything was just something I had never done before,” Gash said. “Is it going to work out? Do people want this?”
The answer seems to be that they do.
“I’m four months in, and I thought, honestly, at four months, this would be like the period where I realized I’m in over my head, or maybe there’s no interest in what I’m offering,” he said. “And it actually is working out pretty well.”
One of his employees is the son of a friend he worked with overseas at USAID. He also gets help from his wife and kids on the food truck. Being his own boss means he only answers to himself now — that’s how he got to have a spontaneous picnic in the park with one of his kids this week — and now his Plan B is the new Plan A.
“There’s no looking back at this point,” he said. This week he had a talk with a bank about getting an SBA-backed small business loan and he’s already dreaming of expanding beyond the food truck. “If I can expand, I really want to do a brick and mortar location and that will allow me to actually start making what I would have made and never have to look back again.”