Jul 8, 2026
Hank Murphy quit his corporate job about two years ago to sell frozen bean and cheese burritos out of a defunct Taco Bell in Phoenix. In a recent TikTok chronicling his company's near-death experience, the Bad Hambres founder talked about the harrowing experience of getting his business off the ground.
For Bad Hambres, Murphy wanted custom packaging: boxes, wrappers, and labels. The price tag, though, to make everything look the way he wanted it was an eye-watering $106,000. Murphy said it was "more than the cash in our bank account."
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Murphy says Bad Hambres is now a million-dollar business, built on the back of a two-ingredient burrito and a scrappy operation held together with, as Murphy put it, "DIY stickers, baggies, and paper wrappers." That original setup "got the job done, but it wasn't gonna work at scale."
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No margin for error
"When you're bootstrapping, custom packaging isn't even on the table," Murphy said in the video. "Order minimums are massive. Thousands of everything, and all in."
Bootstrapping, which is building a company on personal savings and reinvested revenue rather than outside investors, describes the vast majority of new businesses in the U.S. Founders get complete control, but it also saddles them with all the risk. In Murphy’s case, investing $106,000 would mean there was no fallback.
And Murphy wasn't just gambling on the price. He was also gambling on a product he had never physically seen. Bad Hambres had two flavors to get right: the original red-salsa burrito, and a spicy salsa verde born from a collaboration with James Beard–recognized chef LT Smith of the Phoenix restaurant Chilte, which was being promoted to a permanent menu item. Murphy's wife and business partner, Sam, spent eight months on the design.
“Sam turned into a packaging goblin,” Murphy said. "She obsessed over every inch."
On screen, everything looked finished, but then they booked their first production run with a new co-manufacturer before the packaging samples arrived, which the couple now considers a mistake. When the samples finally showed up, the two flavors "looked basically identical" side by side. There was no time to redesign, no time to reorder proofs, and a manufacturer waiting on them. "We were panicking," Murphy said.
So they picked a new color for the spicy verde and ordered blind, calling it "$106,000 and a prayer." Things unfortunately got worse from there, when Murphy learned the packaging wouldn’t arrive until after the burritos were already made; for a frozen-food company, that’s pretty bad. Basically means product has nowhere to go.
The Murphys put another $3,000 on a credit card to rush delivery — and thankfully, the boxes arrived and the colors looked great in person. "Seeing the burritos in the final packaging for the first time was emotional," Murphy said. "It was like, damn, the bean dream might actually happen."
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Small business = small odds?
America is in the middle of an entrepreneurial boom. More than 16 million business applications have been filed with the federal government since 2021 — a record pace. And while you tend to hear horror stories about getting a startup off the ground, the odds are probably better than you’d think.
For a long time, the prevailing statistic was that 90% of restaurants fail in the first year, but that’s actually a myth. In reality, across all industries, roughly 80% of new businesses survive their first year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And, if anything, food businesses do slightly better out of the gate than the average: about 86% of new accommodation and food-service establishments survived year one in recent cohorts, per the BLS Business Employment Dynamics program.
The wrinkle to this statistic is that only about half of all small businesses make it to their fifth year. And for the food sector specifically, which is typically up against thin margins and seasonality, tends to underperform over the long haul. You have to pay suppliers weekly and cash flow can be tight, but building a loyal customer base can take months if not years. That’s before you even talk about the impact of online reviews.
In the case of Murphy and Bad Hambres, the packaging snafu is a great example of an obstacle most bootstrappers run into, which is that to grow, you have to spend money you don't have yet. There’s a lot of faith in the old Field of Dreams quote: “if you build it, they will come.”
But there are plenty of examples of entrepreneurs taking the leap and living to tell the tale. A Louisiana baker turned a cookie hobby into two storefronts and seven-figure revenue. A former teacher built a $428,000-a-year fidget-toy company with her father. There’s usually a pretty clear pattern across successful founders, which is an obsessive focus on a specific and/or niche product paired with direct-to-customer sales and at least one risky gamble.
For Bad Hambres, the bet paid off, though Murphy noted that getting shipping for the West Coast off the ground "almost took us out." But he and his team pulled it off, and the popular burritos now ship across Arizona and much of the Western U.S.. Hank and Sam have since rolled out limited collaborations that sell out in minutes.
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Dave Smith is the VP of Content at Wise Publishing and Editor-in-Chief at Moneywise and Money.ca. His work has also been published in Fortune, Business Insider, Newsweek, ABC News, and USA Today.
