As we have previously discussed, when one grows up in Greenwich, CT, there are certain expectations. Prep school, college, Wall Street, death. And in the beginning, Garrett Hoelscher did what he was told. He attended the Brunswick school, then Emory and did a summer internship at RBS. But he was just going through the motions. "Nobody there [was] passionate," he told Business Insider. "It's all just numbers and spreadsheets." (Also, people smoked "two packs a day," which offended him.) But he still took a job working at Wedbush Investments in LA, where the unhappiness followed. It wasn't until a transformative weekend in Stratton, VT that decided he needed a change. And that's when Hoeslscher, whose favorite quotation on Facebook is "Don't talk about it; be about it," came up with a plan. To sell waffles in Aspen.

He had spent the week cold calling potential clients and thinking, "I want to be the guy making the calls," when the sweet aroma from Stratton's mountainside waffle shack wafted into his nostrils. Lightbulb. He could build waffle shacks on ski mountains where they hadn't been built yet, like Aspen. Then, he "learned the dynamics of dough and how to bake," he explains, and spent over 4 months perfecting a secret recipe before "finally figured out what worked." Hoelscher teamed up with two friends from Brunswick, a private high school in Greenwich, Colin Constantine and Brian Wells, and prepared a business plan to submit to the Aspen board...With two huts, the business should be fairly profitable, bringing in a conservative estimate of about $200,000 in the first year, he says.

Garrett Hoelscher: "Nobody I Met On Wall Street Was Passionate," So I Quit My Job To Build Waffle Huts [BI]

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