One opportunity opened the way to another.

Around 2016, Myra was watching her son play football at Redondo High when she noticed a food line that did not seem to get any shorter. After watching it for nearly an hour, she finally asked Joe what everyone was waiting for. Kettle corn. Myra joked that maybe they should get into the business.

Then she went home and researched it. For roughly $35, she bought an online guide from someone already selling kettle corn and began learning what the equipment, ingredients, setup, and process would actually require. The joke turned into an experiment.

Myra and Joe deliberately avoided making their first attempt at a major market. They were still learning the equipment. They did not yet know how quickly they could produce, bag, serve, or recover when something went wrong. A church carnival gave them a safer place to learn.

Sales were slow, but the day taught them how to operate together. School fundraisers followed. One generated roughly $2,000. Those early events gave Myra and Joe enough experience to evaluate a much bigger decision when an established kettle-corn business appeared for sale.

They purchased the operation for roughly $13,000 to $15,000. The deal included a trailer and three recurring weekly markets. This time, they were not buying an idea. They were buying something they had already learned enough to understand.

About a year after starting, Myra and Joe decided to make vending their full-time work. They left their jobs in May 2017. The transition was difficult. There were days when a market produced only $100 or $125 before fees and product costs. There were schedules that required crossing Southern California for multiple events in one day.

There were children to raise, equipment to move, traffic to manage, and no large financial cushion protecting them from a bad week. Myra describes those years as blood, sweat, and tears. The only way forward was to keep finding enough good opportunities to balance the bad ones.

Kettle corn opened the door, but Myra never assumed it had to become the only thing the family sold. A fellow vendor introduced her to açaí bowls. When an organizer later needed someone to take over that category, Myra tried it. The first location was not especially strong.

Instead of deciding açaí did not work, she changed the location. Corporate markets—where employees could come down during breakfast or lunch breaks—proved to be a better fit. That pattern repeated throughout the business. If one concept did not fit one audience, the family tried another environment rather than immediately abandoning the product.

Some expansions came through acquisition rather than starting from zero. Myra and Joe knew a longtime vendor who operated shaved ice and roasted nuts at established markets. When he decided to sell the business, they bought it. The value was not only the equipment. The operation came with locations, customers, and years of market presence that the family could continue serving.

Later, other concepts—including boba and funnel cakes—became part of the mix. Each additional category gave the family another way to enter an event. If an organizer already had kettle corn, perhaps there was room for shaved ice. If shaved ice was covered, maybe the opportunity was roasted nuts, açaí, boba, or another concept.

Instead of depending on one product to fit every market, Myra and Joe built flexibility into the business itself.

At one point, the family also took on a storefront opportunity connected to their boba operation. The store itself was not the major profit center Myra hoped it might become. But it created another kind of value. It gave the business kitchen infrastructure that could support market operations.

The lesson was familiar: something did not always have to succeed in the way originally imagined to still be useful to the larger business.

At their busiest point before COVID, Myra says the operation was covering roughly 23 markets a week with a very small team. That required constant coordination. Family members divided locations. Good markets helped absorb weak ones. The family kept exchanging information with other vendors about which events were opening, which categories were missing, and where opportunities might exist.

They also learned that once a strong recurring market becomes part of the schedule, it can become foundational. Reliable weekly locations gave the business enough stability to experiment elsewhere. The portfolio mattered more than any one event.

During slower seasons, Myra and Joe widened the map. They searched for festivals and events within driving distance and sometimes traveled as far as Northern California or Nevada to keep the business moving. Other days required far less glamorous endurance: long drives across Los Angeles for a market, then racing back in time for school pickup.

Those decisions were not about chasing adventure. They had left their jobs. The business had to work. That urgency forced them to become unusually alert to what was happening around them. An open category. A retiring vendor. A new event. A corporate market. A different product.

Another route into the same customer economy.

Over time, the operation became deeply family-based. Myra and Joe built it together while raising their children. Their oldest daughter, Savannah, became heavily involved and eventually began running full events herself. For Myra, that growth is part of what makes the journey difficult to reduce to a single product name.

Kettle corn may have been the beginning. But the real business became the family’s ability to identify an opportunity, learn what it required, and build another working piece around it.

Myra’s philosophy is not that every entrepreneur should add more products. It is that the first product does not have to become a cage. A market can be excellent and still be wrong for what you sell. A product can struggle in one place and work somewhere else. An unexpected category can become an entry point.

A competitor’s exit can become an acquisition. A weak storefront can still become useful infrastructure. The family kept moving because they stayed open to what the business was actually showing them. What began with a line at a high-school football game became a network of products, markets, events, and family roles that no one could have mapped out at the beginning.