Today we’d like to introduce you to Donut Dad (Tom).
Donut, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
What got us started down this journey was the desire to create a different future of my children than what I had growing up. I wanted to do life with them. So when they were young I started taking them on daddy dates. We would go get us donuts and I would get coffee. This became a weekly tradition which included a photo to document the time together and a trip to the library and even an adventure in the park.
My son was 2 when I started this with him and his sister. Now he is 15 and my wife and I added two more kids who have only known this life of eating donuts once a week together.
We came to a fork in the road in our careers and we felt we had a blank canvas in which we could do what ever we wanted to. A good friend asked me “ what does your past reveal as a path to your future.” Along with the weekly donut dates with my kids I had been working with a group of dads at a church and felt much fulfillment in helping them become better husbands and fathers and felt like this would be a worthy cause to give the rest of my life to.
So the path was set and off we went to chase the goal of creating a place that would inspire fathers to be present in the lives of their families.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Nothing worth doing will be easy. We had never done anything like this before and so we approached it with this mindset: “there are things we need to learn at every step along this journey, and we can’t miss a step”.
We started in our kitchen at home and we are still searching for a physical location as we save and earn our way.
Patience is hard because we have seen many succeed faster than we have. But in the same breath, we have seen many more give up or crash out of doing what they wanted to. We seek to be faithful, committed to our mission and content to walk even if it takes longer than we wanted.
One day we will have physical location and the only people who will remember the struggle will be us. We just know to take the next step and the goal will arrive.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
When we started in this we had planned to only do 4-6 flavors and nothing more. After the second week of doing the same thing I was bored. I am way more creative than this. So we pivoted and now we do 4 different flavors every week. This allows for my creative outlet that was originally paused.
I am proud of this because people have loved the different flavors we have created and often comment that they have never had flavors from us that they didn’t enjoy.
What sets us apart? Every week our whole family is involved. Mondays my wife makes the dough, hand rolling and cutting every donut. Tuesday through Friday I fry & top all our donuts and my kids join me in delivering them and selling out in our community. This has been an amazing experience for all of us. Seeing the hard work paying off and our friends sharing with us how much they look forward to us showing up with our donuts! It’s been a blessing to be a blessing as we earn our way into our first location.
Until we have a location people of Savannah can look at our Instagram & Facebook pages for our weekly menu drops! We offer FREE delivery in Savannah because as we like to say “The hard part is over, you found us! Now we will bring you the donuts.”
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
The Last Arrow & Mindshift by Erwin Rafael McManus has been a great books for me along this journey.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Dadsdonuthouse.com
- Instagram: https://Www.instagram.com/dadsdonuthouse
- Facebook: https://Www.facebook.com/dadsdonuthouse
