MARBLEHEAD, MA — Maddie Ferris has a deal for anyone in Marblehead who has a hankering for a good hot dog this summer.
The 16-year-old Marblehead High School rising junior is about three weeks into her first season as a small business owner after launching her Mad-Dogz hot dog business in June. A year in the making after she haggled quite the deal on a hot dog cart, she spend her sophomore year working on the business as part of a school project and last month made it a reality with a cart serving Marblehead residents and visitors five days a week at 74 Atlantic Avenue.
“My day has always inspired me to work hard and that if I had an idea to pursue it and not wait until I was older,” Ferris told Patch during a supply run on Friday afternoon. “I started researching things I could do when I was 16. There were not a lot of things but one was hot dogs and it inspired me.”
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She said she first set out to find a cart and shrewdly negotiated with the owner of one on the market for $2,500 down to $1,000.
“So then I knew I had to pursue it,” she said. “We have a yearlong project for school and I was able to incorporate the hot dog cart as my project. That kept me going all year because I had to do it for my school.”
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Over that time, Ferris got herself Serve-Safe certified and secured all the proper licenses from the town and the Board of Health to set up and operate her business.
“I knew I wanted to do it the right way,” she said. “I didn’t want to start it and then get shut down. I knew there are a lot of regulations these days. It’s not like in the past where you could just set up someplace.”
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While she said her extensive research allowed her to understand what to expect during the start-up process, she did face some challenges along the way.
“A lot of things are difficult because I’m only 16 and you can’t do a lot of these things you need to do until you are 18,” she said. “So my dad had to help me with some of that.
“But it worked and now I’m open.”
Ferris enlisted the help of classmate Olivia Goldwater, who assists her with setting up each day, sales and running the marketing and social media on her Instagram page @maddogz01945.
“She has been a huge help,” Ferris said. “I am very thankful for her.”
Mad-Dogz is open Wednesdays through Sundays from either 11 a.m. or noon to 3 p.m. unless the weather is prohibitive. Ferris said she intends to keep her schedule until she returns to school in the fall.
A member of the DECA Club at Marblehead High School, Ferris said Mad-Dogz has been most of her extracurricular focus over the past year — though she does have some additional ambitions to pursue during her time at Marblehead High School.
“It’s a full-time job starting your own business — especially at 16 — but I think it’s going to be worth it in the long run,” she said. “I think it’s probably going to last the next couple of summers. I am learning a lot and I am grateful for that.
“Then I am also really interested in real estate and real estate investment. I want to do some of that in high school so I have experience before I go into the real world.”
She said she has developed some regulars at her Atlantic Avenue location and that her hot dogs were a big hit at the Marblehead Festival of the Arts on the Fourth of July.
“That was the busiest day of the summer,” she said. “It was crazy. We couldn’t even keep up with all the people there were.
“The whole town has been super, super supportive. You can see people in Marblehead really want to support you and that feels so good.”
(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)
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