Interview
‘Resilience is a win for all of us:’ One millennial’s take on adversity, community and survival
By Tracy Turi, WEforum Editor
For Dave Lewis, resilience means adaptability. The ability to pivot through life’s surprises and uncertainties, particularly during this pandemic. “Resilience means adaptability. For me, having the work ethic, the discipline to adapt to whatever is happening around you.” He’s done this repeatedly throughout his entire life, growing up in the military, living on the streets, going to prison, finding a purpose even while still in prison, jump-starting a new life in the real world. Adaptability helped him pivot into entrepreneurship and adjust to those uncomfortable moments as a small business owner walking into a boardroom and feeling like an outsider. Adaptability allowed him to thrive during the pandemic.
Lewis, the co-owner of MacroBites, a new meal prep service in Asbury Park, shares that adaptability is a skill he began cultivating as a young child, growing up in a military family that moved a lot. As soon as he felt connected to one community and a new set of friends, the government would reassign his dad. The family would pack up and move, and he would have to adjust all over again. They bounced around the country for years until Dave was a teenager and the family settled down in Monmouth County.
He also learned about adaptability from his dad, who was a great role model. While still in the military, his dad started numerous small family side businesses, and Dave got to watch those little businesses grow, sometimes falter, and took note of the struggles along the way. It taught him to never say never, learn from the failures, take those lessons to heart, and always begin again, sometimes from nothing. His dad was also great at instilling his values and work ethic on all his kids, many of which Dave admits took him about 30 years to embrace. However, the foundation was firmly established from the beginning, even when Dave started to get into some bad stuff and make bad choices as a teenager, some of which resulted in his incarceration.
Those were challenging years, but he began applying some of the same values he had learned growing up. His adaptability helped him make it through the fear and uncertainty he endured inside the system and even created as positive a community as possible so he could thrive. He was accepted into the prison culinary program and allowed to cook for the officers; and discovered he was good at it. Dave had grown up watching both of his parents cook and had learned some basic skills cooking for himself after he’d moved out of the family house. He had secured one of the best jobs available in prison because it meant that, in a place where it was customary to be in lockdown 23 hours a day, he had a job that allowed him to frequently move around the compound and even take food back to his cell.
When he got out, he realized maybe he could expand on these skills and jumpstart a new life in his community that would lead to stability and financial security. He had always loved music and even played the piano, but music didn’t seem to hold the same quick path to financial stability as food and cooking held, and he knew that he didn’t have the time or luxury of chasing his dreams. Today he also has kids to worry about and wants to leave them a legacy. He wants them to have a lot of good options.
Dave emphasizes that the world can be swift and cruel to those who don’t plan and prepare appropriately. When his dad was stationed in Alaska, the family enjoyed many wilderness fishing adventures. He never forgot that once, some kid was killed by a moose because he got too close to it. Making good choices is an important lesson he now takes to heart, even when it comes to the little details. His dad used to preach about mastering every task, even the little jobs, making your bed, and cleaning and mopping a floor. And this ethos extended to his dad’s more enterprising ventures as well. “It’s better to just focus on the little actions every day, the minute you wake up because it’s easy to have an idea, even a great idea, and to think about it, but it still needs to be put into actions if you want it to materialize.”
And he wants to pass this ethos on so his kids can run the business properly when they step in. MacroBites is a food delivery service, a marketplace, and a grocery store that sells salads, healthy snacks and meals, fresh produce, yogurt, juices, coffee and tea, and health-focused beverages and high energy drinks, but no sodas. Dave and his partners, Jarrette Atkins and Fritz Georges, share the space with The Prosper Foundation, a nonprofit foundation run by a friend who offers free mental health services to children.
“When the pandemic happened, you know, we lost half of the revenue because all the gyms closed the next day. I was like, oh, well, I guess there go these contracts for these gyms.” When the pandemic hit, the gyms closed the next day. The MacroBite business model, built around Dave’s personal relationships with all the gyms, delivering MacroBite meals directly to them, suddenly came to a grinding halt. Dave and his partners, Jarrette and Fritz, had to develop a new way to make money, but even driving all over New Jersey making sure their customers from the gyms could now get their meals at home wasn’t enough to sustain the business. Luckily, they had registered MacroBites as both a marketplace and a grocery store, so when COVID hit, they could continue to operate as a grocery store. Still, they knew they nevertheless had to expand their delivery services. Today, MacroBites ships to eight states around the country.
Dave underscores that in his mind, the success of the MacroBite model means “wins for everybody around us that help us, everybody around us, this reaches back and, you know, the community didn’t give up on us when we weren’t the best. Like, these are not just our wins, they’re wins for the team, for the community, for everybody. That’s why we brought a nonprofit in here and that’s why we give back and why we do charity all the time. We did a coat drive, a toy drive … we do all these things because it’s not just for us, this is a win for all of us.”
Dave says their top seller is the New Orleans Strip, which comes with their signature MacroBites sauce, a bourbon-style glaze spiked with a delicious hot sauce from his friend Maria’s Colombian restaurant in Bradley Beach called Aires DE Columbo. The sauce is her grandmother’s secret recipe. “Everybody likes the sauce, even if they buy a different meal, they ask for that sauce specifically, so someday we might even bottle and sell it.”
“Things are different [now] than what they were. What do I do? I can’t do anything? Let me just close up shop and wait for it to get better? We’ve never been like that. It’s like, something changes … how do we adapt? And that’s what resilience is because we have the ability to make changes, not lose your head … and just figure out a way through it. Then, you know, you can be resilient through times … having discipline when you’re not having a good time, still doing it anyway. You know, that’s what resilience means for me, adapting to changes. And to focus on those actions that will make you the proudest, and eventually, you don’t NOT want to do them because you want to be true to yourself. So, it’s about focusing on those little actions, the little details along the way, and doing it right, down to each detail, even when it gets hard, that gets you to where you want to be going… no matter how busy it got or how tired [you were], we can’t be okay with not doing it right.”