Three years after first offering German cuisine out of a food truck, Iggy's Family Doner is celebrating Small Business Week out of their new digs.

The restaurant is owned by Candace Georgijevic and husband Igor. Georgijevic grew up in Steinbach but eventually moved to Europe where she met and married Igor. After living in Germany for some time, the couple decided to move to Canada with dreams of opening their own business.

Georgijevic says with her background in the restaurant industry and with so many Germans calling Steinbach home, the decision was made to open a restaurant serving German food. But, rather than dive right into owning their own restaurant, the two decided to first test the waters with a food truck offering what are in fact Turkish kebabs, referred to as doners.

According to Georgijevic, operating a food truck was an eye opening experience. She says because of the limited space, they had to do a lot of the preparation outside the truck, which included renting bakery space. Yet, Georgijevic says it was a lot of fun.

"It was a lot of fun because there is a community to the food truck industry and we made a lot of really great friends that way," she says. "The best thing about it was you are always at a festival and when people are at a festival they are always in a good mood and so it was exciting and fun."

The food truck also allowed them to build up their clientele, while keeping down their overhead costs. But Georgijevic says right from the beginning, the plan was that the food truck would simply be a starting point to the eventual move to own their own restaurant. And in September of this year, that dream became reality, opening with a bang.

"Our first week was completely crazy," she says. "We knew people were waiting for us to open but we didn't know how many and how intensely they were waiting."

Georgijevic says growing their clientele in advance helped them to sell out of everything in the first two days. She notes it was a lot of familiar faces from their food truck days that visited early on, as well as their many friends and family members that call Steinbach home. Georgijevic says more than half of their customers today are German speaking.

According to the Business Development Bank of Canada, a small business is defined as one having fewer than 100 employees. And in fact, it says 97.9% of businesses in Canada are considered, small. Linda Peters, Executive Director for Steinbach Chamber of Commerce says Steinbach would closely follow the national trend. In fact, she says Steinbach was built on the success of small businesses.

Peters explains in today's world, businesses are looking to do more with less money. As competition intensifies, business owners are needing to be innovative and in some cases that means two businesses running independently under the same roof. And that is exactly what has happened with Iggy's Family Doner. The restaurant is sharing space with Old Church Bakery.

"The best thing about it for us is that because we share the space, we also share the costs of renting," explains Georgijevic.

She adds they are also in the process of handing their baking needs over to the bakery and in that way giving them business.

"Also I think we draw from some of their clients, they draw from some of our clients, it's a win-win situation," she says.

Georgijevic says the restaurant is still quite new and so it is difficult to know exactly how things will look in the future. But she is hopeful it will catch on and maybe they can open additional locations down the road.