Meet Derrick and Brittney Williams

Hi Derrick and Brittney, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
We didn’t get our work ethic from anyone or anything. We were simply born with the drive to be successful. Both my husband and I have been driven from a young age. We don’t come from a success story or family built around success. We are the success, and we still haven’t quite met our vision.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
Currently my husband and I are the owners of Bitty’s Southern Kitchen LLC. We started this food truck in 2020. Our start didn’t exactly go as we had intended due to Covid, so we paused it until may of 2022 after the birth of our 4th child. Being in the food truck business is super hard work and it has put a toll on us. With him being a military veteran it has affected him the most. This year 2023, I told my husband to stop abandoning his God given gift of music. I told him God sent me a message for him. That was to take our growing social media page and start using that to promote his music @Dbe Love on YouTube. With his 20 plus years of expertise and amazing musical background from playing percussion in the Marching 200 at Ribault High School back in the mid 90’s to his brief tenure with the Marching 100 at FAMU. He also aided in bringing his band mates a successful championship back in 1997 and 1998.

Bitty’s Southern Kitchen is a gem that we work because we LOVE feeding people our amazing food but we both understand that making a career of it isn’t something that is sustainable in the future. Our customers love our food. It’s some of the best southern food we could serve. We’ve touched so many souls from Mr. Vernon at the Tractor Supply with tears coming from his eyes saying “This fried chicken took me back to my childhood, it’s just as good as my grandmothers” to Ms. Janet saying “Bitty’s, this corn bread, and collard greens was so good, it made we wanna slap my son.”

With all that being said, a career in music will be sustainable. My husband has already released his album “Maturation” by RoadWest in 2019 and also a single titled “Love Christmas” the same year available on Spotify and Apple Music. If all the iconic celebrities like P Diddy, and Patti Labelle can do both music and food so can we. So let’s do this!

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Let’s first say that age should never dictate whether or not you continue to pursue your dreams. Also, for as long as there’s breath in your body you should never stop being your vision of success. The end game should only be the continuation of your drive to success. We never allow negative affirmations to dictate our day or our life. When we feel down we get up. Right now my husband has major problems from being a military veteran. He has jumped out of planes and was stabbed. His body aches daily, and I never know because he just can’t stop and will not stop until he is successful. I can’t help but be a strong woman to continually lift up this strong man. Our love and family is a driving force for us.

Any advice for folks feeling overwhelmed?
When we get overwhelmed which we do, we look around at the success that we have achieved and we tell ourselves we didn’t come this far to lose it all. We also think about our daughters. We owe them. We will never be okay with them living the life we had growing up, not having much. There were nights without electricity and no food. For me, moving from home to home living with a single parent was extremely stressful. Not only that, we both lost our fathers at a young age. His father was killed in a fatal head on car accident by men that overdosed on cocaine in a stolen car, and I myself lost my dad to a gun shot to the head. Both our mothers struggled raising us on their own and that alone motivates us. We know together we have strength.