It's 11 p.m. on a Saturday and Eduardo Arroyo is almost ready to go out, he just has to make sure all 250 drinks have been packed in his 24-foot-long van.

Arroyo and his business partner, Adrian Perez, need to be prepared for their night because once they reach 438 Stonemill Rd. they'll be there for a while. It's the same place they go every weekend from 11 p.m. until 4 a.m., grilling steak and taking

orders at their late-night sandwich

venture, The Monchon. Working

until 5 a.m. isn't every college student's dream, but these capitalists

haven't tired of it during the past 10 months.

"This was not anybody but us," electrical engineering graduate student Arroyo said. "We were in this entrepreneurship dream, that's what pushed us to do it."

MBA student Perez mentioned the idea of opening a sandwich shop with a Puerto Rican influence two years ago to his then-acquaintance Arroyo. Together they invested $1,500 and began what they said has been the most ironic learning experience

of their life.

UD first had to OK what was then just two tables and a grill under a canopy. They allowed The Monchon to set up in the parking lot of the recently-closed Rudy's Fly-Buy.

"We were outside of the original student-run business that had gone bankrupt," Arroyo said.

After a UD and City of Dayton taxation permit, only the health department

was left.

"[The inspector] said, 'I trust you guys but there's one problem: you're going to need a four-compartment sink'," Arroyo said. "We thought, 'outside'?"

It was the beginning of the partners

solving the seemingly impossible.

An eBay search led them to a pedal-powered portable sink.

The Monchon opened November 2007 and hasn't stopped growing. It has the partners working from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. on the sandwich joint that's open from 12 a.m. to 3 a.m., selling sandwich and drink combos for $4.50.

"Every Sunday we meet in my room and say, 'What will we improve

on this week?'" Arroyo said. "We have the desire to keep innovating

and improving."

There have been times when that seemed impossible, Perez said. They've had to successfully make warm sandwiches outside in freezing

weather, get a 10,000-pound industrial van from California to Ohio in order to move the business inside, and have had to calm down hundreds of students holding fake free Monchon coupons.

Someone had gone door-to-door handing out "free" sandwich coupons,

perhaps a "bad prank," Perez speculated. Arroyo has a crumpled copy of the coupon in his desk reminding

him that he and his favorite entrepreneur are decades apart, but Walt Disney's story is not too different

from the one he's part of.

"Customers copied tickets to the entrance of [Disney's] park," Arroyo said, recounting the tale he came across on the same day his coupons surfaced. "He had to close the park entrance and didn't reopen for years.

"Walt Disney is my personal idol when it comes to entrepreneurship. He was a man who had a vision. When you've got a vision sometimes no one can see it but you."

Arroyo and Perez's main goal is not to make the most money possible,

though they had a return investment of a month-and-a-half and have bought their food van for $20,000. Their hope for the sandwich shop is to generate student jobs and pass on the ideas of desire and entrepreneurship

to others.

"How many millions of ideas are out there?" Arroyo said. "Millions. Why don't they work? Perseverance and hard work weren't there."

For these two, perhaps their most blatant example of perseverance

was in February during a fierce snow and ice storm. They closed only Friday night and spent two hours on Saturday shoveling, positive that with desire eventually comes success.

"Domino's was closed, Milano's was closed, we were standing there in a snowstorm under a canopy," Arroyo said. "We sold 70 sandwiches

that night."