The 10 Biggest Questions About Starting a Personal Chef Business
If I was starting a personal chef business from scratch today, these are the 10 questions I would want answered before I took my first client. These are the most common questions too that I get from emails and in YouTube comments and in DMs, through webinars
This isn’t just the questions I would want answered. This is questions I get on my YouTube channel comments, in webinars, in my Instagram DMs, through email
And I’m answering them all here for you today
Hey there. If we haven’t met before, I’m Chef Shelley. I’ve had a successful personal chef business for 20 years, and when I’m not cooking for my own clients,I help passionate cooks like you start your own personal chef business so you can get paid to cook on your own terms without killing yourself working restaurant hours for someone else, because you can absolutely get paid to do what you love, cook on your own terms
The first category falls under the umbrella of do I actually have what it takes to start a personal chef business? These are questions like,
What if I don’t have experience? You do not need restaurant experience to start a personal chef business. In reality, you just need to be a great cook. So you need cooking experience. But cooking in a restaurant does not prepare you to have a personal chef business. It does make you a better cook. That part will serve you.
So as long as you are an amazing cook and people love your food, that is the most expor- most important experience that you need to have.
The next one is, do I need culinary school before I can be a personal chef? And the answer is no. I didn’t go to culinary school. I’ve been a personal chef with a successful business for 20 years. Gordon Ramsay didn’t go to culinary school. I think we’re all calling him chef, right? So If you do, again, this kind of ties into the previous one.
If you don’t know how to cook, if you aren’t confident enough in your cooking, that is the experience you need. You do not have to get that through culinary school. There are many other paths to do that. You can be self-taught. You could take classes online. You can take classes from a local cooking school. Or again, you can learn at your grandma’s knee and now you’re 40 years old and you’ve been cooking for 30 years.
That is more than enough cooking skill
Culinary school also teaches you a lot of skills about working in restaurants which are not helpful. The two things you need, again, are to be passionate about cooking and very good at it, and to have the business skills. If you need help with the business skills, I’d love to invite you to join us inside the Personal Chef Business Academy.
That’s exactly what we do, is start successful personal chef businesses. Or if you have one already and you’re struggling to get fully booked, it’s complete training, community, and group coaching. There’s a link below the video. You can check it out. So another question I get a lot is, “How is this gonna kinda fit into my life?
What if I work full-time?” I talk to full-time people who wanna start this business, and what I always tell them is, “If you are working full-time five days a week, that means you have two days to yourself. If you take one personal chef client who’s weekly for weekly in-home meal prep services, that means you’re going to be working six days a week.
Is that something that you want to do?” Because think about it. If you have two clients, you would either have to do them in the same day, or you would have them on two days, and then you would be working seven days a week. So if you are working full-time, think about what you want your personal chef business to look like on top of that.
Do you want one weekly meal prep client, or do you want two catering events a month? What is the balance you want? You can absolutely have this on the side of a full-time business.
Another question I get is, “What if I live in a small town? I’m worried that there isn’t anybody here who would hire a personal chef.” Even if you want to cook one day a week every single week, that is one personal chef client, right, for weekly repeat meal prep services. So there is probably one person in your town who, no matter how small your town is, might be interested in that service. And if you do wanna have a full-time personal chef business, you do not need more than eight to 10 weekly repeat clients to have a fully booked six-figure business.
So do you think your town has one client if you wanna cook once a week, or eight to 12 clients if you think you want to cook full-time? And consider it that way.
Next question, how much time does this actually take? If you’re starting your personal chef business, the amount of time you put into it just kind of determines how fast you’re going to get started. So the best thing to do is think about when do you want to have your first client, and then work backwards from there. I’ll put a link below to my business startup checklist. That’s a good thing you can download. It’s free, and it’ll just walk you through, and then you can kind of see it would take me this long to do this, this long to do that, and you can back into how long it takes.
You can spend one hour a week doing this and start your business in six months, or you can spend 10 hours a week and be ready to take a client in 30 days. It just depends on how you wanna do it
The next set of question kind of comes into, I don’t know what to do. Like, oh, the one I hear the most is probably, “I don’t know how to get clients.
What if I don’t know?” Well, all you need to do, as you’ve heard in all my other videos, is have conversations with people. But before you have those conversations with people, you need to have your services set up, know how to do them well, and then know how to have a conversation with someone, and that means knowing how your service works and what your pricing is.
Those are the main things you need to have. Then it just gets into having those conversations, whether you wanna do it in real life with people, or whether you wanna do it online with people. There are a million different places, and I will drop the link below to my 25 different ways that you can get personal chef clients
I hear from a lot of people who, “What if I don’t have a website?” Please, please, please, for the love of all that is holy, do not wait to start your business until you have a website. A website is like a billboard. It is not going to actively get you clients in the beginning. Nobody is gonna go to your website except for the people you send to your website. So if it’s too hard for you to set up or you don’t wanna pay someone to set up a website for you, just set up an Instagram or a Facebook page for free, and it’s much easier to get started with that.
You do not need to have a website to get started, or possibly ever
Another question is, what services should I do? Well, it depends on what you wanna do. The main two services that personal chefs offer are either small boutique event catering that we can handle either by ourselves or with just one or two people helping us, whether that’s a multi-course sit-down dinner for four people or eight people, or a small buffet for maybe 20 people, whatever you can handle, small catering like that.
And weekly personal chef services, also known as weekly in-home meal prep services, where you’re preparing a week’s worth of dinners or however many for a repeat client, whether that’s weekly, every other week, or even once a month. Those are pretty much the two services to start with, and you can do them both or choose one or the other.
It depends on what you want. If you want recurring clients where you’re spending more time cooking, then you are trying to get jobs, and you’re cooking on the regular, getting paid on the regular with the same schedule, that’s personal chef services. If you love planning events, doing special event food, working with clients on those special occasions, that’s really exciting, that’s catering.
Again, you can do either or both.
Next, “How long is it really gonna take before I get my first client?” Honestly, you could tell someone right now. You could pick a price and go tell someone that you’re doing weekly meal prep services in the client’s home for $350 plus groceries right now and start talking to people.
Now, if there’s something stopping you, like you don’t know how to do a personal chef service, cooking service day,
or you don’t have an invoice or a food questionnaire to onboard the client with and things like that, then those are the things that you need to do first before you could get your first client. But in theory, you could walk out and tell someone today that you do personal chef services which are in-home, repeat meal prep services for the clients for $350 plus groceries and see what happens
Next, what if I make mistakes? Like what if it doesn’t work? What if I mess this up?
You’re probably going to make some mistakes, right? That’s just part of the process, and it’s especially part of the process when you’re doing something new that you might not have done before, and that’s okay. There is nothing that’s going to happen that’s going to stop the world from rotating, right?
Now, if you are not wanting to make mistakes because you wanna get to paying clients as fast as you can, and you don’t have time to mess around with figuring things out and learning and making mistakes, then you might wanna consider joining the Personal Chef Business Academy, where there’s a complete roadmap in setting up your business, learning the services, and getting paying clients, and getting to fully booked without having to figure out things on your own or making those mistakes.
And you can get a link with more information right below this video
Now, the biggest takeaway from all these questions that most future personal chefs have is that these aren’t actually barriers, they’re just assumptions, you know? They assume they need more experience. They assume they need culinary school. They assume they need a website or perfect circumstances before they can get started.
But when you actually look at proof of successful personal chefs, how they actually build their businesses, how they actually start getting their first paying clients, and how they get fully booked, it’s much simpler than people expect. You just start with the skills you already have. You focus on serving people well, learning what you need to learn, and taking action, that consistent action, instead of waiting until everything feels perfect so you can feel certain, right?
If any one of these questions has been keeping you stuck, I’d love to hear from you. Let me know in the comments. Which questions have been going through your head and are actually your biggest obstacle to getting your personal chef business started? I’m telling you because once you identify what’s really holding you back, it’s much easier to move forward.
And if you’re ready to take your first action steps, watch the next video, Your First Personal Chef Client is Waiting: Here’s How to Find Them, and I’ll walk you through the practical steps to start finding clients and building momentum in your personal chef business.
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