Transcript
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Let’s talk about the question everybody wants to ask, but hardly anyone answers clearly. Okay. How much money can you actually make as a personal chef? Not vague ideas, not, it depends. I’m gonna break down for you in real numbers and I’ll share what I’ve made, what some of my students are making, and the real income potential you can tap into with the right service model so you can decide if this business is a good fit for you.
If you’ve ever wondered, can I really make good money doing this? Stay with me. We’re gonna get into it. Hey there, chef Shelly here. I’ve had a successful personal chef business for over 19 years, and when I’m not cooking for my own clients, I help passionate home cooks and burnt out pros. Build their own personal chef business that gives them freedom, income, joy, and you don’t have to have a commercial kitchen.
You don’t have to go to culinary school if you haven’t already. You don’t even have to work nights, weekends, or holidays or guests at every step of the way. You do need to know how to structure your [00:01:00] business, so let’s talk about how it can support the life you want, if it makes sense with the numbers, right?
So a lot of people assume that personal chefs don’t make very much money. I. Why is that? Sometimes people think this is just a side hustle, or maybe they think because we don’t work in restaurants, that they figure it can’t be that much. But here’s what they’re missing. This is a high value, high trust service.
- We are not selling food. It’s personal, it’s consistent. And when you do it right, it’s extremely profitable. The problem isn’t that the work doesn’t pay well. The problem is most people don’t know how to set up and price their services properly, so then they stay stuck doing underpriced gigs or doing work they don’t wanna do and burning out.
So let me show you what’s possible when you shift that. Let’s say you want to offer weekly personal chef services, also known as meal prep [00:02:00] services, right? Your client hires you to come in once a week. You cook several meals for them and stock their fridge. So if you price that at 300 plus a grocery reimbursement, which is on the lower side of average for this industry, and you have five weekly clients, that’s.
$300 times five clients is $1500 a week times four weeks is about $6,000 a month times 12 months is about $72,000 a year. And again, just to reiterate, that is not high, super end pricing. That is pretty standard average pricing, right? Many of my students are charging $350, $450 even more depending on if they live in extremely big cities where there’s a higher cost of living, if they have a lot of hospitality experience already, if they have a very niche cooking specialty, right? Some people are only cooking three days a week and they’re still bringing in 4-5K a month. [00:03:00] So remember too this, if you’re talking about personal chef services, AKA meal prep services isn’t restaurant hours.
This is during the day, during the week in a controlled environment. There’s no staff to deal with, there’s no inventory, there’s no hardly overhead, no commercial rent, basically no overhead. So that is the true beauty of the personal chef business model. So I said I was going to get specific. Let me share some real examples.
Myself, when I started part-time, I still hit full-time income pretty quickly. Once I was fully booked at the time for what I wanted, I was making over 6K a month, cooking just four days a week. I have a student who retired early and still wanted extra income and is now making 8-10K a month doing, weekly meal prep service clients, plus small caterings.
I have a student who was a home cook who doubted that she could even charge what professionals did, and she’s now fully [00:04:00] booked at $325 a cook day, working four days a week. I have another student who started no business background, got her first paying client within three weeks of starting in the academy and built to $4,000 a month part-time, like within two months.
So yes, this is absolutely a real business with real income potential, but only if you treat it like one. Now, a few things are going to affect your numbers.
First is your location. Honestly, pricing is gonna be different if you’re in a very small, very rural town versus if you’re in New York, LA, even bigger cities like Sacramento or Houston.
But let me tell you, it doesn’t matter what city you’re in, people everywhere pay for convenience, making their lives better home cooked meals. It is not relegated to the fancy millionaires at all. Another thing can affect it is how your services are structured. Meal prep [00:05:00] services, personal chef services is reoccurring income.
You get a client who wants it weekly. You have one client, but you’re cooking once a week, every week, four times a month, right? When you’re doing one off dinners, small caterings and stuff, that’s more of a hustle. You’re constantly having to get your next job. Each client only hires you once. Weekly clients for like meal prep services it’s what equals more freedom in your schedule, you’re cooking more than marketing. You’re not constantly on the hustle for that next job.
And then of course, your pricing strategy. Are you charging hourly? Are you including groceries? Are you undercharging because you’re nervous? This is the kind of stuff that kills your profit. Flat rate pricing for meal prep services is the key to good profitability.
And then finally, this is what it all really comes down to. It’s your mindset. If you don’t believe [00:06:00] that people will pay you well, you’re not going to charge well. You can’t listen to people, and by people I mean friends and family who mean well, but they just tell you “it’s too expensive”.
If someone who would never hire a personal chef, no matter how much it cost anyway, tells you that, they’re not the right person to give you feedback on your business. And I promise you, there are plenty of people out there who are happy to pay for exactly what you do.
So how much you can really make as a personal chef just sort of depends. But if you offer weekly personal chef services and you’re cooking three to five days a week, charging average rates you can make $3000-$7,000 a month consistently. If you’re an experienced hospitality pro and or you are offering small event catering, it’s very doable to make six figures a year if that’s what you want.
Plus, you’ll have more [00:07:00] freedom. You’ll be working fewer hours and you’ll have more control over your schedule than any restaurant job or any job job really, and you get to do what you love. For people who actually value it, the ceiling is higher than most people think, and the best part. You don’t need hundreds of clients.
You just need the right handful who are thrilled to have you in their kitchen each week. You can be cooking 20 days a month, month after month with only the same 10 clients.
If you want help figuring out your pricing and how to price your meal prep services, also known as personal chef services, I have a pricing report of what over 60 personal chefs are charging flat rate plus grocery reimbursement. It walks you through what city they’re in, what price they’re charged. It talks about flat rate and compares it to hourly and why that’s not what I recommend. You can comment the word pricing and I’ll drop the link for you, or I’ll also have the link in the video [00:08:00] description and make sure too that you subscribe to me on YouTube.
I share new videos every week to help you build a personal chef business that works for you because the clients are out there and they’re hungry for what you’re cooking.
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