[00:00:00] If you love to cook and everyone’s always telling you how delicious your food is and how great you are, so maybe you’ve been thinking about starting a personal chef business so you can get paid to do what you love. But you might be making this mistake if you’re thinking that that is enough to create a successful personal chef business.
[00:00:21] What if I told you that being a great cook isn’t the thing that separates someone who’s successful with a fully booked personal chef business from everyone who struggles? Seriously, why do two personal chefs with the same cooking skills end up with completely different clients? One stays fully booked with great people who stay with them for the long term, and another one struggles to get inquiries, always needing more revenue, not able to get booked month after month.
[00:00:57] If you’ve ever wondered what makes the difference so that you can make sure you’re one of the people getting clients, this is the video for you. Today I’m gonna show you why it isn’t talent, it isn’t how great a cook you are, it isn’t even if you went to culinary school and have restaurant experience, it isn’t even if you can put great pictures on Instagram, it’s not even luck that separates successful personal chefs from the ones who struggle.
[00:01:23] By the end of this video, you’re gonna understand the one thing that actually determines who builds a thriving personal chef business and how you can make sure that you do.
[00:01:32] Hey, 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 just like you start your own personal chef business, whether you want one weekly client or a fully booked load and making six figures, because you can absolutely get paid to do what you love on your own terms.
[00:01:51] One thing I’ve noticed that people often focus on is improving the wrong things, and before we dive into that, if you’re ready to have a fully booked personal chef business, whether you just want two weekly clients or six figures, I’m doing a free live training that shows you exactly how to set it up and what successful personal chefs do differently to get clients. I’ll walk you through the whole path that I do, that my successful students do, you can get that link right below the video
[00:02:19] All right, back to it. So in the beginning, we often think that it’s talent, cooking talent, that is gonna make the difference between who’s successful and who’s not, who gets clients, who gets fully booked While you absolutely need to be a great cook to know how to prepare delicious meals consistently, talent alone for cooking is not the differentiator for having a successful personal chef business.
[00:02:45] Once you reach a level where you can confidently cook for clients, your cooking skills are not the main factor that determines your success
[00:02:52] And again, like I say all the time, culinary school is great if you have that. Restaurant experience helps some skills that transfer over, but none of that is a requirement for building a successful personal chef business. Most clients aren’t gonna ask where you went to school. They’re just looking for someone who they can trust, who understands their needs, who communicates professionally, who’s consistent and reliable, and delivers a service that makes their life easier.
[00:03:21] That’s it. As far as cooking, you know, restaurant work can help you learn, speed and organization and efficiency, and those are useful, but running your own business is very different from working in someone else’s restaurant. One teaches you how to execute within an established business according to someone else’s rules. You just do what you’re told. The other requires you to set up your own business, to learn how to get clients, to make all the decisions yourself, to make the mistakes and learn from them. So they’re really two completely different skill sets.
[00:03:56] And a lot of people also think they have to be on social media and get a ton of followers before they’ll be able to get enough clients. The reality is there are tons of fully booked personal chefs who did it without Facebook, without Instagram. Social media can support your business. You can get booked doing it, but that isn’t what determines whether people hire you, and it is 100% not the only place to find clients. If you don’t wanna do social, you do not have to do social.
[00:04:24] A lot of people think the personal chefs who are fully booked already knew the right people. They had a big network, wealthy friends, or someone who was handing them clients. When I was starting, and I followed a local personal chef, that was actually how they got started. So they did not have a lot of useful information for me on how to get clients because they got out of culinary school and were fully booked from friends and family. So that’s usually a real outlier. That is not the case for 99% of us who start a personal chef business
[00:04:59] [00:05:00] most people start exactly where you are. Very few connections, not surrounded by people who will hire a weekly personal chef. We build our network just one relationship at a time, getting out there by either being on social media or being out locally and meeting people. You build your network by serving clients well, get your reputation built, letting word of mouth do its job,
[00:05:26] we’re not successful because of who we knew. Most people get successful because they consistently put themselves out there and get in front of the right people eventually, even if that’s not your first degree of network.
[00:05:41] And then sometimes there’s luck. It’s easy to look at a successful personal chef if you hear about someone who’s making six figures or fully booked, or maybe they do have a huge Instagram following, and assume that they were in the right place at the right time or they went viral or whatever.
[00:05:58] While everybody can experience a lucky break now and then, consistently getting clients isn’t the result of luck long-term. It’s the result of making decisions in your business, taking consistent action, following a process that you know will lead to getting the results. One of the favorite sayings I’ve ever heard is, “The harder I work, the luckier I get,” and that is 100% true.
[00:06:25] Really, the personal chefs who build successful, fully booked businesses aren’t the greatest cooks in the world. They aren’t always the ones with culinary school degrees or years of restaurant experience, a huge social media following, coming into it with a network of a bunch of rich people, or simply getting lucky.
[00:06:45] What separates successful personal chefs from ones who struggle is stop just thinking like the cook, the artist, the creator, and start thinking like a business, like a business owner. The people who consistently get clients know who they serve, how to communicate the value of their service, and how to consistently attract the right clients, and that’s what creates consistent results.
[00:07:13] If you’re tired of trying to piece everything together from YouTube videos, Facebook groups, and ChatGPT, join me for my free live training. I’ll show you the path I wish someone had shown me when I started and how to focus on the things that’ll actually move you forward so that you can get clients and get paid to do what you love, cook.
[00:07:33] The links below this video, we’re going to go through your services, getting clients, everything you need to do to get ready for that client rush that’s coming when school starts so you can be ready ahead of time . Because the clients are out there and they’re hungry for what you’re cooking
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