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[00:00:00] If you are flipping through a binder or digging through piles of handwritten notes, even if you’re having to scroll through screenshots on your phone, trying to find that one recipe you need for your cook day. Let me save you some serious time, stress, and embarrassment. Today I’m gonna show you how to organize your recipes like the pro you are, or want to be using a simple digital system that makes your personal chef business way easier and easier, means faster, means more profitable.

Hey there, I’m Chef Shelly. I’ve been a personal chef for over 19 years, and now while I’m cooking for my own clients, I help passionate cooks just like you. Turn what you love. Cooking into a business where you get paid to do what you love with all the freedom, the flexibility, the income that you want on your own terms without restaurant hours, culinary [00:01:00] school or burnout.

And if you’re serious about getting paid to cook, you need more than just good food. You need systems. So let’s start with your recipe collection. First off, why does it even matter? Why does recipe organization matter? And now listen, I love paper as much as the next person. I’m not even gonna tell you how many magazine subscriptions in addition to online membership for recipes, I still have.

But when you’re cooking professionally. Slow times disorganization and recipe chaos is gonna cost you. It costs you time, whether you’re scrambling to remember what was it that client liked or didn’t like, it costs you and professionalism, whether you’re flipping through pages or screenshots in somebody’s picture, in some pictures in someone’s kitchen, and they see your unorganization.

And probably most importantly, it costs you in your sanity when you’re [00:02:00] rewriting menus from scratch every week and trying to remember things and keeping things in your head, it just takes a toll. So here’s what I tell students in my personal Chef Business Academy. If you wanna look like a pro, you need to cook like a pro.

And pros don’t wing it with disorganized, random recipe chaos. Every week they use systems. So let’s talk about going digital with your recipe collection and why It can be a total game changer. You just can’t run as an efficient a business. On paper, it works fine for cooking fast weeknight dinners. It even works for Sunday dinner at home for the family.

But when you’ve got multiple clients in a week and you’re juggling their preferences, their allergies, their prep times, the cook times, the equipment that you need, everything else, you need something searchable, shareable, repeatable, [00:03:00] digital recipes, let you find what you need instantly. Copy and tweak.

Keep notes on what worked and didn’t work. Replicate it across different clients. Access everything from your phone, your tablet, your laptop, or wherever. No more. Rewriting, reprinting, scribbling, losing it, having something happen to it, ruin that perfect recipe that you had weeks ago. Going digital, I promise, will make you faster, more organized, and all that makes you way more confident in your client’s kitchen.

So what do I use and recommend? Believe it or not, it’s a free app and it’s called Copy Me that it’s simple, it’s powerful, and it’s made for people who are cooking like we do. You can save recipes from any website in one click. You can edit them and format them the way you want. You can view it on your phone or a computer and you can print them.

Plus you can create custom tags so that you [00:04:00] can get your recipes organized in any way you need to. This can be really important if you’ve got one of the more obscure cooking specialties, like maybe lectin free, or you create a lot of your own ingredient. In addition to things like gluten free or tagging them by clients, so you can pull one client’s recipe favorites all at the same time, and copy me that you can even create the weekly menus and generate a grocery list for ’em.

Honestly, it’s fantastic. It’s what I use for all my clients and for my home cooking recipes too. And once you get the hang of it. It’s very intuitive and easy to use. It will save you a ton amount of time, and there is a premium version that if you do want the upgrade, it’s. Like $20 for life. It’s not one of those things that you have to pay a monthly fee to use over and over and over, or risk losing your recipes.

It is honestly the easiest, [00:05:00] most affordable thing out there. So here’s just a super simple recipe system to get you started first. Get started. Choose your very top 10 entrees, your go-tos, your ones you know how to cook, you know, everybody loves, and put them into copy me that. Now listen, not the fancy stuff, not what might work someday, not the things you wanna try.

Start with the meals that you already cook well and that you know people love. Then as you put them in, start building out your tags. Tags, like kid friendly, freeze as well. Client, Mary. Start with quality, not quantity. Don’t do yourself the disservice of just putting ’em all in as fast as you can, thinking you’re gonna go back later and organize it.

Spoiler alert, you’re not gonna go back later and organize it. Ask me how I know next, build them into client collections. So as you’re working with clients, start making [00:06:00] sure that you’re tagging recipes for them so that way when they tell you their five selections for their meal prep service, it’s really easy for you to go in and instead of even.

Searching each recipe and pulling it up. ’cause let’s say they want lasagna. You have five different versions of lasagna you make. Then as you have a client who’s allergic to garlic, you have that one as a client who likes you to use cashew ricotta instead of dairy ricotta. You have that one. All these iterations.

Make it more difficult to search individually, so when you tag ’em for the client, when someone has their weekly service, you can instantly pull up all that client’s recipes and build from there. No reinventing the wheel every week or searching for something like your Indiana Jones, right? Finally, add as you go.

Every time you. Come across you create. You [00:07:00] make a new recipe, whether it’s from a cookbook or online, or you create it, add it. Every time a client raves about a recipe, tag it. Every time you tweak a dish, update it. After a few weeks of doing this, you’ll have a curated recipe collection that is fast, flexible, and completely customized to you, your clients, and your business.

So here’s your homework. Sign up for, copy me that. Start by adding your 10 best entree recipes and start tagging and organizing like a pro. This is one of those behind the scene moves that your clients aren’t going to see, but it really separates the hobby cooks. From the paid professionals. If you want help building more systems like this, whether it’s doing weekly meal prep services, or getting clients and getting fully booked, you can work with me a number of different ways.

First, you can grab my fee free guide on how to [00:08:00] do weekly meal prep services for clients. You can get the link below this video or just DM me the word meal prep guide on Instagram or Facebook, and I can send it to you. Then you can watch the dozens and dozens and dozens of other videos I have on YouTube if you like to DIY, or if you want more personal help, you wanna get your business started with the support of someone who’s been doing it successfully for over 19 years.

You don’t want to do the trial and error. You want to get to the. Fun part that getting paid to cook by clients who love your food fast. I’d love to welcome you into the Personal Chef Business Academy and work with you one-on-one on building your personal chef business. You can find a link to that below too, or again, just DM me because the clients are out there and they’re hungry for what you’re cooking.

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