111823 E – top 3 biz owner skills you need to be successful
[00:00:00] There is a huge difference between being an employee And having your own business. And I think this is where a lot of passionate cooks really end up failing. Is not knowing the difference and not handling it properly. Or learning what they need to do properly. And I want to help you so that you don’t fall into this same trap.
Starting your personal chef business. Hey there, Chef Shelly here. If we’re just meeting for the first time, I’ve had a successful personal chef business for over 15 years. And when I’m not cooking for my own clients, I help passionate cooks just like you start your own personal chef business so you can get paid to do what you love on your own terms.
If that sounds spectacular, be sure to subscribe and hit that little bell so that you never miss a weekly video. So as an employee, You just get to have a sort of level, a certain level of, let’s call it [00:01:00] detachment, right? You go, you do your job. Yes, you’re proud. You’re a hard worker. You do a good job and whatever.
But you go home. You’re not staying awake at night worrying about the revenue or the company’s direction or the competition or whatever, right? Sometimes, you know, you’re just not feeling it and you might just kind of phone it in on a Friday or… Nobody really cares if you leave early, right? You get your sick days, you get your vacation days, whatever.
You turn your phone off at five and on the weekends. You know, they don’t own you. That’s your time. Well, let me tell you, all that goes out the window when you are the business owner, for sure. First of all, let’s talk about decisions. As the business owner, you get to make all the decisions. You might be making decisions as an employee, but as the [00:02:00] business owner, you make all the really important decisions about what the business is, what it does, how it runs.
Everything from, you know, big decisions to little day to day stuff. One of the places I see people really fall down on this is just Deciding on their pricing, like for weekly meal prep services. They can’t decide a price. They waffle and go back and forth. Maybe they finally decide on something, then they change it a couple more times.
The word it’s too high, they’re worried it’s too low. Then they start talking to people and somebody tells ’em. too high and they can’t afford it. So then they drop their prices or they decide spur of the moment to give them a discount. And it’s just a hot mess. So one of the most important skills in being an entrepreneur, being the business owner is making decisions.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t ever change it. That’s [00:03:00] not what this is about. But this means you make a decision, you stick to it until you get data in the business that informs you whether you should change it or not. And I’m telling you, one person telling you that your meal prep services are too expensive and they can’t afford it, It is not enough data to change your prices.
There are many, many, many, many, many times more people that will not want to pay for meal prep services from a personal chef than there are that will. But let me tell you right now, just in case you’re worried about it, there are plenty of people willing to pay. So do not use that as an excuse to stop yourself.
Just a little side note there. So, second thing that is a crucial skill to being the business owner is honoring your commitments. And, not just honoring your commitments in general, but honoring your commitments to yourself and your business. Because what I [00:04:00] see happen to a lot of people, and don’t get me wrong, I’m like this too, this is a very, very human thing.
If we tell someone else we’re going to be somewhere at a certain time, we’ll get there at a certain time. If we tell someone else we’re putting it in the mail, or someone else gives us a deadline, we will do it by then, right? It comes down to like, okay great, I have some time next week, I’m going to work on getting some clients.
And then comes that day, and you’re kind of not feeling it, so maybe you don’t do it. Or, let’s say you have two hours to work and you find yourself, you’re supposed to be like creating posts for Instagram and you find yourself scrolling, scrolling and the next thing you know it’s time to pick a kid up from school or do whatever and you didn’t get anything done.
It’s very human nature that it is easier to honor our commitments to other people than it is to [00:05:00] honor commitments to ourselves, to making those decisions. Honoring that commitment that we said we were going to do and then do it. And that might be, it is for me, a skill that you need to work on and develop.
A third huge thing in being a business owner that is different than being an employee is being responsible. Taking the responsibility for what happens in your business. And what this means is… Taking responsibility for the failures. If you’ve been working on your personal chef business for a while and trying to get it started and trying to get it off the ground and it hasn’t happened, where is it that you can see it is your responsibility?
That the, the effect of not having gotten enough clients yet. [00:06:00] Is coming from you, not the economy, not the area, not the whatever, but lays with you as the business owner. This is a huge and difficult one. But then finally, here’s a little bonus one. It is important that you take time to celebrate your wins.
Having your own business can be really hard sometimes, and it is easy for us when we have a goal that we want to get to, like a certain number of clients or a certain amount of income a month or whatever, that instead of celebrating and really taking a moment to take responsibility for all your hard work, everything you’ve done, how you showed up when you didn’t want to, the work that you’ve done to get these clients, to build this business, to get it where it is now, even if You want it to be farther along than it is, it is important to take time to celebrate those wins Instead of just immediately moving on to the next one like oh, I’m making 2, 000 a month great now I need to make 4, [00:07:00] 000 a month or great now.
I have five clients now. I need three more clients take a minute and Celebrate your work. So all these things, you know, they don’t happen just by magic I don’t say them you watch this and then you’re like Oh, okay. I’ll just do that. God, I wish it worked that way in my experience and I hope you’re different.
That would be great. But in case you’re not, I just want you to know I am right there with you. I don’t just wake up and decide that I’m going to honor my commitment to myself and my business from now on. And then I go out and plan my calendar and I work when I say I’m going to work and I never procrastinate again and I get all my stuff done and I slay all day and conquer the coffee or whatever and the hustle lingo inspirational bullshit of the day is, right?
And then it magically happens and I have exactly the revenue I want and I’m making [00:08:00] all the money and I have all the clients and stuff. Nope. Well, in my experience, for me personally, that is not the way it happens. The way it actually happens for me is that I decide, okay, like for planning my week out so I know how much time I have to, you know, spend on different parts of my business I need to work on.
I say I’m going to do my weekly plan on Saturday mornings. And then what happens is, client paperwork takes like an hour and a half longer than I thought it would. And then it’s Saturday, I get distracted by the kids, and then I need to make lunch. And then I have to do the dishes. And then there’s some house stuff I wanted to get done, and then it’s all of a sudden date night.
God, where did the day go, right? And then on Sunday, maybe I had a couple glasses of wine Saturday night, and I’m moving a little slow. And then I wake up Monday, and I look at my calendar, and [00:09:00] And I never did my dang calendar. So Monday I end up running from one thing to another and I feel frazzled and unorganized and I don’t get done what I want to get done.
So I get mad at myself and then Tuesday comes and I do my calendar Tuesday, but so maybe the next week what happens is. I get my calendar done on Saturday, like I say I’m going to, and my week starts off great. Monday, I’m ready to go. Everything is so much better and organized. And then on Tuesday, I am feeling like a boss, and I am so proud and overconfident that I decide to treat myself to a little time off, and I get kind of distracted with some fun stuff like a new book or TikTok.
Guilty. G A C. And then I run out of time and then Tuesday I don’t get done what I meant to get done. Or… Maybe it’s one of those weeks where I have a thousand appointments and I can’t even get work done on my business [00:10:00] that week and I get pissed off at myself. Sometimes on the other hand, it really goes great.
I plan, I get shit done and it just all works the way I think that it’s supposed to, right? So I just try to hang on to that feeling to remind myself, that’s why I want to do it. I don’t spend a whole bunch of time. beating myself up for the failures when things go wrong, because they do the F ups, the blow offs, the other stuff I focus on when I did plan.
What did my week look like when I was focused? Why did it work out that way? If I got a lot done, what happened? What contributed to that? And then I try to incorporate that and recreate it the next week. And over time I get A little bit better each week, right? You don’t have to start out at 100 percent and never fail again.
That is [00:11:00] not the way being human works. You just start and then get 1 percent better every time. It is a journey. We are all still gonna be human and that means… Never being perfect, but always working to get better. So again, you don’t have to be perfect at all this stuff already if you want to have your own personal chef business.
Just be working on them and getting better. They are important. They’re never going to be perfect. If you need to work on improving your organization and your meal prep system for clients, you can click the link right by this video and download my free guide. That’ll definitely be a step. forward to helping you getting your meal prep system down.
And there’s a link again right by this video where you can get it because I’m telling you clients are out there and they’re hungry for what you’re cooking. So get that practice in and get improving at being the business owner.
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