Transcript
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[00:00:00] If you’re struggling with getting started with your personal chef business or if you’ve stalled out, stuck on a name, or figuring out how to do services, or maybe you’ve just gotten confused at everything you had to do and you’re starting just to be afraid that it’s just not for you, I get it. Lots of people have felt exactly like that.
And it’s no wonder, right? With so many things you have to decide on. Well, I’ve worked with enough people to know that are trying to start a personal chef business that I have distilled it down to three simple questions that when you answer them for yourself, it’ll give you the exact direction of what you need to do to get where you want to go.
So
you want to know how to create a personal chef business you love? You just need to build it backwards. I know it sounds weird. Don’t worry. We’re going to be going through it step by step right now. Hey there, chef Shelly here. I’ve had a successful personal chef business for over 15 [00:01:00] years and when I’m not cooking for my own clients, I’m here helping 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, All the freedom, all the joy, all the money that you want.
If that sounds amazing to you, subscribe, like this video, and be sure to hit the little bell so that you never miss one of my weekly videos, building your business backwards. Okay. What this really means is figuring out exactly what you want in your business at the end. Because that shows you exactly how to make the plan to get there.
So, to kind of put this into an image that will help you understand, imagine that you want to go on a trip to a new exciting place, and you keep getting ready to go, and you even get in the car, and then you start to drive, but you don’t know exactly how to get there because you haven’t been there before and you can’t use GPS because you don’t [00:02:00] know the address and you’re not sure what it’s called.
So you figure, you know what, you better do some more planning. So you stop and you go home and you pack some more stuff and then you get back in the car and you start driving and you maybe even get a little bit further than you did, but then you realize, you know what? I think I figured out where I want to go, but now I’m not sure if I should go the freeway or should I go surface streets?
And so you go back home again and then you do some more planning and do some more packing, but now you’re getting frustrated, right? You just want to go on vacation. So maybe you like talk to a friend or google around and then you just pick a place even though you’re getting all this contradicting information.
Fine, I’m just gonna go there. So you get back in the car and this time you know where you’re going but you still haven’t been there before and the road is a little bumpy and it takes a little longer than you thought it would and you realize at some point you took a [00:03:00] wrong turn but then you finally get there where you’re going.
And then you realize, what? This isn’t what I wanted. I thought I wanted to go skiing. I thought I felt like snow and a cabin and stuff. But you know what? This isn’t what I wanted. I wanted to be on a beach. I wanted to be warm. I wanted to hear the ocean. I wanted a cocktail. Okay. This is kind of a funny example, I know, but it illustrates then when you want to go somewhere you’ve never been before, doing something you might have never done before in a way you’ve never done before, the best thing to do is to start with what you want at the end and work backwards to get there.
So, Think about back to that example. If you would have been to a beach before and you would have been skiing before and you decided you wanted to go on vacation, you’d think about it and just decide exactly what you felt like at that time. I want to lay around and be warm enough. So I’m bringing me drinks.
I want to go to a [00:04:00] cozy cabin with some snow where I’m skiing hard all day and relaxing at night in front of the fire. Right? Beach mountain. So either way, if you’re going to the mountain, you know, So, you live by the mountain, you’re going to drive by the mountain. Or maybe you know you want to go to the beach, the beach is really far away, you know you’re going to have to fly, right?
Whatever. You can figure out how to get there. You know the steps, but again, this can be hard when you’re starting a business if you’ve never started a business before. So maybe you don’t have a hospitality background or all those things, and so the simplest questions about figuring out what you want to do can be hard.
So, the first question is How much do you want to work? Now this should be a pretty easy one, right? If you have a full time job and you’re not ready to leave and you know you’re only going to be able to cook like One day a week, probably on the weekends, doing this on the side, then you know it’s going to be like that.
Or maybe you want your cooking business to be a passion project, or you just know you want [00:05:00] it to be part time, or you just only need part time money, right? So exactly how many days does that mean? When your business is the perfect business that you’re dreaming about and that you want, how many days a week are you actually going to be cooking?
right? And I’m not talking about again. This is the end. I’m not talking about at the beginning when you’re planning and you’re starting and there’s a lot of other things you do and paperwork and stuff. Not talking about that. I’m talking about when you’re in the business getting paid to cook, how much are you going to be cooking?
Right? So if you have like full time wants, that might be, you know, you’re going to be working five times a week again or part time. So then think about when do you want to work? If you have a job and you’re doing it on the side, are you working Monday through Friday? Well, then you know you only have Saturday and Sunday, or maybe you’re going to try to leverage after work, but you really need to think about that because you probably can’t and don’t want to work seven days a week.
Right? [00:06:00] And maybe you know, you don’t want to work weekends or maybe you know that you’re probably going to need to do both. Right? So. So when you’re,
that’s question number one, how much and when do you want to work when you have the dream personal chef business that you want to have? Now, the second question. is how much money do you want to make? Right? If this is on the side of your nine to five, you just want something that makes you happy and it’s not about the money.
Or maybe this is just part time to bring in some money. That’s one thing. If you want a full time income for you, you need to know exactly what that is. So think about how much money you want. Should be, again, pretty easy. But then finally, the third, is what kind of services, then, do you want to offer? And there’s a reason that this question is actually last.
Because, at the end of [00:07:00] the day, you might find this question is the least important because it is driven by the first two answers. Let me explain. Let’s say you want to do catering. You love that party vibe. You want to do appetizer parties. You want to do dinner parties. It’s just your favorite thing, right?
Let’s say you wanna do catering, okay? So when you look at catering, the things that you need to consider are as a business of one, or just with a little help. You’re not gonna have a huge commercial kitchen, you’re not gonna have this huge catering business. The majority of catering that you would do is gonna be nights, weekends, and holidays.
So is that a deal for you? Remember in the beginning when we talked about how much you wanna work and when is there a reason? that you can’t or won’t work weekends? Do you want to be your busiest when it’s the holiday season or knowing that you’re missing out if you don’t take holiday jobs? That’s when a [00:08:00] lot of catering happens.
Are you okay with being really slow sometimes and then really busy sometimes? And most people only get catering every once in a while. So are you happy doing a lot of marketing to keep catering jobs coming in? Now, if none of that was a deal breaker for you and you still want to cater, just think about how much catering would you need to do to get you to how much money you want to make, right?
That third or that second important question, if you’re doing this on the side of a full time job and you just want it as a once in a while thing, that’ll be a lot of fun. That’s great. That’s easy. If you want this to be a passion project or a part time money or whatever, then again, it’s not that intense a deal to figure this out, but if you are wanting to make full time income from catering.
really look at what type of gigs are you going to need to get? How many are you going to need to do? [00:09:00] What kind of profit are you going to make on each job? Realistically with the type of cooking and catering you want to do, what is the profit margin that you can have and what kind of marketing are you going to need to do so you can keep those jobs consistently coming in all the time or Leveraging the busy season as much as you can to get you through those slow times, right?
So another service to consider then is personal chef services, also known as meal prep services. Now if you’re not familiar with the differences between selling plates kind of meal prep and meal prep services, also known as personal chef services, watch this video, right? And I’ll link it below. So if you’re wanting to do personal chef services where you’re cooking for a client, like every week or every other week or monthly or whatever.
And this takes place usually during the day during weekdays because clients [00:10:00] who want weekly service want to be at the beginning of the week. So typically they want Mondays or Tuesdays or maybe Sundays if you’re working a full time job. So that’s something to consider. Clients who only want it every other week or once a month aren’t as date sensitive, so that’s something to consider if you’re doing it on the side.
Now, if you, again, are working that full time job, how many days realistically are you going to be able to do personal chef services for a client? Again, if you don’t want to do catering and you only want to do personal chef services, Then, what are you going to need to do to make the money you want to get where you need to be?
Especially if you want to be full time, if you want full time income. Are you going to be able to get there only doing personal chef services? Answering these questions goes for every type of service that you want to consider in your business. Whether it’s personal chef services, catering, cooking lessons, [00:11:00] online, in real life, whatever.
When are you going to be able to do them? Weekdays? weekends? Are you going to do them part time? Do you need to work full time? How much money is that type of service going to bring in? Are you going to be doing it on the side of your other services? How are you going to be able to market them enough to make enough money that you want to?
So this is especially big to consider if you’re thinking about doing baking, right? Those cottage laws that are so compelling where we can bake out of our own house. You need to consider the volume you would need to do and the profit margin that you’re going to have to get you where you want to go money wise, if that’s a big consideration for you.
So how much work that you’re willing to do and Will that make enough money to make it worth your while, right? People who are doing baking, sometimes it can really get them stuck because it [00:12:00] gets back to that selling plates, right? Where your profit margin and That you’re selling a food product it comes down to volume to make money Whereas when you’re doing a service, it’s more about the service and that’s why that’s a premium price So the time to answer these questions is before you start before you commit time To learning and putting this stuff into place when you figure out that How much you want to work, when you want to work, how much money you want to make, and then what services will fit into that.
This is what gets you the business that you want to have and the direction to get there. Because again, if you’ve Think that you want to do some baking on the side of your other services, you’re going to find yourself busting your butt to do this volume and that still might not be able to get you where you want to go and it might end up just being a distraction from [00:13:00] keeping you from getting those regular meal prep services clients.
You can save yourself all the drama by doing this work up front. Again, it’s not that hard, right? To answer these three questions. You just have to do it in the beginning so that you’re mindfully moving forward. When you know, again, that all you want to do is personal chef services because maybe you only want to cook during the week, during weekdays and you only want to work two days a week because all you want to bring in is a couple thousand a month, then you know that you can just price the average.
Get two weekly clients and that will be the exact business you want to have bringing in a couple thousand dollars a month. On the other hand, when you know that you want to make six figures. You want to make 100, 000 a year and you’re willing to work full time. That’s what you know you need to do. Five days a week.
You can do the math on meal prep services, see how many clients you would have to have and what your pricing would be [00:14:00] to get you to 100, 000. And if that’s realistic for you, your skills and where you’re at or to get you to that six figures, are you going to need to add in catering? or other services to get you where you want to be.
Then you can look at that and say, yes, I’m willing to do that to get the money I want or no, this isn’t going to be the business for me. Or maybe I can change how much I want to bring in and that’ll get the work to where I want it to be too. So I’m happy with both things. These are the important conversations to have with yourself and the decisions you need to make before you just start planning a business because you love to cook and you want to get paid for it.
This gives you exactly where you want to be so you know where to go, what to pack, and the exact directions to get you to either the sunny beach with the fruity cocktail, or hitting the [00:15:00] slopes and some apres chalet if that’s what you want. Either way, if you haven’t decided services and you want to get a taste of what it’s like to do personal chef services, also known as meal prep services for clients, there’s a link underneath this to get my free guide.
It walks you through step by step choosing recipes, making lists, doing shopping, the cooking, the packaging and everything. And you can see if that’s a good fit for you. Maybe you’ll decide that you hate it. You love the party vibe. You love working with people to make their events spectacular and catering is all you want to do.
Again, that’s super important to know upfront because the clients are out there and they’re hungry for what you’re cooking.
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