The Do’s and Don’ts of Running a Personal Chef Business

Want the INSIDE SCOOP on building and growing a food business? Subscribe to our newsletter.

Are you thinking about starting a personal chef business or looking for ways to make yours more successful? After 11 years of experience as a personal chef and building the Chefs Without Restaurants community, I’ve learned what works—and what doesn’t—when it comes to running a profitable, sustainable business.

In this episode, I’m breaking down the do’s and don’ts of being a successful personal chef, based on a recent interview I did for the meez blog. Whether you’re just starting or already working as a personal chef, these tips will help you avoid common mistakes, attract more clients, and streamline your operations.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

✅ The #1 thing new personal chefs should do before taking paid clients
✅ Why cooking in someone’s home is completely different from a restaurant kitchen
✅ The importance of focusing on the entire dining experience—not just the food
✅ How to ask for and leverage client reviews to grow your business
✅ Why building a strong chef network is one of the best things you can do
✅ How vacation rentals (like Airbnb and VRBO) can help you book more clients
✅ A game-changing tool for organizing your recipes and menus digitally

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

📖 Read my interview on the meez blog: How to Be a Successful Personal Chef
🎙️ Listen to my interview with meez founder Josh Sharkey
🎧 Grow Your Personal Chef Business with Airbnb
🛠️ Try meez for better recipe organization

PERSONAL CHEF BUSINESS STARTUP GUIDE
Follow us on Instagram, Threads, TikTok and YouTube
Reach out at chefstartup@gmail.com
... More Coming soon

CHEFS WITHOUT RESTAURANTS
Check out our other podcast and community.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support it financially, please check out our Sponsorship page (we get a commission when you use our links).
Get the Chefs Without Restaurants Newsletter
Chefs Without Restaurants Instagram, Threads, TikTok and YouTube
The Chefs Without Restaurants Private Facebook Group
Chris Spear's personal chef business Perfect Little Bites

Transcript

[00:00:00] Chris Spear: You're listening to Personal Chef Business Startup Guide on the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast network.

[00:00:10] Chris Spear: As many of you know, I started Chefs Without Restaurants to help people grow their food businesses. Because I've been working as a personal chef for 11 years now, I have a lot of first hand knowledge about what you can do to grow a personal chef business. I was recently interviewed by meez for their blog about some do's and don'ts of the personal chef business.

[00:00:28] Chris Spear: If you're not familiar with meez, they're an online tool that lets you digitize all of your recipes and keep them in one place. You can easily scale the recipes up and down, cost them out, and even share them with your team or customers. meez founder Josh Sharkey was on the podcast last year, and at the end of the episode you're going to learn more about meez.

[00:00:47] Chris Spear: As much as I love doing the long form podcast episodes, I think there's a lot of value in doing the short and punchy, informative episodes. This week I'm going to share what I consider the do's and don'ts of being a successful personal chef. In [00:01:00] just a couple of minutes, I'll be able to tell you some of the things that worked really well for me, and some of the things I think maybe you should avoid.

[00:01:07] Chris Spear: I'd love your feedback on this episode. Did you find it informative? What did I miss? What other questions do you have? Hit me up on Instagram at chefswithoutrestaurants or send me an email at chefswithoutrestaurants at gmail. com. But I'm getting ahead of myself, cause you haven't even heard the episode yet, so let's get into that.

[00:01:24] Chris Spear: I started my personal chef business, Perfect Little Bites, 11 years ago with the goal of bringing the fine dining experience into the customer's home. I bring everything with me, china, linens, cooking equipment, and cook the food on site, oftentimes doing culinary instruction as I go. In a lot of ways, I'm an entertainer.

[00:01:42] Chris Spear: It took me several years to figure out my process and build up momentum enough to become a personal chef full time. I found my footing and have even built this community of like minded industry experts and culinary entrepreneurs. From costing to scaling and planning, as you can imagine, being a successful personal chef has a lot of [00:02:00] challenges.

[00:02:00] Chris Spear: People are always asking me for some tips on how to start a personal chef business. So here's a few things I recommend as you start your journey. Practice with friends and family. To become a personal chef, the first thing you need to do is get out there and practice. Cooking in your home or at a restaurant is so different from cooking in other people's houses.

[00:02:19] Chris Spear: Find a neighbor, a relative, or someone who has an anniversary or birthday, and just offer to cook for them. You can do it at cost, maybe even make a profit, but just get out there and try it. It could be as simple as a two course dinner to see what it's like to take all of your stuff into someone's house and cook on a stove you're unfamiliar with.

[00:02:37] Chris Spear: You also need to understand how you cook with people talking to you and watching. Not everyone has worked in open kitchens, and a lot of us don't have any experience interacting with customers while we're cooking. You have to be able to deal with whatever comes your way, whether that's a dog or a kid running through the kitchen, having five things cooking at once, or people asking you a whole bunch of questions.

[00:02:57] Chris Spear: You can't just think, I'm a chef, I make food, [00:03:00] and it'll go fine cooking in someone's house. Don't focus only on the food. As a personal chef, you've been hired for more than just your food. You need to think about what that experience is going to look like overall. For a lot of chefs, this is really hard to accept.

[00:03:14] Chris Spear: You have to let go of some of your ego to be successful. When I was starting out, I told myself I wouldn't make some things like chicken parm. I don't know why I'm always dogging on chicken parm, but, you know, it's a good dish, but it seems a little mundane to me. If it's a client's favorite dish, why should my personal bias get in the way?

[00:03:32] Chris Spear: You're a chef, and you can do a great job of it. Why not make the best chicken parmesan they've ever had? Ask for reviews early on. Once you start booking clients, reviews are super important. A lot of my customers today tell me that they went to Google and picked me because I'm the top reviewed chef in the area.

[00:03:49] Chris Spear: People love social proof. When a potential client reads about the positive experience you provide, they want to experience it too. Because only about 25 percent of people actually write up reviews, make sure you [00:04:00] ask everyone you can as early as you can. This is especially important when you're doing those trial dinners.

[00:04:05] Chris Spear: Have your friends and family write reviews. Not fake ones, but that's why you should be cooking for them. Get them to write a review. Make that Part of the deal, especially if you're going to be cooking for free for them. I pride myself on the fact that I have exclusively five star reviews on every platform.

[00:04:19] Chris Spear: Google, Yelp, Facebook. It can feel like a lot to repeatedly ask for reviews, but being persistent can help your business grow significantly. Make it easy for the customer by sending a thank you email with links to where they can leave that review. Don't underestimate the power of a network. A lot of personal chefs come from big operations where you have a lot of people to bounce ideas off of and work with.

[00:04:41] Chris Spear: When you start your own business, especially a personal chef business, you often don't have anyone. Most of us are a small team, if not just one person. Since we're doing everything, including business development, having a stream of referrals can really help out. If you're booked on a Friday night, but someone wants to hire you on that same day, it's great to have [00:05:00] another chef you can recommend.

[00:05:01] Chris Spear: Not only will your prospect be grateful, but your referrer might pay it forward later on. This has been huge for me. Being a personal chef is much easier if you have people to lean on who know what you're going through. Even a network of just four chefs in your local community can be a huge help. You're not only sharing job opportunities, but resources, advice, best practices.

[00:05:21] Chris Spear: I think you know this, but it's why I started Chefs Without Restaurants in the first place. Work with vacation rentals. I did a whole podcast on this and have talked about it over and over, but I would say it's one of the biggest business drivers for me. Working with vacation rentals like Airbnb has been huge.

[00:05:36] Chris Spear: It probably accounts for about 80 percent of my business these days. Reach out to the owners and operators of Vacation Rentals, not Airbnb directly, and ask them if they'll pass on your contact info to upcoming guests. So make it easy for these owners and operators and put together a media kit, uh, you know, like maybe a PDF that they can share as part of the welcome package.

[00:05:56] Chris Spear: In this podcast episode that I did, I'll link it in the show notes so you can listen to it. [00:06:00] Don't rely solely on a recipe journal or binder. This is where meez comes in. As a personal chef, it just makes sense for your recipes to live in a digital format. You're always somewhere new and can't risk leaving a notebook or binder at home.

[00:06:13] Chris Spear: I find meez to be the most dependable, professional recipe tool out there. Being able to take my recipes in my pocket everywhere I go has been huge. So here are four ways I use meez as a personal chef. Number one, sharing. Some clients ask me to send them recipes. This is easy to do with meez. I can just pull up the recipe on my phone, type in their email, and share a link with them instantly.

[00:06:35] Chris Spear: This is also really helpful when I'm planning a cooking lesson at a client's home or working with freelancers. Instead of printing out recipe packets for everyone, I can just email them a meez recipe. 2. Scaling meez comes in really handy when you have to create a recipe for an odd number of guests. All you have to do is put in how many people you're cooking for, and it scales the recipe exactly.

[00:06:54] Chris Spear: That means I can leave a house with little to no food waste, whether I'm cooking for 5 or 25 people. [00:07:00] Number three, organization. As a personal chef, you're at someone else's house, not a commercial kitchen or your own place. Previously, I'd bring a little manila folder with all these paper recipes. Keeping them organized was hard.

[00:07:12] Chris Spear: Plus, they often weren't scaled or converted. Now I can just bring a tablet or my iPhone, pull up the recipe in meez, and get started. And number four is search. As personal chefs, our menus change every day, and sometimes you make a dish, prep too much, and have to use an ingredient by the next day or two.

[00:07:28] Chris Spear: For example, I do an apple fennel celery salad and almost always have shredded fennel left over. With meez, all I have to do is type fennel into the tool and it'll pull up all the recipes with fennel listed as an ingredient. It's a great way to create specials. And a quick tip, if you're an iPhone user, with the latest iPhone update, recipe importing is even easier.

[00:07:46] Chris Spear: All you have to do is take a photo of your recipe, click on the recipe text, and copy and paste it into meez. Those recipes can be imported in minutes without any real manual labor required. Being a personal chef is an extremely rewarding career choice if you have a passion for [00:08:00] cooking and entertaining.

[00:08:01] Chris Spear: Like I mentioned before, dipping your toes in is a good first step. Cook for friends, family, or people you know to get a feel for this experience. I hope this episode was helpful. Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions or comments. And if you want to check out meez for yourself, go to www.getmeez.com/cwr.

. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope you have a great week. You're still here? The podcast's over! If you are indeed still here, thanks for taking the time to listen to the show. I'd love to direct you to one place, and that's chefswithoutrestaurants.

[00:08:39] Chris Spear: org. From there, you'll be able to join our email newsletter, get connected in our free Facebook group, and join our personal chef, catering, and food truck database so I can help get you more job leads. And you'll also find a link to our sponsor page, where you'll find products and services I love. You pay nothing additional to use these links, but I may get a small commission, which helps keep the Chefs Without [00:09:00] Restaurants podcast and organization running.

[00:09:02] Chris Spear: You might even get a discount for using some of these links. As always, you can reach out to me on Instagram at chefswithoutrestaurants or send me an email at chefswithoutrestaurants at gmail dot com. Thanks so much.