How to Grow a Personal Chef Business with AirBnB and Vacation Rentals

Are you a personal chef looking to grow your business and get more clients without spending a ton on advertising? In this episode of the Personal Chef Business Startup Guide, part of the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast network, I’m sharing one of my most downloaded solo episodes, focused on a game-changing strategy that helped me scale my business: partnering with Airbnb and vacation rental property owners directly.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• How vacation rentals like Airbnb and VRBO can become your #1 source of clients
• Why I’m booking 10-15 person parties instead of just couples—and how you can too
• The exact steps to find and contact vacation rental hosts and property managers
• How to create a media kit that gets shared with every guest staying at a property
• Tips for becoming a preferred or exclusive chef for a vacation home
• Why rural locations and wine country rentals can be gold mines for private chefs

I also cover the power of social media tagging and how one comped dinner can lead to recurring gigs. Whether you're new to the personal chef business or looking to scale, this episode will give you practical, actionable advice.

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] You're listening to Personal Chef Business Startup Guide on the Chefs Without Restaurants Podcast Network.

Today's episode is one of the most popular episodes from my other podcast, chefs Without Restaurants. The topic is on acquiring more customers, specifically using vacation rentals. When I originally released this episode, I named one of the platforms that you can rent houses from. You know, like VRBO, but obviously there's a lot of places where people can find vacation rental homes.

And this is where I'm currently getting probably 75% of my clients from. And it's great because quite often the parties are bigger. You know, I'm trying to get away from doing the two person parties and getting more into the 10 to 15 person parties. And a lot of places like this that I'm cooking at, I'm specifically targeting, you know, a cottage in Harper's Ferry that can sleep 16 people.

So I'll go do a bachelorette party for 12 girls. [00:01:00] Anyway, I'm gonna keep this intro short because I just wanna get to the episode. I want people to hear this. If you have specific questions about maybe how to do this better, , or there's just something you don't understand in the podcast, feel free to reach out to me.

Send me a DM on Instagram at Chefs Without Restaurants or Chef Startup, or you can send me an email at Chefs Without restaurants@gmail.com. I tried to make this episode super clear so people could put it into action right away, but also I did record it a couple years ago, so some things I've maybe fine tuned over the years.

Anyway, best of luck with getting more gigs and lemme know if you need a hand

hello everyone. This is Chris with the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast. If this is your first time tuning in, this is the show where I normally talk to guests. They are usually culinary entrepreneurs and people in the food and beverage industry, not working in restaurants, so people like caterers, personal chefs, chefs doing research and development and cookbook authors and so forth.

But today [00:02:00] I'm doing this little mini episode. What I really want to talk about is how you can grow your personal chef business using Airbnb. Now, it doesn't have to specifically be Airbnb. It can be vrbo, any kind of vacation rental. This show is not endorsed by any of those companies, though I am open to partnerships, so if you're listening, hit me up.

Airbnb and VRBO executives. So this was one of the big things that really transformed my personal chef business. I started to notice a trend with my customers. I was starting to see more people hire me to cook while they were staying at a Airbnb. And as this continued to happen more and more, I thought, wow, this would be a really great way to keep getting business.

And if I can find a way to grow this aspect, I won't really have to spend as much money on advertising. At the time I was taking a lot of business through Thumbtack. That's a whole nother thing. I, I really don't love Thumbtack or recommend them [00:03:00] anymore and it costs a lot of money. So I think we all wanna save as much money as we can and get the most return on our time and money.

Right. So anyway, let's cut to the chase. How do you do this? First off, if somebody hires you to cook for them and they are in an Airbnb, I highly recommend you talk to the person who hired you and see if you can get the contact information. Will they share an email or a phone number or something, some way that you can get in contact with them?

The hardest thing when working with Airbnbs and VRBO is they don't want the consumer to be able to go outside their system and book these places, which makes sense, right? So you can't really go on the Airbnb website, find a place and contact the property owners directly. You would have to book an experience there and I guess you could maybe go through the booking process and send them a message, but that can be, uh, problematic.

You might get banned or blocked, and I don't really recommend doing that. So you go to a place, you find out that it's an Airbnb, get the contact information. That [00:04:00] person, second of all, when you're in that house, poke around a little bit. I've been to a lot of places that have, whether it be a QR code on the fridge or.

Cards laying out with their contact info. You can probably find the contact info while you're there, whether it be the email or a website or a phone number, and I recommend getting that information so you can get in contact with these people because the key to this is you are gonna want to be in contact with the people who run these houses.

But let's say you haven't been hired at one of these places and you kind of want to break the seal. Look for places that have a name, you know, 2 89 Smith Street in Hagerstown, Maryland is not gonna cut it. But so many of these places now are kind of wanting to give you this experience and they name their places.

You know, I've cooked at places that are called the Fingerboard Inn or the Distillery House. Quite often you can Google them and find an independent website or get contact information and that is a way of [00:05:00] kind of going around this whole Airbnb, VRBO website system. For me, I've had a lot of success also finding ones that are not in major metropolitan areas where people would potentially be going out to eat.

So, you know, I live near Washington, DC people book, uh, an Airbnb in downtown Washington. They're probably gonna be going out to these restaurants, you know, maybe even ones they can walk to. I. So I've decided to focus on, you know, for me in like Virginia wine country, people renting this cool cabin that's kind of out in the middle of nowhere, you know, they have great wineries, but not necessarily a place where everyone wants to go out to dinner that evening.

Now, let's go back to the part about, you've got the contact info for the people who run this house, this place. What do you do? First of all, I recommend everyone have some kind of media kit. They're really easy to make. I did mine in PowerPoint. It's like five pages of slides. If anyone has questions or wants to see a template, reach out to me and I can give you some [00:06:00] guidance.

But mine has, you know, my headshot. It's got basic info on the experience, how it works, pricing. I have a sample menu, I have some reviews, a couple of pictures, and then a page with all my contact info and social media. Make it real, lean and mean, you know, five slides at most and send that to these people and let them know what you do.

Say I'm a personal chef, I would love to come to your property and cook for your guests when they stay there. Pitch it like it's a value add. You know, when my wife and I go places, we often look at restaurants, uh, because we love going out. So if, you know, we're looking to stay somewhere and I can't see any place that I would want to eat while we're away, I might not book that place.

And I'm sure there's other people like that. So that's how I propose is say, Hey, you've got a beautiful place. I would love to be able to come and provide a culinary experience for your guests. Would you mind sharing this info with them when they book? It would be simple enough for them to just take that [00:07:00] five page PDF, PowerPoint, whatever, and just send it as part of the welcome message to people staying there.

This has worked over and over and over for me. Just last week, I did three events in six days working for the same Airbnb owners. They have two properties in the area. You know, you can totally build your business on this if you're in an area that has Airbnbs and places to stay. A couple more bits of advice here.

One thing I'd say is you can always offer to go cook a complimentary dinner. I've done that before. If it is going to be really beneficial for you to start being maybe the preferred chef at one of these properties, go do a dinner for two or even four for the people who own this place. For what I consider a very small financial investment.

You know, get in there and show them what the food is like, what the experience is like. It might make it easier for them to recommend your service. And another thing, [00:08:00] if they are one of these places that you have realized is on social media, tag them. Don't you love that when you do a dinner and your customers post up on Instagram, showing your food, do the same thing.

If I'm at the Fingerboard Inn cooking dinner for guests there. I will take pictures of that dinner post on social media and tag that business, the fingerboard in, they will most likely repost that or share it. I know it's 2022 and so many of you know how to do this, but I did wanna just make sure that that was something that you were thinking about.

Beyond that, I don't really have much today. I just have talked about this a number of times, both on my podcast and when I've been guests on other podcasts, and people are always asking me to expand on it. I thought rather than kind of bury it in another episode, I would just drop this little mini episode this week so we could talk about this.

And if anyone has any questions you know where to reach me. Chefs Without Restaurants on Instagram, send me a DM or Chefs without [00:09:00] restaurants@gmail.com. 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 chefs without restaurants.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 Restaurants podcast and organization running.

You might even get a discount for using some of these links. As always, you can reach out to me on Instagram at Chefs Without Restaurants, or send me an email at Chefs Without restaurants@gmail.com. Thanks so much.