674: How to Make $500/day as a Personal Chef

25:54But like you said, it doesn't take a lot of clients. Like I only need one, you know, one taker to add potentially$2 ,000 to my bottom line. Yeah,$5 a day too is all the ad spend you really need. Okay. What else have you got on the marketing side? I think this is, it's not going to take a ton. You probably not have to do all of these different marketing tactics to fill up your schedule. But what else? Strategic partnerships are really effective that are aligned with your strengths. You know, a lot of times people will think, oh, I'm going to go with a personal trainer. That's not what I would consider a strategic partnership.

26:30What I would consider a strategic partnership is, again, someone who you're helping solve that challenge. So like a doctor, a nutritionist is a good strategic partner because they will give their clients or patients a plan and just send them on their way and have no idea of how they're going to do that. So a personal chef is that bridge between the plan and execution that really helps that customer have success. So they've been really great strategic partnerships. So a lot of times when I work with chefs, my homework will just be to find 20 strategic partners and reach out to them with an introductory offer.

27:09And a lot of times that is enough to just get the ball rolling as a personal chef. Can I pause on introductory offer? What's an example of that? So an introductory offer, obviously, like people aren't going to want to jump in and pay$2 ,500 to somebody if they've never tried their service. So an introductory offer is a way, it's a taste. It's a way for people to get to try your food, your services, get to know you, start to build that trust and see if they want to take it further. It's, you know, it's just like any other relationship, you know, people aren't going to ask to be exclusive on the first date.

27:42So you want to just kind of get to know and see, is this an alignment? Is this going to be good for both of us? And so an introductory offer is that that ability. And by doing that, you have a crowd pleasing menu that showcases your food in a way that is a little bit less work for you and maybe a little bit lower of a price point. Okay. And are you offering that to the doctors and nutritionists or you're offering it as something that they can then in turn pass along to their clients? Yeah. And it could actually be offered to anyone or you could tailor them to the specific doctor or nutritionist, depending like if you have a doctor or nutritionist who focuses on, you know, let's say they have heart patients and you want to gear it towards them.

28:28or you could have a general introductory offer. That's going to be really up to each individual chef, how kind of dialed in they want to get. Okay, yeah. So the nutritionist is going to say, hey, we got your test results back. You need to improve your omega-3, omega-6 ratio. You need to add more lean protein to your diet. And then they just send you on your way. So like, here's a value add for them. And by the way, if you'd like a discounted sample from a trusted personal chef contact of mine, you know, give Chef Jessica a call. Exactly. Or she has a special introductory offer just for people in our office.

29:03And here it is, something like that. I mean, I love ChatGPT for helping me kind of fine tune my offers. A lot of times they're very general. But if I can't decide how I want to position it, it might help me. okay, I have a nutritionist who specializes in this and I really want to help her patients do this. Can you help me? And then it will help me kind of pinpoint that offer and then I can fine tune it more towards my food and my messaging. But that's just one way. Strategic partnerships are a really great way. I mentioned press releases, just being visible in your community. So instead of posting on social media all the time where people have such a short attention span, And getting out there and talking to people, going like I love going to senior centers.

29:48I will go. I'll bring a healthy baked good. I'll bring a healthy lunch salad. And I'll talk to them for an hour or two. And it's so fun. And it's so rewarding. A lot of times I get paid a couple hundred dollars. I mean, it's not a ton of money, but it's enjoyable. It's paid marketing. And you get them to sign up on your list. You always make an offer at the end. And that's one thing that chefs need to always do is make an offer at the end of when you're talking or your demo. And if they don't sign up, collect their emails and then you can pitch your offers in the future. OK, so the senior center is is paying you to come in as the expert guest of the week.

30:28Yeah, actually, a lot of places do like wellness places with wellness businesses that have wellness programs for the employees. Like I used to go to the San Diego Zoo and the San Diego Wild Animal Park. They had a wellness program for their employees and they would pay me to come in and their employees would get points to come and watch me. Oh, OK. And you're giving a presentation on how to make healthy food at home or something like that. Yeah, it was. I think for them, it was healthy eating for the work week. And again, pitch my offer. I still have those a lot of this was probably like 15 years ago.

30:59I went there for the first time and I still have those people on my list that read my newsletter. OK, yeah, this is one of our favorite marketing tactics. First, the strategic partnerships that you mentioned on that, are like doing any sort of commission or rev share? Like, oh, I'll give you 10 % of the first month's service or anything like that. I never have, honestly. I'm helping them really, their patients have success. So I don't really feel like there needs to be a revenue share. Because again, then it's also like making money, more money off of their patients when really we're just trying to help them.

31:31And I think if you come from this business with a service mindset, you're going to be a lot more successful. Yeah, we've seen it. We've seen it both ways. So just wanted to clarify, you don't have to have like a paid affiliate relationship or partnership. And the other thing that you mentioned here was these kind of like low-key speaking gigs at the corporate wellness event. You're getting on their calendar, the senior center where you're showcasing your expertise. You're getting in front of a larger group of potential customers all at once. Of course, not everybody's going to sign up. You don't need everybody to sign up, but if they are going to hire the service, all of a sudden you jump the line, right?

32:08They're not going to go to Google anymore. They're just going to go straight to you. This is a really, really powerful. We've seen people do this, you know, in person, like lunch and learn. Hey, come learn about copywriting from, you know, the seven deadly SIDS you're making with your website to doing it online partnerships. where, you know, invite your email list to this free webinar workshop and we'll teach you this skill and this really, really effective way to kind of jump the line and showcase some expertise. Yeah, I mean, it builds trust, I think. And as a personal chef, they have to trust you because they're bringing you into their home and they're sharing a lot of personal information with you.

32:45And so by doing those things, for example, having the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park bringing me into their employees, build trust, their employees trust me, and it sort of softens that relationship. But not only that, again, I talked about earlier how, you know, we have such a short attention span. And to be able to really capture people's attention span is where you're going to get them. I mean, you know that you have a podcast where people are tuning in. It's totally different than when people are scrolling, you know, and you have them for two seconds. So that's why really being visible and getting out there in your community and showcasing your offers, showcasing your skills is always going to be more effective than posting on social media.

33:28Yeah, fair. I like it. Anything else on the marketing side? Get comfortable with talking about what you do and telling people what you do, because a lot of people I work with, they just don't talk about it or they don't tell people and people don't know. Having an elevator pitch or a tagline where you can describe your services very quickly is very helpful. But just getting more comfortable and confident is really what's going to get you over the edge and be good marketing because nobody's going to hire a chef that's not confident. More with Jessica in just a moment, including the additional income streams she's been able to build from this one skill beyond just cooking for clients one-on-one.

34:05That's coming up right after this. One of the tools I personally see make a huge difference for business owners is Quo, formerly OpenPhone. It's the same great business phone system you've heard me talk about before, just with a new name. When you're running a business, you know that every missed call is a missed opportunity. So Quo, formerly Open Phone, this is the number one business phone system that streamlines your customer communications. It works through an app on your phone or your computer, so no more using your personal number as your business line, no more carrying two phones around.

34:34With Quo, your team can share one phone number and collaborate on customer calls and texts, just like a shared inbox so anybody can jump in to keep response times fast. And this is where it gets super cool. You can set up Quo's built-in AI agent in just a few minutes to handle calls after hours, answer customer questions, and capture leads on autopilot. I want to invite you to get started for free. Plus, Side Hustle Show listeners get 20 % off your first six months at quo.com slash side hustle. That's q-u-o dot com slash side hustle. Look at them getting that three-letter domain, q-u-o dot com slash side hustle.

35:13And if you've got existing numbers with another service, Quo will port them over and no extra charge. Quo, no missed calls, no missed customers. Are you still overpaying for wireless? It's time to say yes to saying no. At our partner, Mint Mobile, their favorite word is no. No contracts, no monthly bills, no overages, no hidden fees, no BS. And here's why I said yes to making the switch over five years ago, and yes to getting premium wireless for 15 bucks a month. I really liked being able to keep my existing phone and my existing phone number when I switched over. This year, we've taken advantage of their easy international add-ons, including free service in Canada and affordable packages when we were visiting Japan.

35:52But closer to home, all Mint Mobile plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. And the best part, plans start at just 15 bucks per month. Are you ready to say yes to saying no? Join me in making the switch at mintmobile.com slash side hustle. That's mintmobile.com slash side hustle. Upfront payment of$45 required, equivalent to$15 per month. Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Let's talk about a potential way to scale because it's like, okay, I can make great money doing something that I like.

36:36I could start doing it as a side hustle. It doesn't take a lot of clients to really build up a meaningful income stream. But if I ever want to take time off, all of a sudden I'm not getting paid. If I want to try something else, like I'm kind of potentially stuck in this trading time for money business. And is there, you know, what are some ways that you've seen where someone with a skill could branch out to some other creative revenue streams? Okay, some of the things that I have done and I've seen chefs do is, you know, you look at the problems you're solving for your clients right now, and how can you help people who can't afford your services on the same level?

37:18So one of the things that I will do is I would create a customized menu plan for people that has recipes, shopping lists. So it basically shows them how to be their own personal chef. You can start to release recipes. I have personally done a lot of consulting work. So I will do recipe development for companies such as like I'm making a developing a protein bar, developing a healthy shaved ice. I have created a cookbook for a supplement company. You can also do cooking classes, cooking classes online or in person. So there's a lot of different ways that you can creatively create different income avenues as a personal chef.

38:05Okay. So these companies are coming to you to say, hey, we saw you on social or we saw, Like, can you help us put this together? Yeah, and believe it or not, they either find me through my website, which is primarily through looking for a personal chef. They're not looking for a research and product development chef. I can tell you that because I know my keywords. And also through my personal chef clients. So business partners of my personal chef clients will say, hey, Jessica, I'm really interested in making this. Do you think you could help me? So that's just things that have come to me because I'm open to them and I talk to people about these types of business situations, but I think that people being open to helping people with eating healthy in new ways.

38:49So it's not just about, oh, can I cook you a healthy dinner? There's, think about it's problem solving. I mean, I can't answer how, you know, Chef Dan in Idaho should align his business to the highest level, but I know there's a way for him to do it, right? I like this kind of reframe or this exercise of, you know, what could I create for the people who can't necessarily afford my one-on-one services? And then parsing out, using those same skills, oh, it could be the recipe development. It could be the meal planning. It could be, you know, the group cooking classes or the hosted dinner party. Like there's Eat With, I came across one of these sites where I was like, you know, host this dinner party.

39:33It was like a cool experience type of thing, kind of a sample almost of your work. but you know allows you to serve lots of people all at once versus just the one-on-one client. Yeah ideas are popping into my head as we're talking like I'm thinking oh you could you could create a dinner party master plan where you teach somebody how to create a four-course dinner party in their home. I mean there's so many different things that you could do you have to take what your skill is and what do you like to do but especially now with AI it's much easier to do these digital things as a chef, because a lot of times in the past, they didn't necessarily have those skills, but it's easier now.

40:12And it's something that I've done for at least 10 years now, been doing the digital side for my chef clients, where I sell menu plans and recipes and cookbooks and things like that. And it's great because it allows me to connect with people all over the country and the world that I would not normally have as clients. Yeah. What do you charge for the menu menu planning or something like that. If it's 500 bucks a day or 600 bucks a day to have you come to my house. It's not cheap. It's usually starts at like 150, but it's quite a bit. It's very extensive and it's customized and it's something they have forever.

40:46And it always comes with my support. I always want to support people with anything they purchase of mine. So I always tell the chefs as well, you know, provide that support and people will keep coming back. Another thing I did, which is interesting. So one of the things that I teach people is offer and visibility. Create the offer and be visible. That's how you get the clients. So I created an offer during a slow time called the Soup Trio. And basically, this was for my local clients. And I did, it was three plant-based soups. And it was sort of like a detox. But what I did was I sent it out to my whole list as an option of either you could purchase the soup or you could purchase it as a digital download.

41:25So you could get all the recipes for the soups. It had the a shopping list. So if they wanted this detox or this cleanse at home, they're able to do that. And I think I sold that for like$30 or something very low. But that was a way to showcase what I did. But it was no more work for me because I was already doing it for my regular clients. I already had to create all of that stuff anyway. Yeah. Do you do any of the group classes? I'm thinking when we travel, I think we did one of these in Thailand where I don't know if it showed up on TripAdvisor or like some other friends had gone and said, oh, you got to do this while you're there.

42:02I mean, anything like that through Airbnb? Yeah. So I didn't mention this in the marketing. Airbnb has connections. So they reached out to me and I'm sure any chef could do this. They have an elevate part of their services where you can post something that you want to provide, a service that you want to provide. If you want to do a fancy picnic or a cooking class, You post that in the Airbnb Elevate area and then people searching for services like that will see it. As a personal chef, there are a lot of apps and companies that want to market with you. There is Cozy Meal, which does cooking classes.

42:41So people will sign up on their app and book a cooking class through you. Airbnb, a lot of places. So you can kind of hand off the marketing in some aspects if you like to do events like that. Yeah, I think this is really interesting. when we were like trying to shop for a place to do our annual friendsgiving and we're looking for airbbs or houses to rent in in mexico and it seems like a lot of the hosts the owners of these places had relationships with local chefs were like and if you don't want to bring you don't want to deal with going out or you don't like we could bring in our partner chef to prep three meals a day for you you know it'd be an extra 100 bucks a day or something there's like different you know currency cost of living, everything else.

43:22But it was a unique value add where if you have some strategic partnerships, if you're in a tourist area, you don't necessarily want to do the full weekly thing, but you'd be open to doing it every now and again when the requests come in. I could see that being a thing too. Yeah. I mean, nobody wants to go out every single night when they're going out to eat. So it's actually a really great service. I don't do this as much anymore, but I used to spend a lot of time or a lot of events doing vacations because I live in an area where a lot of people come in for vacation in the summer. And so a lot of my clients would travel during the summer.

43:57So it allowed me to kind of pick up extra business. Yeah. We came across there was I want to say it was Southern California, too. Maybe it was in L.A., but they were doing these luxury picnic setups. And there was some overhead involved because, like, you know, fancy little table and table linens, you know, for this. They'd set up the whole charcuterie platform. But it was like so pretty. I've seen them. I forget the price, but it was much higher than I expected somebody to pay for a picnic setup. Yeah, it's definitely a premium service. There are so many cool ways to market yourself as a personal chef.

44:28It's kind of like and it's just like anything. I always feel like everything takes effort and work, no matter what we're going to do. Everything takes hard work. But I don't feel like this is a hustle, like hustle hard. It's more of a hard work and alignment type of side hustle where, you know, you find people who you're really connected with and you can help instead of having to work so hard to find clients because you only need five to 10 clients. Right. Yeah. And it's a helpful exercise where you're not trying to serve thousands of people, right? You don't need to. And you physically couldn't.

45:05Yeah. There's not a lot of businesses that you could get to six figures with just five clients and still work Monday through Friday, nine to five. I don't know. I don't know a lot of businesses like that. So in that way, it's very unique. But again, it is a service-based industry. Right. And have some level of security in that. Well, it's a good job. If you got one client and you get fired, then you lose 100 % of your income. Like, well, if I lost one client, I lost 10 to 20 % of my income instead. And I go replace them. That's true, actually. So you've been doing this a couple of decades, like any big surprises or any big mistakes that you see new personal chefs making?

45:44I would say the biggest mistake is getting locked in with either the wrong client or too low of a price or agreeing to something that they know they shouldn't do. Because as a personal chef, once you're locked in with a client, it's really hard to you can't go back and say, you know, I think I want to raise my price or I think I don't want to cook this much food. So that would be my biggest mistake I see people make is agreeing to stuff because they're so they want a client. So they just, you know, they they drop all their boundaries. OK, yeah. You price too low at the beginning or it's just like it's not a great fit.

46:19And now you're kind of stuck. Or promise the world, you know, the people are asking too many things and the chefs don't know how to set parameters on their business. because I think a lot of people, they come to this business because they love to cook and they want to help and they liked doing it, but the business side, they're a little bit clueless on and they don't know how to really communicate that part. Yeah, I think a lot of people fall into that mode of, well, I have this skill and I just flip a switch and say, well, now I'm in business. Like, well, there's a few freelancer skills or entrepreneur skills you got to learn along the way We talked about the mindset and the marketing and positioning and everything else.

47:04Yeah. And also, like as a personal chef, the interesting thing is you're dealing with people who are very business savvy, right? Your clients. And you may not be. So if you're if you're coming in and you you're going to get steamrolled, they're going to push your boundaries, you know, because they can't. I'm not saying they want to. They just don't know. They're not mind readers. They don't know where your boundaries are. And that's why it's really important for business owners, especially personal chefs, to be able to communicate that. And that's one of the things I see them really struggle with is because, and that's confidence mindset.

47:40That's all of it. That's why I always say confidence mindset is the first step to pricing, to your pricing strategy. Yeah, I like this call to put up some boundaries, put up some guardrails from the early days. You know, what are you willing to do? What are you not willing to do? And kind of stick to your North Star guidance on that. So I appreciate you sharing that. You've alluded to it a couple times. The Prosperous Personal Chef is a program that Jessica has created. You can find it at chefjessica.com. Tell us a little bit about it. Who's it for? What's inside? It's basically start to finish walking you through the business of starting, growing, sustaining a personal chef business.

48:21That being said, there is a ton of stuff in there that's done for you. The assessment, the sample menus, all of that is in there. And then anybody who goes through the Academy also gets my full support because I want to make sure that they're successful. So I include three full calls to make sure they are on page with their going through the right direction. Because even I find that as a self-study course, it's not as successful as if you have my support because people still kind of get off the rails with their marketing and their boundaries and all of that. Yeah. Well, I think it's a fun example of kind of packaging up years of knowledge and expertise and sometimes like the actual resources and templates and stuff that you use.

49:09And I imagine people were asking like, hey, can I pick your brain on how to get started on my own? How did you get customers? You're like, well, you get sick of answering the same questions over and over again. You're like, well, let me put if there's some demand for this. Yeah, it was also like, ah, like watching, you know, watching a train wreck or like you it's like you seeing almost like your child wants to go to Disneyland, but won't put their shoes on. That's kind of what it was like watching with chefs and seeing them doing the wrong thing over and over again as personal chefs and people constantly posting questions that are like, how much should I charge for this or things like that?

49:46I felt like I got to get this information out there because somebody needs to document the right way to do this. There's too much misinformation and too many people doing it the wrong way. Well, very good. We'll link that up at chefjessica.com. You can find your free guide to getting high paying VIP clients over there. We'll link that up in the show notes. This has been fun. Hopefully some lessons and takeaways regardless of what kind of local service business that you're running. You talked about it may not be, cooking may not come naturally to you, but lots of tools and tactics, I think, that you'd be able to apply and different mindset shifts that you might be able to apply to different business models as well.

50:27Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Science Hustle Nation. Connection. I think that if you want to grow a successful business, it's all about connection. And building that connection with your clients is truly the secret to success, in my opinion. That's so true. It's all about your network and building that level of trust and who knows you, how they know you. Talked about the strategic partnership angles. Talked about the introductory offer angles, like the free samples at Costco, the example I come back to a lot of times. Like, oh, I don't know if I want to commit to having you here every week.

51:05Let me see about this first. I call it dipping your toe in the water. Yes. I love that angle. I love the angle of doing low risk, low key speaking events or presentations to showcase your expertise and build trust. Lots of cool marketing tactics here. Again, chefjessica.com is where you can find her. You also find the full text summary of this episode with links to all the resources mentioned at sidehustlenation.com slash chef. While you're there, go ahead and download your free listener bonus for this episode. That's 101 service business ideas. She might be able to apply some of Jessica's same strategy to, once again, sidehustlenation.com slash chef, or just follow the link in the episode description.

51:51It'll get you right over there. Big thanks to Jessica for sharing her insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let's come out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.