Holly Verbeck – The Niche: Hey Chef!
Sometimes you come up with a good idea and sometimes it comes to you. It’s been said that necessity is the mother of invention. Well, Holly and her chef husband came up with an idea to fulfill both a need and a lifestyle.
Listen to this episode for some inspiration for your next idea!
Holly Powers-Verbeck, founded and continues to operate HeyChef!, Lake Tahoe’s premiere culinary staffing company since 1997. In 2018 she formed MakeYourBusinessCook! to help chefs launch private chef businesses and restaurant/caterer owner-operators who are adding private chef services to generate additional profits with existing resources. You can read her monthly column The Business of Chefs in Food & Beverage magazine and hear her on awesome podcasts like this one.
Reach MakeYourBusinessCook on Facebook, the internet and Instagram, email [email protected] or call (818)HELP-ONE
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– When I think about niching a business there are some businesses where I scratch my head and go, “Huh, I never would’ve thought of that.” And my next guest has one, and you’re going to want to hear this. Welcome to another edition of the “Wedding Business Solutions” podcast. I am so glad to have my friend Holly Verbeck on for my series on niching. Holly, how are you today?
– I’m just great, and I’m so glad that we get to visit.
– And we got to visit in person recently at the Catersource conference which was special as well-
– That was fun.
– After all the time of not doing this. So HeyChef!, HeyChef! is your business. What is, HeyChef!?
– Well, HeyChef! is a business that allows people to be a guest at their own party. We provide in-home entertaining that’s personal, distinctive and effortless, and we do that with our private chefs, bartenders, baristas, shoppers and servers.
– Okay. So this is somebody having a party at their house and they don’t have to do anything, you’re going to take care of everything.
– Yeah, we’re sort of an on-call private chef for people who are on vacation who probably have culinary staff and other domestic staff in their homes when they’re at their primary residence, and when they come on vacation they want to have that same level of in-home service, and so they call us to staff.
– Okay. So this is people on vacation, and you are in the Lake Tahoe area?
– Mm-hmm, we’re in Truckee, Tahoe. So we serve all around Lake Tahoe, but it’s a big lake, so primarily, the North Shore and Truckee.
– Okay. Now, you are not a chef.
– That’s correct. And I have to tell people that all the time and that’s why they don’t want me to plan their menus and they’re really glad for it because I don’t cook, and that muscle atrophied long ago when I met and married a chef.
– Okay. So you are, “Hey, I’m not a chef, but I married a chef.” So how does this happen? You’re not a chef, your husband’s a chef, how did you come to this business? because your husband, I’m sure was being a chef and applying his skills not doing this, right?
– Right. Well, we actually met, we each went on solo kayak tours in Alaska. He was from New York, I was from California, and yes, I was with my boyfriend at the time. So when I met and married a chef, what I realized was that so many chefs are overworked and underpaid, and most chefs know more about cooking than they do about running a business. So I saw an opportunity there, and really the spark for the business came from the fact that when he was in New York, he’d been a private chef for many years for a single family, a notable family, and every time they traveled, he was their traveling chef. They also had another full-time chef, he and Chef Brian worked together. And then my husband was traveling 180 days one year.
– Wow.
– And that really became like, well, he’s not making as much as he could, and I want to be at home, and selfish too, I want to be at home, I want to raise children, start a family, so what can I do that will really change the balance for us, how can I leave my corporate job?
– Which is what I was going to ask next. So what were you doing when you married the chef?
– Thanks. So my background is in human resources and risk management. And I was in charge of all of the training and safety programs for the largest employer here in town with almost 2000 employees. The Northstar Ski Resort is now owned by the Vail corporation, so I moved to Truckee from my hometown of Los Angeles to be their risk manager and human resources person.
– Okay. So you had the business background, and you said something very prescient which is, a lot of people like chefs, and not just chefs, we have a lot of people listening who are photographers and videographers, and bands, and DJs, and florists, and officiants and invitations and dressers and all this, and being good at that doesn’t make you good at business, it’s a completely different scale.
– Same with plumbing, same with electricity, there are a number of tradesmen that are really good at their trade, but not so good at business.
– Right. And it’s a self-awareness thing to understand that you got to a point in your business, and a lot of people do get to a point in their business despite the fact that they don’t have business skills because people keep asking them to do what it is that they do. They keep asking them to fix the pipes, or take the pictures, or play the music, but that doesn’t still make you any good at business.
– And they’ve got money that’s uncollected, and they’ve got clients they’ve never invoiced. And it’s unbelievable the amount of money that’s washing away from small businesses because they don’t have the systems in place.
– And not charging enough. A lot of people don’t know what to charge because again, people were paying you, you have money in your pocket, the bills are getting paid, and you’re not looking at the P&L, you’re not looking at the balance sheet, you’re not looking at at those things. And a lot of people when you start talking about that, their eyes start rolling in their heads like, “I don’t want to know about that.” Good, good, if you don’t want to know about that, hire somebody who does, and you got lucky because you were married to the chef.
– Right. He had the talent, I had the brains or vice versa. We both would argue that we each bring something unique to the table but we pair really well together, and that became the basis to grow into what we are now. Today, now, we’re a seasonal business, so that’s one of the problems that we face, one of the opportunities that we face as a business. So on any given season we can have between 30 and 70 talented professionals that we can book in-homes.
– And what is your season? When does it run?
– Well, we have about 10 weeks between 4th of July, it’s really between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and then it’s Christmas through New Year’s.
– Okay. And what do your people do during those other times?
– Well, so many of the people that live in our town love the seasonality of it. So we have people who are ski instructors in the winter and they’re tennis instructors in the summer, and everybody gets a three to four week break in between both seasons to switch gears and switch out their gear. So people are really unique in this town at pulling together a number of different talents to make things work. Some our staff members for instance are individuals who are teachers during the year, and then they work with us during the summer. Or they’re somebody who’s a massage therapist who also does housekeeping, who also has a food and beverage background. So people in Truckee just pull it together.
– And do what needs to get done. But you saw the niche. So let’s talk about the niche here.
– Yeah, I’ve been doing the same thing for 25 years, it keeps changing.
– Now, do you only do this in the Tahoe, Truckee area?
– Yeah, we do have a portion in our contract that’s a take me with you clause so that if somebody says, “Oh, I love you so much I want you to come with me when I’m going to Spain,” then we have that covered for. And then we do have some clients, because they live remotely and come on vacation here, well, a large portion of the clientele that comes to Tahoe are from the Bay Area in San Francisco. So some San Francisco families would say, “Oh, I want to have a birthday party but I want to have Chef so-and-so.” And so we’ve traveled back down to the Bay Area just to give them the experience that they wanted. And we’ll head out to, Reno’s not far, that’s the nearest city for us.
– But again, if you have people are coming in from San Francisco, I always say to people, if somebody says, “Hey, can you do this?” You say yes and tell them how much and let them decide.
– And I would add that too. We have a solid business model that knows how to make a profit no matter what situation we’re in, and so we have a customer that wants that and is willing to pay, then we can make that happen.
– Right. And too many people, and some of you listening, will think, “Oh gee, that’s a lot of money for that.” And then you’ll either not tell the customer, you just say “No, I can’t do it,” or you’ll say how much it is, but you’ll say it almost apologizing. “Oh, that’s going to be…” No, it’s the customer’s money, let them decide. That’s going to be absolutely.
– That’s a great point because I still wrestle at times with putting out an estimate and seeing, I don’t know if you want me to talk numbers here because it’s not bragging, these are just some of the numbers of having my business, but I’ll put in an estimate and it causes me to pause because I don’t live that way, I wouldn’t hire these services and spend that much money. We’re just putting a team into a home, I’m comfortable talking about this because it’s listed, they’ve rented a home, and the rental rate per week is 65,000 for the week. But I’m like, “Okay.”
– So they’re not exactly price sensitive, right?
– Well, they’re value sensitive and they do have a price associated with that. But if you can convey to your clientele the value and the results and ask them what their expectations are in such a way that it builds trust and they understand they’re calling the right company, then I know I’m reaching the right client and they know they’re reaching the right company.
– And the thing with a niche is, your business, my business, anybody who’s got a very narrow niche, and I’ve been told that my niche is an inch wide and a mile deep because I can do what I do around the world, you have chosen your area, but you’ll go if they want you to go to Spain, or to San Francisco, whatever it is, you just have to have enough prospects to do business with during, in your case, during your season that you need there. You don’t worry about the people that come to Tahoe and stay at a hotel, come to Tahoe and are spending $2,000 on their rental for the week instead of $65,000, they are not your customer and you don’t worry about them. You just want to make sure, and this is important when you pick a niche, you pick a niche that there are prospects and there are people, and there are enough that will make your business profitable, that’s what you need.
– But I’ll tell you, in the early years, because my husband and I each come to it with different talents, and in the early years, we almost always had an argument in the spring. It was like April or May and I would panic and go, “We don’t have any bookings, the clients aren’t here, we’ve got this cheap catering gig, they want burritos for 150 people, we should do it.” And he would say, “We can’t do it, we’re not going to be available for the clients when they call, when they do ask.” And what we found that’s unique about our niche is that, and this could be a generalization, but we’ve found that the more discretionary income somebody has, the more likely they are to have a compressed timeframe for getting things done. And so we get phone calls from people, we just had an executive offsite call us, they’re renting and their whole team’s coming up and you’ve got all kinds of activities during the week. And then one of the last things people think of is, “Well, how am I going to feed everyone?” And it never ceases to surprise me how quickly somebody will call and say, “Oh, and can you do this in five days?” And “Oh, can we make sure that we have florals too?” And, “We need rentals too.” I mean, the rental trucks long ago filled up for weddings on Saturdays.
– Yes.
– So we have to get creative. But it came with time that I could stop worrying that we were turning down the wrong client and that we were confidently attracting the right clients and not having that FOMO, that fear of missing out.
– I hope you heard what Holly just said, turning down the wrong client gives you the bandwidth to do the right client. And especially knowing what you know, which is that you’re getting this compressed timeline, and these people aren’t saying, “Oh, how much is it?” They’re saying, “I need this in five days, do it.” That’s what they’re doing. And in terms of the price, coming back to that, I remember having a conversation with this florist in Ireland, and she was doing weddings for people coming from the States, coming over to Ireland. And she’s having this conversation through Facebook or email or whatever with this bride who wants a quote and she’s telling her about what she wants, ad this florist is just, “Wow, this is going to be the biggest wedding I’ve ever done.” And before she quoted the bride, she went to a group online and she put it out to her friends there and said, “Hey, before I give her this number, because this is the biggest number I’ve ever quoted, am I missing something here?” She was afraid to give her the number because it was so big. And her friends started coming back and said, “Well, do you need to hire more staff to get that done? Are you going to need a bigger truck? Do you have enough refrigeration to get that?” And it turned out the number wasn’t big enough. It wasn’t that it was too big, it wasn’t big enough. And these are the things that this is not what you normally do, it takes you out of what you do. I remember turning down the best paying gig I ever would have had because I would have had to learn things that are not in my core, and if I was looking to get into that niche, and you could have more than one niche, I would have done it, but I wasn’t looking to. And all that prep time was taking me away from my customers and maybe having me turn down somebody.
– And it’s not enough to say, “Oh, this is a high number.” Because you can put up, like you said, we put out an estimate for $75,000 once, but you don’t go like, “Oh wow, we’re making so much money.” When you look at the expenses involved in us executing that event, and this is a private in-the-home event. I know catering gigs that put out for half a million dollars for big giant events. So this is a smaller number until you put in perspective that this was in a single private home. But the expenses of having a kitchen and a bar staffed 24 hours a day, 24 hours a day in case anybody awoke and wanted a drink.
– So when you’re sleep walking to the refrigerator someone was there to open it for you.
– You might want a cocktail and you might want to sit out on the water. I’m not the one to judge about what it is they want, I’m just so pleased there are people out there who have a very clear vision of what they want. And usually they’re entertaining people and they want it effortless for their guests. And I just am so certain that you’ve called the right company and that we can provide that for you, and that you, as an individual, who are not even here in town calling me so that when you go on vacation you can trust, or an executive assistant calling me, you’re putting your reputation on the line by booking me for your clients. So being able to communicate that so that they know that we answer the phone, we return the phone calls, we’re responsive and we have trained staff. And that’s one of the things that I think separates us from our competition is the training standards that we have for all of our staff. And so many businesses as they’re starting to grow, they’re really a one man show, really solopreneurs, own their own job for quite some time until you becoming a business owner. Early on, my husband set the standard, I think for different reasons, but he said, “Whenever I go out on the job,” he said, “You find a way to make sure it’s staffed, but it’s not going to be you.” Basically he said, “I dated too many waitresses in my life.” And he said, “We’re not going to have that relationship.” So I don’t go out to the homes unless I’m making an appearance, shaking hands, checking on my staff, that sort of thing.
– But that’s also important because you’re not worried about being on a job, you are there to be accessible to the client. And knowing your clientele, the phone rings, they want somebody to answer it, they send an email or a text, they want somebody to answer it. I remember a photography company early on, we’re talking over 25 years ago, and the other photographers hated her because the owner did not shoot. Now, she had been a photographer, but she did not shoot. And she ran the office, she ran the business, and she had photographers going out and shooting, and all of these solopreneur photographers were like, “Oh well, she’s not even a photographer. She’s not even out there.” And she was making a whole lot more money than they were.
– I’ve heard it. And I have a couple of comments to that too because people said “You don’t even cook.” I say, “Yeah, but I’m the one here answering the phone and making sure that the uniform standards are kept up, and the invoicing is done, and the website is kept on, all that sort of stuff.” But what’s really important I think to my staff and then also to the customer is that I’m a layer in between that allows there to be that sacred social transaction when they’re in their home without it being a financial transaction. So I handle the complaints, I handle the money, and I also have the opportunity to seed conversations with how hard we’re working to earn a five star review, and, “Would you let us know who fall below five stars at any time so we can immediately fix it?” And, “Thank you so much for saying that compliment. I want to let you know that our staff are working really hard to earn additional tips.” So our staff are walking away with tips that often are double the wages I’m paying them. And so we have a really loyal team, and I think part of that has to do with the fact that I’m not on the job and I hold a special role for the company.
– And that that separation of powers over there, separation of roles is important. And the idea of, it’s always a transaction, right? They paid you to do something, but it’s not transactional once it’s being done. It’s one of the reasons that I always get paid before I go and speak. There’s that uncomfortable, “Here’s the check,” or “Where’s the check” type of thing. And it happens occasionally. And most of the time with my clients I will go, I’m not even asking and somebody hands me an envelope and I put it in my pocket, I don’t even look at it. I put it in my pocket. I’m here to do the job, let me do the job.
– We’ve developed those service standards so that when our staff go into an event we’ve laid out the four stages of an event. It’s what you do when you arrive, what you do before service begins, the ballet of service, and what you do after service ends. And so there are specific things that we do so that no matter the menu, the venue, or the number of guests, our clients get the level of service that our reputation is built upon that they expect by hiring a service like ours, and that includes training our staff how to greet and enter a home so that trust is immediately elevated. One of the hints is to conspicuously wash your hands in their presence, and then at the far end, how do you leave in such a way that gives them time to provide you a tip? I mean, people need to be educated on how to do that so then they’re not just saying, “Oh, bye, see ya, I’m leaving.” Or, “You need to tip me now.” There’s a very gracious way that you can give people enough time to allow them to leave their party and come say goodbye to you and take care of their business should they wish to do so.
– I love the conspicuously washing your hands. Early on in COVID, I was saying to a lot of my venue clients, “It doesn’t matter how clean your venue is, it matters what they see.” And if you have someone standing at the door with a glove and a mask on opening the door for people, that sends a signal that we are protecting you here. Same thing with the bathrooms or having the paper towels. A lot of bathrooms got rid of the paper towels for environmental reasons, but then with the hand dryers you have to open the door and there’s no paper towel there. So bringing them back, having the pail over there, hand sanitizer all over the place, the perception of clean. I said, “You could have had the robot that the operating rooms use to come in and UV blast everything in there, but if they didn’t see it, it didn’t happen.” The other side of it is, they just expect things to happen, and you don’t get points for doing it right, you lose points for getting it wrong. They notice when you didn’t do it right. If you did it right, it happened, and it was natural, like you said, this is how it happens. Now I want to go back to something else there where you said, you’re quoting these numbers, but you wouldn’t hire somebody or pay somebody this amount of money to do it. And I was doing a Mastermind Day one time and there was a women sitting next to me that did high-end decorating and decor for events. And she said the same thing. She goes, “I wouldn’t pay my prices.” And I said, “Excuse me?” And she said, “I would never pay somebody to do what I do, this kind of money to do what I do.” I said, “Well, do your customers have a problem with it?” She goes, “Oh no, they don’t, but I would never do that.” And it got me thinking, if we went to the Rolls-Royce dealership, there’s somebody there selling Rolls-Royce, I don’t think they own a new Rolls-Royces.
– Probably not.
– Right. But when they tell someone that is $458,000 or whatever it is for this, what was I looking at in the paper the other day? Oh, it was a Ferrari, and it started at 500, but price as tested was $660,000. And the person selling that car has to say that to someone with a straight face and matter of factly, this is how much it is, and ask for the sale. Because it’s just a number, it’s just a fact that there’s more commas and zeros than it is for some of the rest of us when we’re buying a car.
– Well, and whether that’s the number or not, I like to share that, you know, for years we were in business, my husband and I, and my son who’s now 22, so we can all do the math, he was 13 and we were having a special birthday party for him, and we wanted to be present at the birthday party. And I said, “You know what honey, I think I’m going to hire our staff.” Normally, we know how to throw a party, we know how to do that, and we don’t normally spend that kind of money, but we had people coming from out of town, I wanted to be present for pictures and all of that. We hired staff, the evening ended, and the typical thing that happens for people in their homes after they throw a party is they close the door behind the last guest, they turn around and they look and they go, “Ugh,” and they do this balance of, “should I clean this up tonight or should I clean it up tomorrow?” And what we’ve always said is that we give our clients this experience of turning around and looking, and the lights are dimmed, and the sink has been wiped out, and the faucet’s been centered. These are the small things that they don’t add any different flavor to the food that you cook. Chicken, I believe is chicken. There’s a lot of good chicken out there and we’re cooking chicken for a lot of clients, but what we end up doing is wiping down the sink, centering the faucet, dimming the lights, and returning their kitchen to the look that they got on paper when it was designed by their architect and their designer, and that’s the way they want to see their kitchen at the end of the night. And then they’ve got this beautiful monogram dish towel from our company with a thank you note on the counter in this conspicuous place and they go, “Oh, that was really nice, I get to go to bed now.” And they put the last remaining wine glass on the counter and they walk away. “Wow, it’s amazing having HeyChef! here.” And it was that night, and we had already been running the business for a number of years, easily 10 or more years before I hired our own staff for that birthday party. And we closed the door and looked at one another and said, “Oh, now I get it.” And we have never thrown a party since where we haven’t hired some of our servers to come and make it easy so that we can truly be present.
– And understand the value of what you do from their side, and again, it’s up to the customer to decide. It’s really hard because most of us don’t get that opportunity to be a customer for our own business. The closest I had, I was speaking in Philadelphia one time and my son was going to Temple University and I said, “Hey, why don’t you come?” It was an event for “The Knot” and I had him bring a couple of friends. I said, “Hey, free food, come on.” And I brought them in and I spoke, and I saw my son afterwards, because he had never seen me doing what I do. And I said, “So how was it, what did you think?” He goes, “I wasn’t interested in what you were talking about, but I found myself wanting to listen.”
– Aww, that’s a nice compliment.
– And I’m thinking, this is a kid who’s heard me speaking for his entire life and he clearly could have just been like, “Ah, that’s dad over there.” But I was engaging him to want to listen to something that he really didn’t even care about, and that gave him an appreciation for me. And then my other son, same thing. I said, “What did you think?” And he had his friends there and he goes, “It was good.” I said, “What did your friends think?” My friends think I have the coolest dad.” I was like, “Score!”
– Yeah, I know right. It means everything when our kids compliment us.
– My kids’ friends, it’s like “Your dad’s cool.” I was like, “Here you go.” So the idea, we’re talking about, again, about the niche. The niche is finding something that there’s a need, because very few people can be Steve Jobs and create products that we didn’t know we needed and that we can’t live without, most of us have to see a need and fill it, fill a need, solve a problem, something like that. So again, there’s this genesis of this, this seed for where it started, you had the talented chef, you had the business skills, but did somebody ask? I know your husband was doing this in New York, but did somebody ask?
– Well, he was traveling, and then when he was filling the blanks, he was painting. And so he didn’t want to work in a restaurant anymore, he had this private client, he would travel, then he would come home, he’d fill the gaps with painting. And that’s when we noticed an opportunity. First, we noticed this problem that he was underpaid and he was traveling a lot, and we noticed this opportunity that he was cooking in homes, and we made this connection that if he’s traveling with people who want a chef when they’re traveling, and he’s painting in these homes that people are traveling to, I was like, “You know what, I think we could start a business here, and we can be the ones who stay and they can travel. We can stay here in Truckee.”
– But they’re already traveling. That’s the thing is they were already traveling to Truckee and to Tahoe, so you put the two and two together and said, “Wait a minute, the chef can go with the family, or the family can come and have our chef.” And again, it’s seeing that need, solving that problem, and I don’t think this is a price point thing either. Yes, your business is certainly a price point thing, but the idea of finding that niche is, what do people need, what problem are you solving for them, and are they willing to pay for that problem to be solved for whatever it is that you’re bringing? The need was already there. And then in the competitive way you’re also saying, “It’s not just that we’re going to cook you great food, the level of service and everything to that last detail, which your clientele expect.”
– That’s really what separates us. Because I believe, and I say it all the time to chefs who I’m coaching, “It’s not about the chicken, you guys.”
– Not about the chicken, for those of you that are listening on audio, Holly just held up a rubber chicken.
– Yeah. Because they just go, “It should be about my food.” “Actually it’s not, it’s about your shoes and whether or not you have an appropriately hemmed pant that’s pressed.” We have a chef that works with us, we’ve named our child after him, so my husband and he are best friends, they both were private chefs in Manhattan. And when Chef Brian would go to work, he would arrive at the penthouse and come off the elevator in a three-piece suit carrying on a hanger, his garment bag that had his chef jacket in it. And he would meet with the client, he would sit down, they’d talk about the day, and he would say, “Now let me go to work.” Then he would go and change. I mean, the most distinctive mood, and it elevated the service that he was providing up to a level of professionalism that most chefs don’t realize people are willing to pay more for your chicken if you’re willing to present yourself as the consummate professional.
– That’s a great story because he also is then going to be treated differently by the client-
– Absolutely.
– Because he showed up in a three-piece suit and then changed into his chef clothing instead of showing up in a uniform and showing up like a blue collar worker, he showed up not necessarily on par, but closer. And again, you’ve seen me speak, Holly, I’m almost always in a suit and tie, if not, then I’m in a jacket and tie unless the client requests otherwise. And that’s important too. If the client says to me, and I’ve had this, I spoke in Texas one time, I had a sport jacket, pair of jeans and cowboy boots and a V-neck T-shirt underneath the sport jacket. And it looked good, it just wasn’t my normal look, but it was appropriate and the client wanted that. I have had times where the client would be like, “Could you please not wear a jacket and not wear a tie?”
– And that may seem audacious, but we have clients who had asked us to dress down because some of them are uncomfortable with the level of wealth they’ve attained and want it to be more casual. And so we’ve done a lot of educating our staff on the idea that just because you’re in-the-home, doesn’t mean you’re out the home, and don’t mistake them saying, “Hey, call me my first name,” as anything other than a gesture of wanting to feel as though, a lot of our clients, “I want you to think that I’m just like you.” And we are, I believe we’re all equal in the eyes of God, but we’re here to serve, and there’s a level of professionalism that in order for us to serve in the way that we’re known, we can’t break that. So they’ll say, “Oh, don’t wear shoes” for instance, “We don’t wear shoes in the house.” We’ve had to come up with shoe covers then. And I’ve had to say to my clients, “No, we can’t honor that, wearing shoes is important in the job that we do, it’s a safety issue, and you may not be a match for me.”
– And I’m sure, like you said, some people treat you like, “Hey, you’re here, yes, you’re helping out,” but they treat you more warmly. And then some people, you are the staff and you are here to do a job. And I’m sure your staff understands that. I’ve said this before, my wife and I like to vacation on Cape Cod as opposed to a place like the Hamptons in New York. The Hamptons are very pretentious and people put their money in your face, and their cars and their houses and the way they dress and whatever, and in Cape Cod there are people that are just as wealthy, but they’re not showing it. You might see a nice car, but you also might see an old beat up Jeep that they leave at their Cape house, and you just can’t tell, they’re just not pretentious.
– And we can have a whole conversation around that too, because I’ll tell you there are two words that every customer calls me, even the ones who are willing to pay top dollar for the services. They’ll say, “Well, we just want it to be simple and we just want it to be casual.” I mean that comes out of everybody’s mouth. You’re on vacation, and you just want it to be simple, and you just want it to be casual, and I agree with that, but the way that we can achieve that for you is by us doing all the work. So you go ahead and wear flip flops and shorts to the dinner table if you’d like, it’s still going to be really awesome chicken and we’re still going to be really professional when we serve.
– So my dad doesn’t have to wear his big boy pants?
– That’s right. Big boy pants are optional.
– Which Holly heard on the niche I did with Nil Saltuk from Weather or Not Accessories. She got a chuckle out of my dad, my 91 year old dad, having to wear long pants sometimes, his big boy pants there.
– And by the way, great podcast, Nil and I have already connected because she ships regionally as well. It’s so nice that we can all connect in this way.
– But these are the idea of the niche, you don’t even know something exists and then you’re like, “Oh my gosh, how did I ever live without that?” And that’s the same thing here. So do you ever go outside this niche?
– We did once it was, it was disastrous.
– All right.
– I’ll tell you, we stepped outside our niche, probably because of my ego, probably because of my agenda, I really had some ideas about who I wanted to be in my community, I’m a Rotary member, there are things that I wanted to achieve in my status in our community. And so I thought the next thing for us to do was to get a commercial kitchen. We found a commercial kitchen that we could take over the restaurant operations of it, and it was at the airport. And what was great about it was that we could provide the on-flight catering for our customers. On pencil it worked really well and we ended up in the first couple of months doing tens of thousands of dollars of in-flight catering, and we could put our brochures in it and things like that. So it looked like it would go well, but sadly on the first day of snow, we picked up our Christmas tree, it was December 13th, I’ll make the story short, but my baby daughter and I were in the car behind, my husband and my son who were in the truck bringing home the Christmas tree, and I watched them get hit head on-
– Ooh.
– By an oncoming vehicle in the snow that had spun out. And what happened there was two and a half years of eight times in the ER, and my husband had multiple surgeries, and my son broke his back, and it was miserable. And that very first, next day, I found myself in this restaurant making sandwiches to cover for a shift and I went, “Holy cow! What did we do?” There I was, that first week, I think there were 11 doctors’ appointments, and it was a downward spiral that was really tough and it had us all in spots where we didn’t belong. And we realized it was too big of a stretch and that we ought to stay exactly where we were and have, as you referred to Alan, that inch wide mile deep. And we returned to that, and thankfully everyone recovered, but it was a very tough period of our lives, and we lost the restaurant.
– I remember speaking at WeddingMBA one year to a group who specifically caterers venues, and I was doing a Q and A in the big room, hundreds of people there. And I said, “What are you working on? What are you thinking about?” And somebody say, “Well, I’m thinking about, I have a venue and we’re only open for events, and I’m thinking about adding a restaurant so that we can do business all week.” You can’t see Holly’s face if you’re listening. So I said, “Why?” And they said, “Well, because we’re dark all week and this way we could bring in some money.” I said, “Well, have you thought about the fact that you also don’t need food during the week? You don’t need any staff during the week, you don’t need to do any prep in case anybody shows up, you don’t have to have any linens and all these other other things, you have expenses before you sell the first meal. I’m not saying don’t do it, what I’m saying is, did you look at all of that? Or are you looking at, ‘Oh, I could be selling dinner, or lunch and dinner, or breakfast, lunch and dinner during the week.’ And maybe you want to talk to some other people that have restaurants in the area, see what the demand is and all that.” I actually got kudos from a bunch of people for not saying to the guy, “Hey, good for you.” And I said, “I’m not telling you don’t do it, I just want you to go with your eyes open and understand what is this? This is a separate business in the same building as your venue business.”
– And I consider myself a business owner, but I think where I made that mistake there is thinking that that meant I could run a restaurant.
– Right. Restaurants are very, very different businesses.
– Yeah, we got it handed to us.
– But you learned, and that’s the key with it. A good friend of mine, Bruce Hale, he said, “Success is often an unintended consequence.” Failure is an unintended consequence. You didn’t go into that business expecting it to fail, you go into the business expecting it to succeed. Now you know what you didn’t know, and because you know that, you wouldn’t do it again.
– Now I stay in my lane.
– Stay in your lane.
– I really stay in my lane.
– And you can have more than one lane, you just have to be very clear on what those lanes are. There were people listening that do weddings, they do bar mitzvahs, they do quinceanera, they do corporate events, they do fundraisers. You can have each of those lanes, or you can choose some of those lanes, or one of those lanes, it’s up to you. And is there another lane for you? There are definitely people in the industry that have more than one lane. Some of them it’s their day job, they work somewhere else, some of them their day job is their business. I have a client who’s an accountant, he’s got an accounting business, and they also own venues. Those are separate businesses. There’s an overlap because he does the accounting for his venues, but they’re separate businesses, and you have to treat them like separate businesses because they have to be fed and stoked, and you’re going to have to put the gas in the engines and tanks of both of those there. So, we could definitely be talking about this forever. So any last thoughts for anybody who’s either has a niche or thinking a bout a niche?
– Anybody who’s entrepreneurial, there’s a million good ideas every month, and it’s where you put your time, where you put your energy, and the amount of momentum that it takes to gather up, isn’t something that you want to walk away from, and diverge with the plan. But as you said, with the two niches, I definitely have always wanted to give back more than just serving people with discretionary income and having what is essentially a staffing company. I don’t consider myself a food or beverage company, I consider myself a staffing company. And so many chefs have come to us and said, “Well, show me how it is that you run the business, show me how to do what it is that you do so well.” And so I’ve begun coaching chefs on how to build their business and how to put the systems in place to consistently exceed customer expectations. And so that is my second niche and that’s, Make Your Business Cook. And so I offer consulting services to chefs who know more about cooking than they do about running your own business. But that stays very clearly in what my lane is. I’m taking everything that we’ve done with HeyChef! and simply giving these systems to other chefs so that they don’t have to experiment and build them, and they can go out on their own and do what they love, and get paid what they’re worth.
– And that’s kind of what the book, “The E-Myth,” if people have read the book, “The E-Myth,” it’s the systems there that are the business, the services, products you provide, any business has those, but it’s those systems that make it scalable. I have a client that has, I believe they’re at a little over 50 venues now, and they do the same packages at every one of the venues, pricing is different based upon geography. But like you said, chicken is chicken and steak is steak, but their system allows them to go into a new venue and then start it up and just know what they’re going to do instead of, “Oh gee, now what are we going to do here?” And that’s important. So we’ll put into the show notes both of those businesses. Actually I made a note at seven o’clock this morning about a conversation I had yesterday with someone about something similar to this. So in an upcoming podcast, I don’t know if it’s going to go before this or after this, but an upcoming podcast is going to be about, should you learn it yourself? Or should you hire somebody? And there are different ways. So in this particular case with this client, he could either figure it out himself, he could take courses on how to do it, or he could hire somebody to teach him, or he could hire somebody to do it for him. And those are different options. And you have to understand-
– Those are critical decisions based on where you are in your business, and how much time you have, and what your resources are.
– And that was the thing, resources, money is tight, but I said, “How fast do you want to be up and running?” Because if you go to figure it out yourself, it’s going to take you longer. If you take courses, you have to finish the course till you’re ready. If you hire somebody to do it for you, you’ll be up and running faster, but then you still don’t know how to do it, which is okay, because you may not want to know how to do it. Or you could hire somebody to do it and teach you at the same time so that you can then take over. And this is the thought process, and I’m going to do another whole podcast.
– Oh, that’s great. And that’s what I help chefs with across the nation is, “We’ve got this office here that’s running, and I can show you in 30 days exactly what steps to do,” I teach a rapid business launch 30 day program, “And you will get more done as a chef in 30 days for your business than most chefs accomplish on their own in five years. Because I’ll just show you, here’s the exact steps that you take and just, let’s turn this business on.”
– And avoiding the pitfalls because been there, done that, understand what they are, and understanding your client. Yeah, I love it. So, we could go on forever-
– We could.
– because we did this in Miami already.
– I enjoy Alan, not only talking with you, but learning from you, I follow your podcast, I’ve hired you before, and come to your classes, love seeing you every time you speak.
– Thank you, and you email me when you want to know what bourbon to serve at a…
– That’s right. They asked for something special and I knew you were the guy with that answer.
– I’m the bourbon concierge. So there we go. So Holly, I will put into the show notes the two different websites, HeyChef! and your other business. What are those websites?
– Well, our local business in Lake Tahoe is heychef.com, and if you’re a chef who’s looking to start and run your own business, you can reach out to me either way, but it’s makeyourbusinesscook.com.
– Makeyourbusinesscook.com and heychef.com. We’ll put that into the show notes, that’ll be there. Holly, thank you so much for joining me. Of all the places I’ve traveled, I have still yet to be to Lake Tahoe, either side, so I do hope to get there one of these days soon and see you on your turf.
– We’ll set something up.
– So, thank you so much again for joining me.
– Thanks, Alan.
– Bye.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
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