Episode 18
Rachelle:
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Beyond Nourished podcast. I am your host, Rachelle Girardin, and this is the podcast where I typically teach you ways to improve your kitchen experience, whether through healthifying your recipes or improving your efficiency. And today, we're going to do something a little bit different.
I've got my first guest on this podcast - I actually thought I would never have a guest, but then I realized it's just way more fun to talk to people every once in a while. The guest that I have on today has so much information to share, and also, she's just really, really funny. I wanted to have a chance to chat with her because she's going to crack you guys up, she's going to crack me up.
On today's podcast, we've got Kate's from Kate’s Custom Kitchen. Kate is someone who did our Holistic Chef Certification and Business Training Program. She was part of the OG course. She may have even been the first student that signed up, and she's definitely the most memorable thus far. She's become our main cheerleader and also just super successful in this endeavour.
I'll let her tell you where she came from, but she went from zero to holistic chef and just really took her business off the ground. I wanted to take a brief pause in teaching you guys about efficiency today and share with you a success story of one of the people that have gone through our Holistic Chef Certification course, in case this is something that you might be interested in.
Welcome, Kate
Kate:
I’m so excited to be here.
Rachelle:
We're actually going to be doing this in three parts. I just have so much that I wanna squeeze out of Kate that we're not going to get it all done in this one episode.
So first of all, let's talk about, Kate, how you ended up in the Holistic Chef Certification program and what you were doing - I guess two years ago now.
Kate:
Right, I think it's been about a year and a half since we started the course in June of 2020. So in March of 2020, I had been running restaurants for nearly 10 years, and we were laid off. So I was cruising on CERB for a couple of months trying to figure out what I was going to do next, whether restaurants would open again, whether I even wanted to be in a restaurant again. I felt like I had really run my course in terms of being in a healthy state of mind and physically running restaurants.
I'm sure a lot of people out there can relate to that, so I just wanted to take a couple of months and ride EI. had never been on it before, and I just thought I've been paying into this my whole life, I want these checks! And then I actually had a phone call from my doctor that scheduled me for a major surgery I had been waiting for for many years, so I decided to get the surgery and continue to take time off and just take care of my health and get my body and my mind right, and then I would cross my next bridge when it came.
While I was recovering and sitting at my island house on Galiano, an Instagram message was sent to me about the course for the holistic chef training, and I think I sent you a DM within seconds of receiving that message: How do you sign up? What does it cost? How do we do this? I was sitting with my mom, and she was like - “yeah, do that!”. I was sitting with my partner - “do that!”. Everybody was on board.
I'm pretty sure I had $300 in my bank accounts - plural - $300 across the board. We were living legitimately paycheck to paycheck because of Covid, and I didn't know how I was going to get the money, but I knew that it was gonna be money well spent, so I called around for loans, I think you and I had our call a week later - and the rest is history. I may have been the first sign-up. I was very keen.
Rachelle:
I’m like that too - when I want something, I'll be the first one to sign up. I was the first person to sign up to holistic nutrition school when they opened a Vancouver campus. I'm the first in line if I really want something, and not bothered otherwise. But I just remembered something, which was when we originally spoke, I was actually advertising a free mentorship - that's what it was - the course didn't even exist yet! The course became the by-product of all of the people that were interested in learning how to make at least $50,000 per year as a holistic chef. And so instead of taking one person under my wing, I turned it into this course and we ended up helping 15 other people instead of just one. We've now gone on to run the course a number of times, but that was the original thing.
Kate:
Yeah, I forgot about that. And you had so many applicants, that's a testament to how great it sounded, obviously. And thank God for that, because if I wasn't chosen, if I wasn’t the one on one, none of this would have happened. That's crazy.
Rachelle:
You forget where you were two years ago, so it's funny to revisit where we were at at that time, and on the other end of it, I was also figuring out how to deal with covid on my side. We didn't know at that point if we were safe to run a food service, two of my staff got sick immediately - it actually wasn't covid-related but they couldn't work - and it was just this moment of do or die in my business as well. I hate this word because it's been so overused, but the word pivot - I really did need to come up with something in my business. I’ve been cooking for so long, but I love it. I still do! I actually just took a new job recently because I was missing being in the kitchen - but to have something exciting and new to share, I was up every night just so inspired to work on that course, and since then we've had a few renditions from the beta to the first one or the second one, and so on. We’ve been improving it a little bit, but really the bare bones of it came out of a gift from the heavens because it was just like a stream of consciousness - get it all out of me, I need people to do this!
Let's talk a little bit about how you talked about your bank account being pretty narrow, you talked about reaching out to some people who believed in you, but do you remember what your mindset was like in having to spend a little money to know or were you just dead certain that you were going to be successful? How did you decide to take that leap?
Kate:
My theory was I was sick to death of working for other people, and I had a bad run with bosses for a while in the restaurant world, so I was a little bruised. It was pretty good timing in terms of that, so I was very much ready to do my own thing, I love working alone, as I've recently learned. So that part of being your own boss part really spoke to me. But I also grew up cooking, I grew up around food, I cook for myself every single day, multiple times a day, so I was already very comfortable in the kitchen and very confident in the fact that I could cook.
I was also the only person in our course that was not a nutritionist, so I was a little nervous that I was gonna lack a lot of the education that the other applicants would have, but I also eat a generally pretty healthy whole food diet anyway, so I figured I would just learn as we went. But basically, it was kind of do or die, it was either you do this or you go back and run a local spot and work insane hours and make like no money.
I can't believe the difference in money from less than two years ago to now, it is the most freeing portion of this entire journey. I don't think that success is 100% related to your income, but being able to make a grand purchase and not even think of checking what's in the bank account before you do it is the best feeling I think I've ever had in terms of work.
Rachelle:
Amazing. I have so many things to say right now. First of all, for those of you that don't know much about this course, just to let you know, roughly 50% of it is business training, where I truly open up the back end of Beyond Nourished and what we've done in terms of systems and procedures. Not just how we do them now, but how we've done them throughout so that people can pick and choose what works for them. It's more like advice - this is why this didn't work for us, maybe it will work for you - and then the other 50% is the culinary side of things - mostly based around efficiency. A lot of people know how to cook, but not a lot of people know how to translate that into knowing how to cook for dollars. Sure, you make the best bran muffins out there, but it takes you three and a half hours - it's not really a capitalized business model in that sense, it's not scalable. We really teach people how to take their joy in cooking and turn it into more of a business.
We teach a very small fraction of nutritional information because most of the people that come into this are actually looking to start a business. If they have a nutrition background, fantastic. But we really set just the principles of what it means to be a holistic chef, and a lot of people that eat a relatively healthy diet can really take that on because we know that the word healthy is defined differently by so many people. We don't fall into any type of certain dogma when it comes to a teaching perspective, we really leave that for people to explore on their own, but we do teach on how to bridge that world of holistic nutrition into our culinary training.
Secondly, Kate made a great comment about how she said her success is not necessarily just intrinsic to the amount of money she makes. One of the reasons I wanted to have Kate on today is because she also has some of the best boundaries I have ever experienced in my life! We teach boundaries in this course, and there are a couple of different ways we go about it, but why don't you tell our listeners today some of the really awesome boundaries you have around business and the protection of them and how you balance your personal life and your business life now that you're your own boss.
Kate:
The number one thing I do to ensure my business is successful for myself and my business is to establish and adhere to super strict boundaries. I know that's a really hot topic word, but I used to work 24-7 in restaurants. It didn’t matter if you were off on a Monday, Tuesday, you were always on, your phone was always on, you were never really tuning out. So the first thing I did, I think it was within six months, I determined business hours. I work between these hours and on these days - my days off are Thursday and Friday, which are not normal days off for most of the people that I cater to. They love to chat on a Thursday about menu items and invoices, but I do not respond to anything. It took a while to get them to kind of fall in line with that.
Also, at that time, I was fluctuating between a lot of different kind of jobs. I was contracting for Beyond Nourished and I was also contracting for two other companies, so it was harder to do the boundaries then because I was technically working for other people who needed answers when they needed answers. But once I got rid of all of my contract jobs, that boundary went into my email signature, it's on my website, it's on Google: do not contact me on my days off! And also, I don't respond to things after 5 PM and if you get an email from me after 5 or before 9am - you're welcome. Also, it says that I will not respond probably for two days because on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday I am strictly in the kitchen. I don't even open my computer, I work completely off a notebook, sometimes my phone for recipes, but I don't even open my computer to do emails.
I’ve talked to a lot of people who do what we do, and a lot of entrepreneurs in general that I've built a community of now, and I think one of the biggest issues so many people face with running their own business and burn out is that they don't schedule the time. So if you don't know every week that you have Thursday, which is my day, to have sacred time for yourself doing whatever. Some days I watch Real Housewives for eight hours because it’s the only thing I can get my brain to tune out. But whatever it is, if you don't set that time to take care of yourself, nobody else will and the week we'll get away from you.
I also take three days off a week - I only work four days a week. I work 12-13 hours in those four days to make sure I can get everything in, but I also know that two-day weekends are a joke, and whoever said that you spend the first day of your weekend taking care of yourself and socializing, and then the second day of your weekend you take care of your life, you do your laundry, you do your groceries. You don’t have any time for rest! Even if you work a normal work week of 40 hours, you still need downtime to yourself, so schedule business hours, schedule email hours and schedule time for yourself. That's the biggest one. My Thursdays are so sacred, you're the only person I've ever broken my email rule for.
Rachelle:
Thank you so much. Well, sometimes things just need to get done, and you bending the rules a little bit. So I don't know if we actually covered this yet, but just to make sure that everybody is on the same page, when Kate's talking about the work that she does, she's currently working for clients on a personal chef level. She is cooking for probably what - six to eight clients per week?
Kate:
Yeah, eight families!
Rachelle:
She's got her hands full! This is the style of cooking that we also teach because we find that it's what the market wants most of the time. I spent many, many years of my career working for somebody every day, and while that is usually the job of a private chef, we find that we actually cook for people more on a weekly basis and just do one client per day or two clients per day, and let that food take them half of their week to finish or their full week to kind of finish. It's a wonderful way to go about doing business.
What I love about what Kate has done is she found a way to make it work for her. Let's talk about a little bit of the success that you’ve had in terms of monetary value because I really do feel like you've also found the success in the life that you want to live - taking those three days off to really enjoy your life and doing whatever the hell you want to do. Whether that be siting at home or going on adventures or working more - who knows, but whatever you do in those three days is Kate's decision and nobody else's decision.
Kate:
That's huge. I think the other thing too, is I like that you mentioned earlier that you just started cooking again because you had missed being in the kitchen. I got my first client in September 2020, so I've been doing this full-time for a year and a half now, and I was starting to find that being in the kitchen four days a week was starting to become monotonous, I guess. You're doing the same thing pretty much every day. So I started a side hustle outside of private cheffing and opened a Lasagne service and was doing that twice a month. So on one of my three days off, I would devote a full day to making scratch lasagne, and then lasagne season kind of ended.
Rachelle:
What is lasagne season? Can you explain this?
Kate:
It’s during the winter. I'm not eating lasagne in July during a heat wave! I don't think you could put lasagne in an air fryer, I don't know. But I was still a little bored and so I took a teaching job, so now I teach once a month, and that is all I need in terms of work social.
We cook for two hours together on Zoom or in person, I'm starting with seniors this month, so we are going to have seniors as couples come and do a Zoom and learn how to make a thai curry and stuff like that. That gets me out of the kind of general routine, and the money is there too - they're also paying top dollar for stuff like that.
The Lasagne Program was very successful. I couldn't keep up with the demand. If I'm honest, I think that if we re-launch that again, we would have to do it in a much more commercial way, which is always an option down the road.
The opportunities after you finish this course are endless, they really are. You don't have to walk out of the course and just decide that you're going to be a personal chef for someone. I think you get the tools to start the business and then the business can go in a million different directions. I'm just the type of person that when a direction kind of showed up, I said yes.
Rachelle:
Okay, I want to know what you feel are the three things that have allowed you to be successful in this endeavour. What do you think puts Kate's Custom Kitchen above anyone else that may have tried this and not done so well? What do you do that sets you apart, or something that other people could look at your business and say, “Oh, those are the things I need to concentrate on”?
Kate:
Okay, well, my first answer was going to be that I work probably 10 times harder than most people, and I mean that. I am an aggressive worker. I'm up at before 5 AM and I'm high-tailing it throughout the day. I work really, really, really hard.
This success isn't something that just falls into your lap. You can take the course - and the course gave me pretty much every tool I possibly needed to make this business successful - but you have to put in the work.
But the thing that we do that's different than everyone else that I'm super proud of is, as I like to call them - we're finding dietary solutions. So we don't call them dietary restrictions or dietary concerns, we are here simply to help families find dietary solutions. Seven out of the eight families I cook for currently have one or two of the family members who say are vegan, but the rest of the family eats meat, or they are dairy-free or gluten-free and the rest of the family can eat that.
I feel like I'm going to give away my secret and then everybody's gonna do this! But I think more people should because I can't take on any more work, so if you could figure out how to do this, I encourage it. All of my families sit down to the exact same meal for dinner, but catered specifically to how they can enjoy it. If you're going to have enchiladas, one will have chicken with a flour tortilla and regular cheese, someone else will have dairy-free cheese and a tortilla with beans, etcetera. But no one is feeling like they are missing out feeling like they have to sit down and have a salad, while everybody else was having a steak dinner that night.
Rachelle:
What I'm hearing you say is what sets you apart is really listening to your client's desires and requirements and finding a way to make it work.
Kate:
Yeah, a big one that I found with most of the people that had tried a meal service before joining with mine was that the biggest complaint was that it couldn’t cater to everyone in their family, so the money didn't make sense. If you're spending the type of money that we are charging through these services, it has to make sense for everyone involved. No one is working out this kind of cash to then be told no. Also, restaurant rule number one, say yes to the guest! Even if we don't know how to figure it out yet, you just say yes and you figure it out later.
Rachelle:
If we were to draw a parallel success between you and I, I think three of the things for me that comes to mind is I see what a hard worker you are. Sure, somebody can give me the framework to something, but I know you know that you have to do the work. You have to put it the time and make it doable. The other thing is not being afraid of hard work. We're talking about Kate’s success right now, we're talking about the success that you can have if you take this course, but you cannot expect it to just happen for you.
We both come from the restaurant industry. I was a server for basically my entire life, and then I started the business. But what I know how to do is work long hours being on my feet. I'm used to working without breaks, that type thingm and it's just the style of work that it is. It's not for everybody, but Kate and many of our other students are great examples of the success that you can have in it.
Success might be cooking for eight clients as she does, success might also just be cooking for one client and making $2000 a month and using it as your side hustle. It's not necessarily that this needs to be your full-time job, it's also not that you need to make it bigger than just yourself.
One of the things I also love about Kate, and she might have plans to expand, but I love that she's working on her own. I always think back to those days 10 years ago when it was just me very fondly. I'm like Kate, I also love to work alone, and so it's really interesting having a relatively large team now. I play the role of boss quite well, and at the same time, if I can have a day alone in the kitchen, I kind of prefer it. Nothing against anybody, but when I'm in my own flow, I'm good at it, and Kate is kind of similar. So there are some things there that I see in you that I definitely see in myself and would credit to getting me to where I am today.
So, Kate, lastly, when you first contacted me, did you think that any of this was possible? Did you think that you could do this? Have you reached that level that you were desiring or have you got above it?
Kate:
We are so surpassed. I honestly didn't know. I got my first client before we were even done, and one of the tips in the course was about finding clients or pursuing clients, and I used to joke that I was just going to go to Whole Foods and drop my business card into people’s grocery bags. I actually ended up at a barbecue in late July 2022, and I got talking about what I was doing, and one of the people there said, I actually know someone who would be perfect for this! And they linked us up and we had signed a contract by mid-August. My first day was the first week of September, and she was my only client and I priced way too low. That would be my one tip - price higher than you think you're worth. Whatever your self-worth is, times it by 10, and that should be your starting price because you won't make any money where I started. My first client was five dinners, two lunches and two breakfast for $200.
Rachelle:
I don't even cook for people that want that much food anymore!
Kate:
True story! This was one person, full family-style four serving dinners, so they could entertain during the week for $200 a week and a prime Monday spot. All from a kitchen smaller than my bathroom, with no dishwasher, no counterspace and an apartment-sized fridge and stove.
I had worked so hard for so many years, and was so financially stressed all the time. Even running restaurants - my partner and I both ran restaurants - he, as a male, consistently made double what I would make in a salary, working the same level job. So my goal was truly just to make enough money so that we weren't financially stressed. Not even that we wouldn't have to check the bank account, but that we maybe weren't living paycheck to paycheck. And now, like I mentioned earlier, I can buy a Vitamix and not even look at my checking account! So that feels really, really good.
Rachelle:
I remember a similar feeling. I knew that I had reached a certain level of success when I could spend freely. I've always been a frugal person. I don't need all the bells and whistles, and I knew that if I wanted it, most likely it was somewhat attainable to me. The bar grows as you start to make more money, but I wanted to spend money freely - I didn't want to always let price dictate when I was ordering, what I was buying, who I was generous toward, all of those types of things. So I think that it's so inspiring how far you’ve come. And at the same time, I just want to say that I acknowledge all of the hard work that it's taken to get there - it didn't just fall into your lap, you have worked very hard from everything from social media and getting out there, putting your name out there. Like Kate knows, for those of you that are starting to think about getting into this industry, who you know and the relationships is the bottom line of the success of your business. It's just about fostering those relationships. I would say that you know way more people in the holistic chef services industry than I do. You're just putting yourself out there, and people have come to know you. You're personable, you're likable, and you're also reliable, and I think that people really appreciate that and that's why you have a successful business and can run your business like a boss as you are!
I want to share some more of it, but we're going to wrap up this episode. It was really just setting the stage for what is possible, focusing where Kate was at a year and a half ago. We were just in the beginning of covid when all of this started to be a conversation. She was tired of being in the service industry. She was tired of not making any money anymore, She was tired of working long hours late at night for people that she didn't want work for in an industry she didn’t want to be in. All of that said, if you had to sum up your life in three words now, what would they be?
Kate:
Happy. Healthy. Rich.
Rachelle:
There you go! That is the perfect mic drop to end this wonderful episode.
For more information on the Holistic Chef Certification and Business Training click here.
To learn more about Kate and Kate’s Custom Kitchen, visit her on Instagram or check out her website.
Stay tuned for more from Kate in an upcoming episode.