Must-Know Definitions for Every Personal Chef

In the personal chef world, there are all kinds of definitions and lingo you may hear. Today I’m going to cover 5 must-know definitions that will help you explain and offer your services to clients so they can say yes!

Quick disclaimer…these are the definitions I’ve created after working with 150+ professional athletes and 850+ clients over the course of 13 years. You can take what you want from them and make them your own.

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• What the most popular recurring services are

• How to find your “sweet spot” for the income and schedule you want

• Typical pricing for various services

• When to add a contract

• The one service I DON’T offer in my business

• 7 add-on services to bring in some extra dough and make your client love you even more!

Featured on this Episode:

• Ready to book your next summer sizzling client? Click here for my guide on how to get your next 5 clients!

• Interested in becoming Fully Booked? Check out my A-Z program on how to market, sell and set up your cooking practice so you can become fully booked - Join the Waitlist HERE. Course is scheduled to open mid-September 2022.

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• Transcript

  Hello and welcome to the chef with purpose podcast. I'm your host, Stephanie Heller. This podcast teaches personal chefs, nutrition experts, and at home cooks how to become fully booked while growing your purpose, profit and passion. Good food is just part of the puzzle. I'll show you what to offer and how to market so you can become fully booked and help people through your food. Now, let's get cooking. Hey, chefs. Welcome to the chef with purpose podcast. With me, Stephanie Heller, as your host. Today, we're going to talk about the five must know definitions for every personal chef. This vocabulary is going to help you so much in explaining your services, deciding what services to offer, and being in the know of how to offer your services so clients can say yes. So, first, formal. Informal, disclaimer. These are my definitions. They're ones that I've either been taught from other people, made up myself, heard in the industry, and I'm sharing them to shed light, to help you and inspire you. These are like the abridged condensed versions of some of the definitions over my last 13 years of owning my personal chef business, making mid six figures every year, and serving over 150 professional athletes, as well as 850 clients over all these years. So you're going to have your own definitions. Maybe you'll have no idea what I'm even talking about, but either way, come to this with an open mind. You get to make them your own, but make sure that you understand what goes into each. So the first one, these are some service definitions. These are service offerings that I have used in my business. And there are core offerings. So these are the ones that I chose to sell over and over that I got really good at selling. When you choose only one or two services, you get really good at explaining it, making it compelling, making it easier for the client to say yes and then executing it. So the first one is what I call weekly in home meal service. This is also called weekly inhome cooking. It could be called a multimeill service. And here are the core pieces of this. The personal chef will come to the client's home usually on the same day every week or every other week. So you could be at a client's home every Monday, 09:00 a.m. Doing weekly in home cooking. What this actually means is the chef is preparing multiple meals at once. For example, it could be what we call a four by four, which I'll explain in detail a little bit later. This is four different entrees, each with a protein, vegetable and a starch, and has four portions each. So it's four different entrees with four portions. The client comes away with about 16 meals for the week. The client is left with the food in the fridge, fully cooked, packaged, labeled, and ready to eat, hot or cold. There's nothing for the client to do but enjoy. There's no cooking for them. There's no clean up. The kitchen is clean and it smells great. The price range for this could be anywhere from two hundred and seventy five dollars to five hundred dollars per week, plus the cost of food. Again, this is called weekly in home cooking. This is usually the most popular reoccurring service. You're going to want to choose different services that, number one, fit into your life and the time slots that you have available. And number two, support the income and the business you want. I cannot even tell you. It's a slight tangent, but how many personal chefs only offer one time services like dinner parties or catering events, one time only services and then wonder why they don't have lots and lots of reoccurring income? This is why you have to offer two services. One is reoccurring, usually the weekly in home cooking and then single one time events that you do in other cooking slots. But a mix of both usually works out the best for the income that you want and the schedule. You want to create more on that in some future episodes. Okay, that's a little tangent. So that was weekly in home cooking. The next one is what I call a dinner party, but it's also called a boutique in home dining, which is less than 20 or 25 people in the home. It could be called a brunch. It could be called anything. But the signature of it is it's a special one time event that is taking place in the client's home. So this could be a dinner party for a guy's golf weekend. It could be a brunch for a bachelorette party. It could be a retreat where you're coming to the home and making lunch or dinner for a group of ten women on a yoga retreat. Either way, how you know if it's a special one time event that takes place in the client's home or a very small rented venue? Usually it's in the home. So the personal chef will come to the home and prepare a multi course dinner for family and or guests. 85% or more of the food is prepared on site. This is really important. I'm going to stop here because I want to explain to you how important this is. Remember, the people are not just buying food, they're buying an experience. They're buying a feeling. They want to see the chef that they hired cooking the food, even if they're not involved in it, or they're just walking by. There's nothing like having the feeling of seeing a chef in your kitchen in their coat, head down, working, preparing food that smells amazing. When you prepare food off site, either at your home or a commercial kitchen, you are taking that away from them. That is a huge part of what they're paying for and what they're looking forward to. So don't let your nervousness or your need to want it to go quicker or to be more prepared or to cook everything in hiding so nobody's watching you and judging you. Don't let that take over what is more important, which is making the client happy and meeting their expectation. So in my business, Ripe personal chef, we had eight chefs that worked for us on a team, and it was required that 85% of the food had to be cooked on site during a dinner party. How I even came to this number is we found out a couple of the chefs were preparing 70% of the food at home and bringing it over in Tupperwares and just dumping it on plates. And we didn't find out from the shop. We found out from the clients who were really surprised and disappointed that their chef rolled in with an Igloo ice container filled with Tupperware and just putting the food on the plate, like, yes, it might have tasted good, and they heated it up and maybe it looked great, but you took away a huge part of the experience for the client. So that was a requirement for our business. When I was doing dinner parties or brunches in the home, it is also something I made sure I did, because it's what really sets you apart. If you don't do this, you are lowering the standard and just competing on food because they cannot see you preparing it. They don't see your involvement, they don't get to talk to you. So that is really important. Going back to what goes into this dinner party and the hallmarks of it, you're in the home preparing a multiple course meal. 85% or more is cooked or prepared on site. The guest count could be anywhere from two to twelve people. With one chef. Anything more than twelve people, you may have a server, an assistant, or a sous chef. And the price range could be anywhere. This really depends from 85 to 150 a person plus food. But it could go up or down from there, depending on the number of courses, the complexity of the menu, and a few other things. So that is just the basics of a dinner party. These are one time events, and people usually either look forward to it, they save up their money. These are not the same type of people that you're going to have for weekly reoccurring meal service. This is a different crowd. Okay? And the third service I'm going to share with you today is called Daily Fresh Serve. So this is usually for what we call a big fish, which could be an athlete, a CEO, a celebrity, a professional. What I call a big fish, this is another vocabulary word for me is basically any client that wants, needs, and can afford your services long term. Long term is six months or more consecutively. So this is the same thing. The chef will come to the home usually several days a week. To me, fresh serve is three or more days a week. So it could be three days a week, it could be seven days a week. And like I said, it's usually for a big fish. This is someone who wants, needs and can afford it long term. And you will either have a daily or a weekly menu that is approved by maybe an assistant, a house manager, a family member. It may not be for the specific client themselves. You'll usually work with a third party for that. And it could be daily or weekly food shopping. You may have to stock the house or their pantry or their fridge with food. And you will likely also be making food on the fly, not just what's on the menu. Somebody could roll in and say, hey, I want a turkey sandwich. And you will then go make it. So I've had lots of these clients. I don't know if it's my favorite. It's definitely a lot of fun. It's definitely a different pace. I've worked for many athletes in their homes and also four billionaires. And all their lives are completely different. It's not all what you think, and it's not tons of fancy food and all these fancy things. They're just regular people. But you will likely be responsible for either food shopping every single week, every single I've gone to the store every single day. Sometimes you're also preparing fresh meals to serve directly to the client or family and guests. So even if you have an approved menu, they might just roll in with five friends, couple of teammates, people who came off the plane from that with them, family who came in early. You never know. So you always want to be prepared. And you may also be preparing food to be left in the fridge at the same time. So even though you're doing fresh serve, which is making it, cooking it there and serving it, you could also be making other items or more of the same item and then packaging it, labeling it and putting it in the bridge. So the price range for this could be anywhere from 400 to 950 per day, plus the cost of food. And we usually sold these in blocks of time, so we would have a four hour minimum. Then it would be 8 hours, 12 hours, and we would sell it in blocks until we got the scope of what the job actually is and the client and us was ready to make a commitment. And then we would offer a weekly or a monthly rate and a contract. So this service is different because it requires a lot of your calendar time. It will take you away from other clients and other projects, your family. So you want to make sure a lot of these come with contracts. And you want to have a good contract in place so both parties know exactly what they're getting into. So that is a daily fresh Serve and then I'll just do a few more so you can get some more good vocabulary for you. So I see this a lot. It is not my favorite term. I get a lot of debate about this, but when we talk about meal delivery or meal prep, this is when the cook or the chef is making food, usually in their home, which is technically illegal in most states, or in a rented commercial kitchen. The food is prepared for a single client or for many clients at one time. And you're usually doing a bulk food shopping or ordering online from a place and having it delivered. Meal prep and meal delivery is dropping it off, usually at the client's home or at a specified location, like a gym drop off or an after school daycare drop off. And the price range could be anywhere between fifteen dollars to twenty five dollars a meal. And it usually includes the cost of food. This is not my favorite service at all. We never offered it because of reasons I'll explain to you and lots of other podcasts. But this is a short and short sighted way to make money and to provide food. So I never really did it and I don't like it. But just notice the words that go with it. When you're saying meal prep, the client might not know that you're cooking in the home. They might think you're just preparing the things, but you're not putting it together like it's not fully cooked, or that something else has to be done from the client and it's not fully ready for them to eat hot or cold. So just be aware of the language you're using. I'm not saying anything is good or bad at this point. This is not my favorite, I don't teach it to my students and I definitely did not do it in my business because it is not high ticket and it is not high dollar. But we're just doing language today. So here are some add on services that you can put on to any of the above services. And this isn't a core service, think about it because I'll list them out to you, but really an add on because they're not enough to solve a huge problem, but they're interesting and cool enough and needed enough that your clients will likely say yes. And these are all services we've offered as well, which is we offered total kitchen set up. So for a lot of athletes or big fish that are moving from another location or anyone really who would need this for vacation rentals like airbnb and luxury rentals, we would offer a full kitchen set up where we would go there first, see what the kitchen had, and then purchase basically anything needed to fill it in. So it would be a food list of what needs to go in the pantry. We would set up all their beverages, everything in the fridge, vegetables, fruit and we would even buy pots and pans. We would buy dishes. This is setting up a completely new kitchen for somebody. When we would do that, it would be an add on. They would have to purchase a meal service also. And we would definitely have the client's credit card on file. And if they needed to approve any of the items prior, like the set of dishes, whatever it was, they would have a certain amount of time to approve it. And that's it, we would buy it. The price range for that could be anywhere between fifty dollars to one hundred dollars an hour for a four hour minimum. And if you're doing a full kitchen set up, that could be 8 hours a day for two days. So it's a nice add on. Another add on we would do is a recipe packet. This would only be for dinner parties where we were also doing a demonstration or instruction along with it because it honestly took a lot of work to create these recipe packets and people didn't use them. So it could be either included in the price of the dinner or you could do an add on for 15 or $30 a person. And you get the recipe package, you get pictures, you get demonstration and instructions. That's a really nice add on. Another cool addon is a table scape, which is setting up the table with extras or things that they might not expect. It could be place cards, cloth napkins, a centerpiece, conversation starters. We've done anything from a pinata to 400 tea lights all over the house. Like crazy stuff. So this can go up and down. You don't even have to do this yourself. You could find a vendor or a friend or a contractor to do it and offer it as an add on. Another great one is kids leave behind meals. So for dinner parties we would come a little bit earlier and make maybe four to eight meals just for the kids to keep in the fridge. And this is great if you're doing a vacation rental. It's good for a couple's gift. It's good for somebody with a new baby who has other kids. Keep this one in mind. In your back pocket. Price range can be the same as if they book the food separately, like a whole meal service price. And then you can discount it a little bit, maybe 10% or 20% because you're doing it in the same cook day. Okay, two more and we're going to wrap it up. Another great add on service is lunches for work that you can leave behind. So for dinner parties, and even with weeklies, if one of the spouses or somebody there, two of the kids are going to work, we would come earlier, make again the four to eight meals, just lunches that we know will sit well without refrigeration or whatever the requirement was. And we would do that as an add on. And then the last one is a wine pairing. So we'll use the client specific menu for the dinner that they already booked and paid for that's approved. And then we would make suggestions for wine pairings. Or you could do for whiskey or flavored vodka, and then you make it extra special, sometimes with a signature drink. Now, that is a lot of fun. It's not just for holiday parties. You could do it year round. I have tons of ideas for those, and people love that because they come away with the experience, not only with the food being great and it was an amazing experience, but they'll remember that drink because it's totally unique for them. Okay, guys, this was a big episode. I dropped a lot of vocabulary. Take what you need from it, leave behind what you don't, and I know you will make everything your own and make everything special. All right, guys, I'll see you in the next one. Bye. Hey, guys. If you're done waking up each day saying, I don't know what to do first to fill my cooking slots, I have the perfect thing for you. Grab a copy of my free PDF guide 14 daily marketing prompts, four personal chefs to get their next five clients. It shows you exactly what to do each day to stay on track and motivated with simple prompts to get you in front of your champagne. Clients consistently go to chef stephaniehiller. Comchefprompts to get your free copy today. I'll also give you the link in the show notes.