How to Open the Door to High-End Clients
Are you ready to become the chef that high-end clients are looking for? You may feel nervous or intimidated cooking for these clients, but you’ll quickly learn that they are just regular people like you who want good food in their homes. Tune in to this episode for the tools that will help you feel confident and ready to take on the opportunity!
You can become the chef that high-end clients are looking for.
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Listen to the episode to learn:
How to be ready to say yes to high-end clients
How to be the person your clients want in their home
The importance of being flexible and dependable
How to become comfortable around clients who are different than you
Why saying yes to new opportunities can be easy and fun
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Hey guys. Welcome to the podcast. Today we're talking about celebrity proximity and what that means to you as a personal chef. So, Some of my marketing and the way that I talk about being a personal chef is geared toward what I call high end clients, and that could mean a couple different things, obviously, to different people, but let's just set up some guidelines of what I'm talking about so I can get this important concept across to you. So a high end client to me is going to be a client who wants, needsand can afford your services long term. That is like the first parameter I set on it. Now, they may not be, I'm doing this in quotes, famous or a celebrity.These could be CEOs, business people, philanthropists, people that just come from money or are used to a certain lifestyle. Now, the rub here is that when I'm using the word high-end clients, a lot of the images that come to mind are very, stressful, demanding jobs and. That wear you down and that you have to work 18 hours a day and you have no life, and you're kind of like at their beck and call.That's not really what I'm talking about. And of course there's the spectrum of that too. There's going to be high end clients that are very, very easy and fun and lighthearted and don't make a big deal out ofstuff. And there's going to be the opposite end of the spectrum. Where they are very detail oriented.It has to be perfect. There is a lot of stress and pressure to perform. They may be, very demanding. They may not use the tone that you like or have the demeanor that you're used to, so that will take the spectrum as well. But when we're talking about celebrity proximity as a. Or a cook or a technician, it can lead a lot of us to feel nervous and that we wanna back away from that.And I wanna share with you that you don't have to because being nervous is just a part of the job, and there's a whole other side of it that you don't see. And having worked for, I mean, I don't even have a number, I would say hundreds of high, I would call them high end clients, but at least three billionaires and an entire baseball team at once, let alone in athlete's homes, we have about a roster of 50 of those over the years that we've cooked in, including me, myself, that there is a whole other side of it, and I wanna let you in on that side to show you. That even if you're nervous with the first one or talking to them or the first few or showing up there to cook, it doesn't mean stop, and it doesn't mean anything's wrong.So, You may feel nervous, you may feel like you are gonna let them down, or that you don't have the skill set to get a job like that, or if you have to be so flexible that you can't put anything on your calendar because the second they
want you, you have to show up. Or that you won't be able to follow through on what they want, like certain menu items or products that you'll have to get.I wanna show you how you can turn that around into something that you can capitalize on and something that you can learn so it goes in your toolbox when these type of people start calling you. Now, if you've heard my story, my first. Client was a professional basketball player, and it was a total fluke.It had nothing to do with my ability. It had, I was not even a good cook then. Um, it had nothing to do with anything except the fact that I chose to be serious about my business, that I chose to show up as the best version of myself that I said yes, even when I was scared and didn't know what to do. They call it like imposter syndrome.That's a big catch word now. It's there, it's real. And that was literally one of my first paying clients. I had two other fir, like I call them my first three, I call them that. And one of them was a, a basketball player, a very well known one who I knew growing up. So it's not like, I don't know sports and I didn't know them, I knew him from tv. Obviously. His wife was a singer and they had two kids and they, their personal chef was leaving to go work on a movie set with somebody else and she was replacing herself so she took someone green like me,who was fresh outta culinary school who didn't have all the bells and whistles and gave me a try, and I wasn't concerned about the money.I wasn't concerned about the time. I just wanted the opportunity just to get in the door, just to have that on my resume and I, it paved the way. For that door to open for me for hundreds of doors in a row. If I hadn't have said yes to that first one, even though I had no idea what I was doing, I would have never had the guts to try out to cook for an entire baseball team to do a tasting for them, or to walk into a billionaire's home and be like, Here's the menu, what do you think? So saying yes to that first one, Open the door. I want to offer you what's on the other side of it. Once I got in that door, of course, it was one of the, the nicest house I had been in at that time in the future. I had been many, many multimillion dollar homes after, but this was the first one, and it had gates.It had everything you see on tv. It had pictures of them on the wall. It had them on magazine covers. It had the best appliances, the best f. The best everything. A nanny, a cleaning lady, a I mean total house staff. I've never been around any of that before. I did not grow up that way. I grew up with a single mom in an apartment in Queens, New York, so this was totally fish outta water and I just showed up and listened and did the best job I could without any ego or any
attitude. So if something, and it will likely start this way. We all want this, but we, we don't know how to get it. People come up to me, they're like, Where do you find these athletes? Where do you contact them? How do you even talk to them?Where, what are they doing? That's not even it. The point is you have to be ready when an opportunity comes your way. When I said yes to this other personal chef to meet with her, I didn't know who her client was. I didn't even know she was replacing herself. She just said, I found your card in the back of this vegan restaurant.Can you come meet me here? I have a job and I'm interviewing for it. And I was like, Okay. She didn't tell me who the client was, she didn't tell me anything about it. She went over like what they eat. I honestly had no idea what any of it was. He was on a very specific diet with like all these random allergies and all this food from Whole Foods that like I did not know at the time, like, I don't know.I mean now it's like commonplace, but this was like 13 years ago. So we, he, the things on there would be like combo and like in boshi, plum vinegar and just things that I didn't like know what they even were. But my point is I said yes without ego, without. When I didn't know who it was, you can do that too.Also, on the other side of this, at the house, even though it was the nicest house, they are just regular people like you and me. Even if they have more expensive things around them, like their house or their cars or their jewelry or their furniture. It doesn't mean you are any less worthy and less needed or important.They're still human beings too. They wanna have good food in their home when they want it. And that's really the simplicity of it. And I'll tell you a funny story so you don't have to be afraid of what I did for this client. Other chef who trained me, she was with me a couple of days. She showed me a couple of things.I was basically her dishwasher. She would cook everything. I would watch her take notes and I would wash her dishes. And then finally she had to leave. So I was there making his pre-game meal. So they go to the stadium pretty early. For practice and they eat there, but he didn't want, he doesn't eat there cuz he wanted specific food and I had to cook salmon.Very easy, very simple. It was a gorgeous piece of salmon from Whole Foods. Wild caught, very specific. And I had two pieces there weighed out cuz he
needs a certain amount of protein and I'm, he's sitting. Maybe five or six feet away from me at the like small dining table. While I'm in the kitchen and he has headphones on and he's watching like the replay of some game and he's notlooking at me, but like at the corner of my eye I see him and as I'm getting the salmon ready, the entire thing, I'm turning it over with a fish spatula.It falls into an open draw under. Now, luckily that draw was open because if it was on the floor, I couldn't have used it. And he was sitting right there and I didn't have another piece that exact size, so it fell in the draw. This is my first time there. I'm alone. I'm so nervous. He's sitting right next to me, basically pretending he's looking at that while he watches me f it up, and I took it out of the draw.It didn't fall on the. It looked fine and I fixed it up, made the rest of the stuff, and I gave it to. And of course he ate it and everything was fine, but that is like a major mess up. And I felt horrible and like I'm not good enough. Like I don't deserve this job and I don't know how to interact with these people and I'm too nervous.But the reality of it is it didn't matter. He just wants good food in his home. They want to come home and hug their kids. They want to have a snack after the game. They want to watch tv, they wanna play on their phone. They're the. People were all just humans. So when this opportunity comes for you and it will, the longer you stay in the game and the longer you put your sights on it, I want you to remember the story of how I dumped an entire piece of salmon for this player in a draw right before his game.And they asked me back, I still had a job. It didn't matter. Was it seasoned perfectly? Probably not. Was it amazing? Probably not, but it was, I was there and I was willing to do the work and you can too. So being around celebrities and celebrity proximity can also like have the opposite effect on your ego.And I want you just to watch this part of it too, cuz this was really, really important for me cuz once that door opened and I spoke about it, never who it was, never where they lived, never any specifics of it. People get the vibe and I was using certain language on my website where other athletes were coming and they were coming fast, so I didn't make it about me and I just watch this for yourself cuz you may find this happening like you feel important or you feel needed or you feel like, okay, if they want me, I must be really good.Try to separate yourself from that because it's actually not true. You can use it as a confidence builder, but don't use it. A way to inflate your ego and to make
yourself better, because for how many high end, very, very rich people, athletes, and billionaires I've cooked for, I've cooked for even more hundreds and hundreds of what I call regular people.Just like us who have saved their money to buy the service, who look forward to it more than anything, as the highlight of their year, like the special anniversary that they saved for, it's just as important to them, and you'll feel just as a needed and wanted and loved. From them. So having celebrity proximity just means that you're opening up your service.The more people that you can help, you're helping them in the same exact way. Now, you may find that you have to be more detail oriented or. Paying attention to these very fine things and picking up on things when you're in the home that may not be written like, I mean, I could tell you stories for days, I'll just tell you one, but when I did work for a billionaire for three years, I cooked there myself 98% of the time.Everything had to be really specific and over time you get good at it, but things change all the time. This is the hallmark of high end clients is your flexibility. So we would have to buy, I had a certain like par list that I had to keep everything in the fridge, so we needed a certain amount of strawberries, certain amount of cartons, of blueberries, milk, I mean, everything you can imagine.I managed their whole kitchen. We live in Arizona and obviously things are seasonal, so they get flown in and they really loved blueberries, so we needed six containers every day, and I would take my six containers and bring them home, and we did this for months and months and weeksand weeks until one day the house manager said to me, Stephanie, all these blueberries are mushy.You need to go back to the store and get not mushy blueberries. And this was in the middle of when I was preparing everything. I was there three or four times a week, and I would make certain things each time. And I was dead in the middle of my service. I don't know, it was like one or two o'clock afternoon and I was like, Okay, can I go when I'm done? Like when, what do you want me to do? And she was like, I want you to stop right now and go to the food store because it needs to be back when they're back. And instead of copping an attitude or, or been like, Okay, the fish is gonna get ruined, I'm gonna ruin this sauce and then I'll have to cool it down and heat it back up or say anything to her. All I said was no problem. And that is the hallmark of being areally good concierge type chef that these type of clients will want in their house over and over for months and months and years and years. This is not food delivery. This is not cooking stuff out of your home and dropping it.
This is having the willpower and the wherewithal to take that feedback, even though it's something you totally don't wanna do, that you may think is absolutely ridiculous. They had five other cartons. I mean, do I have to go back for that one, go to a store 20 minutes away each way?Cool all my food down, but I had no problem.I was like, Okay. I stopped everything I'm cooking. I went to the store. I actually went to three different stores cuz I was not gonna get caught with mushy blueberries. And what I learned was in the store you open up every single carton and you feel them before you take them and put them in your cart.It's such a simple thing. But if I wasn't willing to do that and to be a learner and a student instead of having an ego, then I would've missed that opportunity. I would've also missed the hundreds of opportunities I had to get it right in the future because they know I was looking out for them. Now, did the actual clients know that I went back to the store, probably not, maybe, I don't know. But the house manager knew and she knew I was dedicated to my job. She's the one who put in my hours and paid me, and they had the blueberries. They had what they wanted. So I call that a win-win. So I'm gonna wrap up this episode with coming to why I started this topic.And for you, you don't have to be afraid of being around people that are different than you. Like I said, I didn't grow up anywhere near this kind of money or this kind of fame at all, and it's something you can learn to be comfortable around because you're providing a really valuable. Serve as. So the next time you may have an opportunity and one of these doors opens for you.Saying yes is fun. Saying yes is easy. Saying yes to this, you're gonna learn something and you're going to become a better cook and a better business owner. All right guys. I hope you like this episode, and as I wrap it up, I have one favor to ask. If you like this podcast and you want more people to see it, I would love if you could leave a review.Just tap below if you're on Apple or Google, leave a five star review. Say what you like about it. Say what you've learned. The more reviews, the more people they show it to, and the more people that can find it. All right guys. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.