4 Metrics That Matter For Personal Chefs
When was the last time you took a step back to see where your business is? Let’s do it together, right now. I want you to think of those signs you see at the mall that has a map with a large arrow that says, “You are here.” This is what we’re going to do with your personal chef business! You need to know where you are so you can decide where you want to go.
In this week’s episode of the Chef With Purpose podcast, I walk you through three stages of where you may be in your business.
Perhaps you don’t know if you should continue being a personal chef…
Perhaps you have an inconsistent schedule…
Or maybe you want to grow your business but don’t know where to start…
Once you take a step back from your business, you’ll be able to see how you’re measuring success.
Listen to the episode to learn:
Where you are at in your business
4 metrics to measure success in your business
Real-life examples of how to be a solution to your client's problems
The many metrics many chefs use that don’t really matter
How you can improve your quality of life and still be a personal chef
These concepts are relevant for anyone wanting to sell their cooking service, get more clients, or stay engaged with their business no matter what stage it’s at! Now you can start focusing on the metrics that matter most.
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.
Take a listen to to podcast, and leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcast, take a screenshot of your review and a surprise will be headed your way!
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Hey guys, welcome to this week's podcast. We're talking about the metrics that matter. You're going to be listening to a part of a call I did for alumni. I did a special invite call for them to come and into my program, the Personal Chef's Secret to fully booked and they got a special offer. But before I did any of that, I taught them this really simple, yet overlooked concept that paying attention to certain metrics in your business are really, really important. And oftentimes the ones we look at are not that important. And some of the things that you're going to learn may be an eye opener for you. But listen, take some notes, I know you're going to learn something and let me know the metrics that matter to you the most after you take a listen. Okay, here it goes. I put three categories. Let me know what category you feel like you're in right now. This may have been one of the reasons that brought you here or just things that are on your mind. The first is category one, you're here because you want to revive your business, you want to have more focus, you want to take it more seriously. And maybe you're asking yourself kind of in and out, days, weeks, months. You're not sure if you should continue and things are not going along as you had hoped. So if that's you just like put a one next to it or put in the Q and A. Number two category would be you're operating your personal chef business mostly full time, but you haven't found the formula to keep your calendar booked. Meaning some weeks you'll have three or four clients and you'll be making the money you want. Other weeks you'll have one or zero or none. You'll find yourself in category two. If you are having dry spells, if suddenly the phone stops ringing or your inquiries are not what they used to be. Maybe you used to have three, four, five a week and now you're having one. So that would be category number two. But you are in the game. You are doing this, you're providing the service almost full time, if not full time, but your calendar is not what you had hoped. Okay, category three, and people are already putting it in the comments in the Q and A, which I love. But also keep it on your notepad because this is like a mini class for you as well. Regardless if you choose to sign up, I want you to get value here today. And the way you're going to get value is you decide what you want to learn, what you came here for and what you want by the end of it. And part of that means just writing it down and deciding. Okay, number three, if you're in category three, you have clients, maybe lots of clients, maybe three to five a week. Maybe you're serving ten to twelve clients a month. But you want to raise your rates, and you haven't done it in a very long time, and it makes you really nervous, so you're possibly not making the money you want. Also, category three is if you have demand, like people are inquiring, they're calling you, they want to know more about you. They want to book it. But you can't handle the demand. So you may be booked Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and you keep getting calls for families who want you on Monday and Tuesday. So you might be thinking about wanting to hire chefs to work for you, but you're not sure where to start. But you know, you definitely need help and the demand is there. So that's category number three. So write down which one you are, what brought you here today, and as you're doing that. Also, I just want to share one or two concepts with you that have helped my current students a lot. It's helped me a lot, and I think we'll let you know that it's okay to be in any category you are. It doesn't matter. Doesn't mean anything is wrong. And the number of years, weeks and months that you are doing this, operating your business, doesn't matter. You could still be in category one even after you're doing this for five years. That's not a problem. We just have to know where you are. You could have been cooking for 15 years in a restaurant, but you are in category two, and you really can't maintain a full schedule. You keep having people come in and out, and your rebooking rate is really low. That's okay. Just write it down. It doesn't matter. It doesn't mean you're good, doesn't mean you're bad. It doesn't mean it won't work for you. It doesn't mean anything. We just have to have a starting point. Think about when you go to the mall and you're looking at the map and you're like, you are here. We just have to know where you are so I can gear the teaching and the methods and what you're going to learn in the course to where you are. So that's just why we do this here's. What else doesn't matter? Number of years cooking, number of years at a restaurant or at any job. The number of years you've been in your personal chef service. Doesn't matter. The metrics that matter. And this is important because a lot of students leave this to the end or never get to it. The metrics that matter is revenue. Yeah, it's money. That's how we score this game. That's how we know which category you're in and what you need to do to get to the next one. This doesn't mean you're good or bad. It doesn't mean you're smart or not. It doesn't mean anything. It's just a metric that matters. Revenue. That's the amount of money you're bringing in. And then you'll have expenses taken away from that, and you're left with your profit. This is the money you have. Another metric that matters is the number of clients that you're booking per week, per month, per quarter. And we compare that to how many inquiries you're getting. If you're getting ten inquiries a week and you're booking one, that's 10%. If you're getting ten inquiries a week and you book five, you're booking 50% of your inquiries. We want to know how many number of bookings you're having versus the inquiries. That's a metric that matters. Another metric that matters, probably, especially to me, and I'm sure to you more than anything else, is your time spent working versus your time off. We all come into this business in one part, usually a big part, because we want to control our own time. If you don't have the time you want, or you're not managing your time right, or you find you are overworking or working too much versus free time, that's a metric that matters because it's one thing to be sorry, hustley and hungry and going after it, but that leads to burnout much quicker and quitting much quicker. So there is this balance that I teach, especially in this course of time spent working versus time off. The amount of time you have off is very important. Very. It's like, why work harder for yourself? You could work somewhere else, work less, and make more money. That's what a lot of entrepreneurs say, where this hasn't clicked yet. And the last metric that matters is your quality of life. Seriously, your happiness, how you're thinking and feeling, where you want to spend your time, who you want to spend your time with. If you have young kids and you never get to see them because you're always working, that you might think that that's a poor or not balanced quality of life. If you find yourself answering texts after 10:00 P.m. From clients, people are calling you on the weekends, they're complaining about this and that. That is not a good quality of life because you have boundary problems with your clients clients. So you're going to not be happy about that. Those are the metrics that matter. I'm going to repeat it because I want you to understand this before we do that. Here's what doesn't matter the number of years cooking, what you've done before this call today doesn't matter. The years you've spent at a restaurant or at another job or thinking that this isn't working. Those don't matter. Here's the metrics that matter your revenue, the number of clients booked versus the amount of inquiries you're getting a week, the time spent working versus free time. And lastly, your quality of life. And the way we get these metrics is we have to be able to measure them. And with all of them, there's a way we can measure them. Okay, so put in the Q and A. Which metric matters to you the most right now? This will be really interesting somebody just wrote, I was always concerned with the number of years cooking, but I realized that never translated into money for me. And now I see what you're saying and focusing on that doesn't really make sense. Okay, good realization. Yes. Okay, who else? Tell me a metric that matters to you. Okay. You want to be home by three, and you find yourself not taking jobs in the night and losing money, and you want to know how to fix that. Perfect. So a metric that matters to you is being home after three, whether it's with your kids or with your family, that matters. There was a time like, I stopped cooking in homes a bit ago because I was focused on growing a business that employed chess. But when I had my first child, I realized that doing dinner parties wasn't for me anymore because if I got home at 1011 or twelve, that just didn't work for me. So that metric mattered to me. And I wasn't willing to lose the income of saying no to enter parties because we had so many of them and because they're so lucrative. So that's important to know. Good job. Okay, somebody wrote, number of clients booked? I don't even know because I don't even track this, but I do notice when I'm having a dip or I feel like no one is calling. Yes. So part of these metrics is a lot of people don't track them. So you'll come and you'll just be like, I don't have clients, I want more money. Like, it's just this very vague stuff. That's what we get into in the program and with coaching. This is important to know. Okay. Started with so keep that in the back of your mind, the metrics to know and the metrics that don't matter. So you're here for a reason. You showed up today live. A lot of you, I'm sure even more of you are going to listen to the replay. You might be here and listen to the replay after whatever that exact reason is, give it the consideration and the possibility that it deserves because your brain and your life is giving you feedback and giving you guidelines at every turn. So your reason for being here is important to you and is special and unique to you. Don't just shove it under the rug or pretend it doesn't exist or it's not important or you're sick of feeling bad about your business never taking off. None of that matters. Give yourself the grace and the compassion of being okay with why you showed up today, because that's important. No matter what happens after this or before this, we also cannot create the results that we want when we don't really know what we want. We all think like, oh, we want to make more money and we want more clients. And that is really first level stuff. It's the thing everybody wants. But to really be an entrepreneur and get this business in the shape and the status that supports your life and gives you everything you want, you're going to have to get really clear on what you want. And it's got to be specific. And it will likely be related to the metrics that I just gave you before. So when we talk about being specific, about creating what you want, it's going to be something like, I want to bring in $5,000 a month no matter what. That's the revenue metric number of clients. I want to be working five days a week or have five books paying jobs a week no matter what. That's specific. Even more specific would be I have four weekly in home cooking slots and I'm going to do four dinner parties a month. That's specific because then we can track it. Time spent working versus free time off. You have as an entrepreneur, we can easily overwork or massively under work. I know. It's like swinging from one pendulum to the next. Our job is to get closer and closer to the middle. You want to be able to have time off and totally unplug, but we also want to be able to get projects started and new things going and invest in your business and kind of put the gas down when we need to. This is a balance that you're going to get better and better at as you keep going. As a business owner, this is part of knowing what you want. So I made a rule. I don't work on the weekends. I don't take this awhile ago. I don't take dinner parties. Friday, we're done. And then I don't do anything in my business. No emails, no texting, no checking Facebook until Monday. It took me a very long time to do this and this is not what I did in the beginning, but that was the parameter where I had to decide, this is when I'm going to work, this is when I'm not going to work. When we work in corporate or for other people, they decide that for us. When you're choosing to be an entrepreneur and to run your own schedule and manage your own life and your business, you have to decide that for yourself.