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- [00:01]
Nick Loper
500 bucks a day from work you love. What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle show where it's all about ideas, action, and results toward building extra income streams. Fun one for you today where my guest took her passion for cooking, turned it into a six figure business. From chefjessica.com Jessica Leibovich. Welcome to the Side Hustle show.
- [00:21]
Jessica Leibovich
Hello.
- [00:22]
Nick Loper
Thank you for having me excited for this one. Stick around in this one, even if you don't know Saucepan from Espatula. We're covering how to get clear on what kind of service niche you could offer, creative ways to get clients and the different revenue streams that one skill can turn into. So, Jessica, my understanding is you're. You're working in catering, you have some culinary background, and then there's this switch that flips. Well, maybe I could take this skill freelance. Maybe I can go solo. Maybe I could get a personal chef type of client. Can you talk me through your first, like, first time getting paid for this type of work as a personal chef?
- [00:56]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah. My background was in catering. I was very young, working very hard, burnt out in my early 20s, and someone told me, oh, have you heard about being a personal chef? You might be really good at this. And I looked into it and I thought I would be really good at that. I was still working. I just decided to take a client on the side, and I made in one day what I was used to making pretty much for the whole week. So, yeah, so being young and naive, I quit my job with no exit plan. I would not recommend that to anyone, but that's what I did at 22. So. And I've been doing it ever since. I've been a personal chef now for 25 years.
- [01:39]
Nick Loper
Okay, how'd you find that first client?
- [01:40]
Jessica Leibovich
It was through word of mouth, through some recommendation in the community. Most of my clients in the beginning were word of mouth. But when I initially started my business, I created a press release for a local community newspaper in a sort of a upper class neighborhood. And they loved it, they ran with it because I wrote the story for them. And that really got the momentum going in my business because as a personal chef, you really only need a few clients. And once you have a few clients, word of mouth starts to spread.
- [02:13]
Nick Loper
Oh, I love this example. What is how. How big of a newspaper are we? Are we talking here? Like, you know, neighborhood specific, city specific?
- [02:21]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah, no, a small one. You know how when you go into a coffee shop and they have the free papers there yeah, those are the papers that I would send my press release to because those are the community papers. They usually feature people in the community and people love to read them and they want feel good stories. So someone suggested it, and it's really such a great way to get clients as a personal chef because it builds trust and it's free.
- [02:46]
Nick Loper
You write your own marketing material. This is great. What, like, do you remember what it said? Like, chef Jessica, you know, now open for business or something?
- [02:53]
Jessica Leibovich
Well, what I always tell people is you have to tell a story and market yourself without marketing yourself. So basically you show the problems that you're solving. At the time, I was showing a family in the community where I was really helping them. One of the family members had an allergy and the other family members were having a hard time kind of eating around those specifications. And this was all new for them. So I help them. So now you do have to make your angle a little bit different. You can't just be like, oh, I'm a new personal chef in the area. You want to show how are you really helping, you know, your community and what challenges are you solving for your clients? Like a unique spin on it. And a lot of times they will pick it up. Because if you think about it, these journalists have to constantly come up with news and articles. And if you give them something that's nicely done, why wouldn't they use it?
- [03:47]
Nick Loper
Sure. So, like, there seems to be just recently a lot of press around food, dyes and the danger. So it's like you could be like, how to have a dye free, you know, kitchen or something like that.
- [03:59]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah, I mean, clean food is such a big thing now. And just take, you know, seed oils, eliminating things out of your diet, adding red meat back in is really popular as well. So helping people do those changes, there's a lot of different things. It really depends on the chef and where their strengths lie.
- [04:17]
Nick Loper
Yeah, this was one of the. The pages out of the 1-800-got junk playbook, where talking with Brian Scudamore, the CEO, and early on he just bought a thousand dollars pickup truck and started picking up junk. Started taking on very few clients, but.
- [04:32]
Jessica Leibovich
Initially solved a big problem.
- [04:34]
Nick Loper
Solved a big problem, and then pitched it to the local paper because it was like, hey, high school student or college student, you know, creates his own summer job. And, you know, it was a unique feel good type of story. Hey, young entrepreneur does good. But by virtue of that, and of course, the picture that he submits is like, him with the side of his truck, with the Phone number, like emblazoned on the side is like, starts getting all of these calls after the fact. It's like trying to figure out like to your point about the seed oils or the allergy specific, like what's the broader trend that's going on? Like how can you, in Brian's case, like in a slow job market, you know, local teen creates his own income stream.
- [05:08]
Jessica Leibovich
So like what's the, yeah, what's the angle? What's the, you know, what's the hook? I actually in my, in my academy, me, my business in a box for chefs, I give them a sample press release and a press release guide because I feel like it's so important as a personal chef to be able to get yourself out there in the press because you know, everybody wants to pay for marketing or do ads, but we have such a short attention span and people also have such a strong distrust of ads that when you see someone in a newspaper it really, you're able to trust them and you have an attention span that's a little bit longer than an ad. So it's just much more effective.
- [05:47]
Nick Loper
Yeah, especially targeting. There's, there's some level of assumption that the journalist has done some level of vetting. So there's like you, you've kind of skipped the line in a lot of cases.
- [05:56]
Jessica Leibovich
And they do, most of the times they do, they're not just going to publish it without speaking to you. And again, sometimes you need to follow up with them. I mean, I've sent my press releases out where they have not responded and then I followed up and they're like, oh yeah, we do want to do that article and you just got busy and then they end up publishing it. So you know, sometimes you have to be a little bit forward.
- [06:19]
Nick Loper
The one advantage that I see of this type of business is it seems ripe for recurring revenue and potentially long term recurring revenue where if a family gets used to having a personal chef, like probably a luxury expense in a lot of cases. So targeting a more affluent audience. Sure. But like once they get used to it, it's like I can't imagine going back to cooking for myself again. Right. It's like they could keep you on the, on the payroll here for, for months and months or maybe years.
- [06:43]
Jessica Leibovich
Exactly. I'm. You mentioned this, this is a huge pillar of what I teach. There's sort of three pillars and it's consistent income, work, life balance and a high level of service. And you're only able to have consistent income if you give that high level of service and it you do, you become indispensable to your clients. And I think one of the nicest things one of my clients ever said to me was that I was like part of the furniture, which I took as a compliment.
- [07:12]
Nick Loper
Not that we're going to like walk over you like a rug, but.
- [07:14]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, when I went to renew my contract with them and raised my price, they were just like, yeah, you're not, you're not going anywhere. But you have to be in there and solve the problem and understand them and be able to give that high level of service and really care about them and their goals because their success is your success. And it's the people who have that heart who are successful at being a personal chef. It's not necessarily the people who are amazing chefs. I've been a chef for a long time. I was trained in France and I have a culinary arts degree. So I have the whole background. And the funny thing is my clients almost never ask me about it. Most of them have no idea where I went to school.
- [07:56]
Nick Loper
Yeah.
- [07:56]
Jessica Leibovich
And a lot of times I don't even use these skills because the food they want is so simple.
- [08:01]
Nick Loper
Yeah. When you were starting out, did you have a niche in mind of like, I'm gonna focus on organic or vegan or allergy free, like trying to, to serve. Like, hey, I'm the go to person for, you know, these specific dietary needs.
- [08:17]
Jessica Leibovich
Well, I started so long ago that special diets were not as common back then. And because my background was in fine dining, that was really where I went to and my clients were aligned with that in the beginning. They wanted really yummy food. I was making things like lasagna or, you know, I would make roasts and gravies and things like that. And I still occasionally will have a client like that, although it's very rare. But what happened was, I think I. It was my first time I got a client. She was a single mom with cancer. And you know, I just was so invested in her eating well, I think I was probably more invested in it than she was. And so once you have somebody like that and you're helping somebody like that, if you really are passionate about what you do, it sort of just gravitates where I just started helping more people like that with health challenges. And because I could put that focus and time and attention into each client, I was able to really develop a relationship with them. And that's where you will get that indispensability is when you have that long term relationship with A client. So I did sort of go in the direction of health challenges because I just felt like there was such a need and those people really needed a chef.
- [09:38]
Nick Loper
I imagine it's become somewhat more competitive. But even in googling near like personal chef near me or personal chef Samamish, I see some like catering companies that pop up.
- [09:50]
Jessica Leibovich
People are very confused. The problem is, is what I'm doing. A lot of. There used to be a lot of us, but what's happened now is everybody wants to be a meal prep or a caterer because they don't understand how to make a career and an income out of being a personal chef. Because it is very specific. You do have to be able to give the high level of service to be able to give that time and attention and you know, really understand what your clients need. And so a lot of people don't want to do that. And so they will do the meal prep, but what happens is a lot of times they will burn out because it's a lot of work. It's exhaustion. You're working weekends, you're working evenings, you're working holidays. Personal chef is a Monday through Friday schedule. You're typically working nine to five and if you have five weekly clients, you're maxed out. And if you have 10 BI weekly clients, you're maxed out. So it really depends on how you schedule it. So that's why it's not as competitive. Because it's very specific niche that not a lot of people do. And a lot of people decided, oh, I wanna do meal prep or I wanna, I'm a personal chef, but. But I actually have chefs working under me. So if somebody is a personal chef, but they have chefs working under them, that's really not a personal chef because how can they give that one on one high level of service that the client needs with somebody working under them? Doesn't quite work the same. So it is a one on one, solopreneur type business.
- [11:24]
Nick Loper
Yeah, it's like a personal chef agency, semi personal chef.
- [11:28]
Jessica Leibovich
A lot of people are doing that. I've tried it kind of like hiring people, but I feel that the quality was lost. And what happens is instead of giving that time and attention to your clients who are paying you for it, you end up giving it to your team.
- [11:43]
Nick Loper
Yeah, yeah. There's pros and cons to it, obviously. The advantage being, you know, free up your time in theory from doing the direct, you know, one to one type of client work. How to expand beyond the kind of the natural capacity, like you said. If I can do this only five days a week, and especially if I'm doing it as a side hustle, maybe I only want to do it one day a week. Now here's a chance to free some of that up.
- [12:05]
Jessica Leibovich
And there are ways you can do that. I mean, my team personally is like my bookkeeper, my cpa. I have somebody who supports me with VA stuff, but as far as my relationship with my clients, that's all me.
- [12:19]
Nick Loper
Yeah. What's typical in terms of pricing here? In terms of how. How much can you charge or how much. How much are people paying for personal chefs?
- [12:26]
Jessica Leibovich
So for me Personally, it's about 650 plus groceries per day. And I've. I've worked my way up to that, but that's very. That's not on the extremely high range. That's about average for a lot of chefs.
- [12:41]
Nick Loper
And that's not one day's worth of food. That's like a week or two weeks worth.
- [12:44]
Jessica Leibovich
Oh, no, that. So that would give them about a week's worth of meals.
- [12:48]
Nick Loper
Okay. That's hooks up like. Hold on. That's like a really, really nice restaurant.
- [12:52]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah, yeah. No, not per meal. So. So that's my revenue for the day. And. And to be honest, it's more than one day because a lot of times I'm planning the night before, I'm shopping, that morning I'm cooking. I have a weekly client. I typically will bring in at least $2,500 from that client a month. So if I have four weekly clients, that gets me to 10,000. Now, the way that if somebody's just starting out, I typically suggest they start at the $500 rate.
- [13:24]
Nick Loper
Okay.
- [13:25]
Jessica Leibovich
And because they're. A lot of times they're more comfortable with that. It's easier for them to sell until they get really comfortable with pitching their value. But at $500 plus groceries, have five clients a day, that's 10,000amonth or five clients a week. Excuse me.
- [13:41]
Nick Loper
Okay. Yeah, five clients a week. Got it. And so, yeah, they come in, do the weekly prep on a Monday or, you know, on a Saturday, if you're doing it as a side hustle.
- [13:52]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah. So they basically prep, like, a week's worth of meals. It's all customized. They leave them packaged for them, and then, you know, they come back the following week and do it again, and they get feedback from the clients. Usually people are doing once a week or once every two weeks.
- [14:06]
Nick Loper
Okay.
- [14:07]
Jessica Leibovich
And if they do once every two weeks. Weeks, it's actually very affordable for. So it's not just for, you know, the upper class or the wealthy. You're able to really market to just professionals who really need support.
- [14:21]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I'm trying to think of, you know, put putting yourself in the client's position which is going to help your marketing is, you know, what are you, what are you really buying? It's like on the surface you're selling food, but really, okay, what am I buying as the customer? I'm buying back my time, I'm buying back my mental load of having to do me. Just think about what's for dinner this week.
- [14:41]
Jessica Leibovich
Honestly, I like to say they're buying a transformation because some of the chefs don't understand this because they think I mean, a transformation in their health. But I don't like. And you probably know this because when you up level in life and you're able to offload or outsource some of your challenges, you transform things, you transform the way you react to things, you transform your relationships because you're able to breathe and focus your attention on other things. And so that's really what you're selling is you're selling that whole package of a support system. It's not just I'm cooking for you. And that's why when my client told me that I'm part of the furniture, I took it as a compliment because it is like a support system. It's like I'm always there for them. They know that I'm always going to be there to help them and they need me. So that's kind of how you have to look at it more than I'm just saving you time and cooking for you. Because if that's all they wanted, then they could just get doordash.
- [15:37]
Nick Loper
Sure, sure. More with Jessica in just a moment. Including the most effective free and low cost marketing tactics coming up right after this. Yeah. Okay, so this is helpful on the marketing side. What are clients really buying? Hey, you're buying a transformation, you're buying a support system, you're buying the mental, you know, offloading and like you said, leveling up. You know, hey, what are the things I don't have to think about, I have to worry about anymore? I've got, I've got, I've got a team in place for this. Just like having a virtual assistant.
- [16:06]
Jessica Leibovich
Right? Like, Nick, think about it this way, like if you have a housekeeper, I'm not just paying for a clean house. It's that whole support, the feeling of knowing it's going to be taken care of. It's off my shoulders. I Get to come home. And it feels amazing to come home to a clean house. I know she's helping. It's all of those things. It's not just about the act. And I think that helps in your marketing because when you're able to communicate your value and also really understand where your clients are struggling and how you can help, that's going to help you kind of get that ball rolling and have them sign on.
- [16:40]
Nick Loper
Do you find yourself making the same stuff week after week? Like, if the client. If that family has a few favorites where they're like, well, make sure to include that in. In this week's menu. Or is it. Does it have to. Do you feel the pressure to, like, be constantly rotating?
- [16:54]
Jessica Leibovich
No. In fact, most people want a rotation. So most people want to eat the same things most of the time with a few new things sprinkled in.
- [17:02]
Nick Loper
Okay.
- [17:03]
Jessica Leibovich
And think about it, like, do you want to eat new things every single. Probably not. You probably have your favorites that you enjoy. And so a lot of times what I'll do is I'll do three or four of the same things that I know they love and maybe try one or two new things and then if they love the new thing that goes on their rotation. So the longer you cook for someone, the more they find things that they love. But initially I do a assessment, try to play it really safe. Just go with things I know they're really going to enjoy. I don't want to scare them too much. I want them to love the service from the beginning. And then once I get to know them better, then we sort of branch out and try new things.
- [17:41]
Nick Loper
And you have it set up, it sounds like as a recurring monthly service. Right. It's 2,500 bucks a month per customer. I come in every week and I do my thing. Any tools or tech that you use either on the recipe, the shopping side, the client, you know, recurring billing side, anything that we should know about there?
- [17:59]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah, I use a lot of tech in my business. Well, first of all, there's a. There's a lot of different recipe database programs that you can use. I have one that I call. It's called Master Cook that I love because it creates a shopping list for you and it stores your recipes and you can add to your shopping list based on your recipe. This is very helpful for not forgetting things. Being a personal chef is a very low stress job, but the one thing that will stress you out is if you forget an ingredient and you're ready to cook. So a program like that is really Helpful to make sure that doesn't happen.
- [18:36]
Nick Loper
Okay.
- [18:37]
Jessica Leibovich
Some of the things that I do for my clients, I go above and beyond. So I will calculate macros for a client if they want. For example, if they say, jessica, I need to make sure that this meal has 40 grams of protein and 20 grams of fat, I will do that for them. And so I use programs for that. I have a program called Macro Stacks. It's an app that I use.
- [18:57]
Nick Loper
Okay.
- [18:58]
Jessica Leibovich
And I also just use spreadsheets and I will put their meals in the spreadsheet and calculate their meals for the day, depending on how. Like, I've had clients who were with me a few days a week where they're on a very high retainer. I will do their macros for the whole week to make sure they're on board. And so I need a really good tech for that.
- [19:20]
Nick Loper
Just to, to clarify macros, we're talking about grams of protein, fat, carbs.
- [19:25]
Jessica Leibovich
Right. So I'll input all their, their food for them to make sure their meals are not going over and to make sure that my meals are staying within the, the proper macros. But yes, it's protein, fat and carbs.
- [19:36]
Nick Loper
Got it. Is it typical to, you know, go shopping, bring all the stuff to the client's house? Are you doing it at your place and then delivering it? Are you, you know, renting out a commercial kitchen space?
- [19:48]
Jessica Leibovich
Well, you could do all of that. So I, I always say don't ever rent out a commercial kitchen space. That's a waste of money. Typically you're going to e in your client's home or you can cook in your own home and deliver. Now if you cook in your own home and deliver, you just need to make sure that your client is aware of it and they're okay with it. So you both are in an agreement.
- [20:08]
Nick Loper
Do you need to have like a cottage kitchen license or food handlers or anything?
- [20:12]
Jessica Leibovich
No, you don't, because you're not selling food to the public. It's a service based industry. So it's not a permit based industry. You're not being overseen by the health department. It's. That's why I said you have to make sure that your client is in agreement. Now if you're telling your client, oh, I'm at a commerc kitchen and you're really cooking at your home, that's not okay. You say, you know, you have to have an agreement now.
- [20:33]
Nick Loper
Okay. Okay.
- [20:33]
Jessica Leibovich
For me personally, I don't really like cooking at my own home because it's more work. You have to bring the groceries to your home, prepare, package it up. I get distracted at my house. My clients have much nicer kitchens than I do, so I prefer to cook in their home. But a lot of times, like for example, my clients, if they're sick or if they have a lot of kids at home, or if they just had a baby or you know, whatever it may be, I may cook at home or if it's a one time thing, like a gift certificate, you can do that. Another reason people do it is I have chefs who are in the corporate world and they are making their exit plan to be a personal chef. And so they're doing the remote work at home and they picked up a client and they're able to cook while they're doing their breaks on their remote work and over the weekend and then deliver in the morning before their job starts. So this is how they're, they're able to kind of segue out.
- [21:24]
Nick Loper
Got it. Yeah. And you can, you can imagine, you can stack it up, you know, one client, two client, three clients, like it just lowers the height of the, of the cliff that you need to jump off of to quit your job.
- [21:34]
Jessica Leibovich
That's what I always suggest. Don't do what I did. But yeah, if that, that way if you have a couple clients, you start to save money, you know, and, and once you gain the momentum as a personal chef, it doesn't take as long once you start to get your marketing strategies dialed in and you build your list. I love Google Ads, another way to get clients. So if you have a Google Ad going, they're going to deliver leads to you on a regular basis. If you have a pretty good website.
- [22:01]
Nick Loper
If people are searching personal chef near me or personal chef, you know, city name, then you want to make sure your ad shows up.
- [22:08]
Jessica Leibovich
Yes. Because there's no competition. There's not, you know, there's not a hundred personal chefs. So typically if you have a Google Ad for personal chef and someone is searching, they're going to see your website. So it just increases your visibility. Like I said, I'm not a huge person who loves to pay for ads, but that, that's just one that is really effective for personal chefs.
- [22:28]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I like that. That seems like a low, low budget. They can't imagine there's a huge search volume. But like you said, it doesn't take a lot of clients, like I only need one, you know, one taker to add potentially 2,000 bucks to my bottom line.
- [22:40]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah, $5 a day too, is all the ad spend you really Need.
- [22:44]
Nick Loper
Okay, what else have you got on the marketing side? I think this is, it's not gonna take a ton. You're probably not gonna have to do all of these different marketing tactics to fill up your schedule. But what else?
- [22:55]
Jessica Leibovich
Strateg really effective that are aligned with your strengths. You know, a lot of times people will think, oh, I'm going to go with a personal trainer. That's not what I would consider a strategic partnership. What I would consider a strategic partnership is again, someone who you're helping solve that challenge. So like a doctor, nutritionist is a good strategic partner because they will give their clients or patients a plan and just send them on their way and have no idea of how they're going to do that. So a personal chef is a that bridge between the plan and execution that really helps that that customer have success. So they've been really great strategic partnerships. So a lot of times when I work with chefs, my homework will just be to find 20 strategic partners and reach out to them with an introductory offer. And a lot of times that is enough to just get your ball, the ball rolling as a personal chef.
- [23:51]
Nick Loper
Can I pause on introductory offer? What do you, what's an example of that?
- [23:55]
Jessica Leibovich
So an introductory offer of obviously, like, people aren't going to want to jump in and pay $2,500 to somebody if they've never tried their service. So an introductory offer is a way, it's a taste, it's a way for people to get to try your food, your services, get to know you, start to build that trust and see if they want to take it further. It's, you know, it's just like any other relationship. You know, people aren't going to ask to be exclusive on the first date. So you want to just kind of get to know and see is this in alignment, is this going to be good for both of us. And an introductory offer, is that that ability? And by doing that, you have a crowd pleasing menu that showcases your food in a way that is a little bit less work for you and maybe a little bit lower of a price point.
- [24:42]
Nick Loper
Okay. And are you offering that to the doctors and nutritionists or you're offering it as something that they can then in turn pass along to their, their clients?
- [24:51]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah. And it could actually be offered to anyone or you could tailor them to the specific doctor or nutritionist, depending. Like if you have a doctor or nutritionist who focuses on, you know, let's say they have heart patients and you want to gear it towards them, or you could have a general Introductory offer that's going to be really up to each individual chef how kind of dialed in they want to get.
- [25:14]
Nick Loper
Okay. Yeah. So the nutritionist is going to say, hey, you're, we got your, we got your test results back. You need to improve your omega 3, omega 6 ratio. You need to add more lean protein to your, to your diet. And then they just send you on your way. So, like, here's a value add for them. And by the way, if you'd like a discounted sample from a trusted personal chef contact of mine, you know, give Chef Jessica a call.
- [25:36]
Jessica Leibovich
Exactly. Or she, she has a special introductory offer just for people in our office. And here it is. Something like that. I mean, I, I love ChatGPT for helping me kind of fine tune my offers. A lot of times they're very general, but if I can't decide how I want to position it, it might help me. Okay. I have a nutritionist who specializes in this and I really want to help her patients do this. Can you help me? And then it will help me kind of pinpoint that offer and then I can fine tune it more towards my food and my messaging. But that's just one way. Strategic partnerships are a really great way. I mentioned press releases just being visible in your community. So instead of posting on social media all the time, where people have such a short attention sp getting out there and talking to people going, like, I love going to senior centers. I will go, I'll bring a healthy baked good, I'll bring a healthy lunch salad, and I'll talk to them for an hour or two. And it's so fun and it's so rewarding. A lot of times I get paid a couple hundred dollars. I mean, it's not a ton of money, but it's enjoyable. It's paid marketing and you get them to sign up on your list. You always make an offer at the end. That's one thing that chefs need to always do is make an offer at the end of when you're talking or your demo. And if they don't sign up, collect their emails and then you can pitch your offers in the future.
- [27:00]
Nick Loper
Okay, so the senior center is paying you to come in as the expert guest of the week.
- [27:06]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah, actually a lot of places do, like wellness places with wellness businesses that have wellness programs for the employees. Like, I used to go to the San Diego Zoo and the San Diego Wild Animal Park. They had a wellness program for their employees and they would pay me to come in and their employees, employees would get points to come and watch Me.
- [27:24]
Nick Loper
Oh, okay. And you're giving a presentation on how to make healthy food at home or something like that?
- [27:29]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah, it was health, I think for them it was healthy eating for the work week. And again, pitch my offer. I still have those. A lot of this was probably like 15 years ago. I went there for the first time and I still have those people on my list that read my newsletter.
- [27:43]
Nick Loper
Okay. Yeah. This is one of our favorite marketing tactics. First, the strategic partnerships that you mentioned on that are like doing any sort of of, you know, commission or rev share, like, oh, I'll give you 10% of the first month service or anything.
- [27:54]
Jessica Leibovich
Like I never have. Honestly, I'm helping them really, their patients have success. So I don't really feel like there needs to be a revenue share because again then it's also like making money, more money off of their patients when really we're just trying to help them. And I think if you come from this business with a service mindset, you're going to be a lot more successful.
- [28:14]
Nick Loper
Yeah, we've seen it, we've seen it both ways. So just wanted to clarify, you don't have to have like a paid affiliate relationship or partnership that way. And the other, other thing that you mentioned here was these kind of like low key speaking gigs at the, you know, the corporate wellness event you're getting on their calendar, the senior center where you're showcasing your expertise, you're getting in front of a larger group of potential customers all at once. Of course not everybody's going to sign up. You don't need everybody to sign up. But if they are going to hire the service, all of a sudden you jump the line. Right. They're not going to go to Google anymore. They're just going to go straight to you. This is a really, really powerful. We've seen people do this in person, like lunch and learn. Hey, come learn about copywriting the seven deadly sids you're making with your website to doing it online partnerships. Whereas, invite your email list to this free webinar workshop and we'll teach you this skill and this really, really effective way to kind of jump the line and showcase some expertise.
- [29:13]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah, I mean it builds trust, I think. And as a personal chef, you really, they have to trust you because they're bringing you into their home and they're sharing a lot of personal information with you. And so by doing those things, for example, having the San Diego Zoo and wild animal park, bringing me into their employees build trust, their employees trust me. And it, it sort of softens that Relationship. But not only that. Again, I talked about earlier how, you know, we have such a short attention span and to be able to really capture people's attention span is where you're going to get them. I mean, you know that you have a podcast where people are tuning in. It's totally different than when people are scrolling, you know, and you have them for two seconds. So that's why really being visible and getting out there in your community and showcasing your offers, showcasing your skills is always going to be more effective than posting on social media.
- [30:06]
Nick Loper
Yeah, fair. I like it. Anything else on the marketing side? Time.
- [30:10]
Jessica Leibovich
Get comfortable with talking about what you do and telling people what you do. Because a lot of people I work with, they just don't talk about it or they don't tell people and people don't know. Having a elevator pitch or a tagline where you can describe your services very quickly is very helpful. But just getting more comfortable and confident is really what's going to get you over the edge and be good marketing. Because nobody's going to hire a chef that's not confident.
- [30:34]
Nick Loper
More with Jessica in just a moment, including the additional income streams she's been able to build from this one skill beyond just cooking for clients one on one. That's coming up right after this. Let's talk about a potential way to scale because it's like, okay, I can make great money doing something that I like. I could start doing it as a side hustle. It doesn't take a lot of clients to really build up a meaningful income stream. But if I ever want to take time off, all of a sudden I'm not getting paid. If I want to try something else, like I've got of potentially stuck in this trading time for money business. And is there, you know, what are some ways that you've seen where someone with this skill could branch out to some other creative revenue streams?
- [31:21]
Jessica Leibovich
Okay. Some of the things that I have done and I've seen chefs do is, you know, you look at the problems you're solving for your clients right now and how can you help people who can't afford your services on the same level? So one of the things that I will do is I would create a customized menu plan for people that has recipes shopping list. So it basically shows them how to be their own personal chef. You can start to release recipes. I have personally done a lot of consulting work, so I will do recipe development for companies such as, like, I'm making a. Developing a protein bar, developing a healthy shaved ice. I have created a Cookbook for a supplement company there. You can also do cooking classes. Cooking classes online or in person. So there's a lot of different ways that you can creatively create different income avenues as a personal chef.
- [32:22]
Nick Loper
Okay, so these, these companies are coming to you to say, hey, we saw you on social, or we saw like, can you, can you help us put this together?
- [32:31]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah. And believe it or not, they either find me through my website, which is primarily through looking for a personal chef. They're not looking for a research and product development chef. I can tell you that because I know my keywords and also through my personal chef clients. So business partners of my personal chef clients will say, hey, Jessica, I'm really interested in making this. Do you think you could help me? So that's just things that have come to me because I'm open to them and I talk to people about these types of, of business situations. But I think that people being open to helping people with eating healthy in new ways. So it's not just about, oh, can I cook you a healthy dinner? There's think about, it's problem solving. I mean, I can't answer how, you know, Chef Dan in Idaho should, should align his business to the highest level, but I know there's a way for him to do it right.
- [33:23]
Nick Loper
I like this, this kind of reframe or this exercise of what could I create for the people who can't necessarily afford my one on one services and then parsing out using those same skills. Oh, it could be the recipe development, it could be the meal planning, it could be the group cooking classes or the hosted dinner party. There's eat with. I came across one of these sites where I was like, host this dinner party. It was a cool, cool experience type of thing. Kind of a sample almost of your work, but, you know, allows you to serve lots of people all at once versus just the one, one on one client.
- [34:01]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah. Ideas are popping into my head as we're talking. Like I'm thinking, oh, you could, you could create a dinner party master plan where you teach somebody how to create a four course dinner party in their home. I mean, there's so many different things that you could do. You have to take what your skill is and what do you like to do. But especially now with AI why it's much easier to do these digital things as a chef because a lot of times in the past they didn't necessarily have those skills. But it's easier now and it's something that I've done for at least 10 years now, been Doing the digital side for my chef clients where I sell menu plans and recipes and cookbooks and things like that. And it's great because it allows me to connect with people all over the country in the world that I would not normally have as clients.
- [34:49]
Nick Loper
Yeah. What do you charge for the menu? Menu planning or something like that? If it's 500 bucks a day or 600 bucks a day to have you.
- [34:54]
Jessica Leibovich
Come to my house, it's not cheap. It usually starts at like 150, but it's quite a bit. It's. It's very extensive and it's customized and it's something they have forever. And it always comes with my support. I always want to support people with anything they purchase in mind. So I always tell the chefs as well, you know, provide that support and people will keep coming back. Another thing I did, which is interesting, so one of the things that I teach people is offer invisibility. Create the offer and be visible how you get the clients. So I created an offer during a slow time called the Soup Trio. And basically this was for my local clients. And I did. It was three plant based soups and it was sort of like a detox. But what I did was I sent it out to my whole list as an option of either you could purchase the soup or you could purchase it as a digital download so you could get all the recipes for the soups. It had the shopping list. So if they wanted this detox or this cleanse at home, they're able to do that. And I think I sold that for like $30 or something very low. But that was a way to showcase what I did. But it was no more work for me because I was already doing it for my regular clients. I already had to create all of that stuff anyway.
- [36:06]
Nick Loper
Yeah. Do you do any of the group classes? I'm thinking is when we travel, I think we did one of these in Thailand, where I don't know if it showed up on TripAdvisor or like some other friends had gone and said, oh, you got to do this while you're there. Anything like that through Airbnb?
- [36:22]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah. So I didn't mention this in the marketing. Airbnb has connections, so they reached out to me and I'm sure any chef could do this. They have a, an elevate part of their services where you can post something that you want to provide, a service that you want to provide. If you want to do a, a fancy picnic or a cooking class, you post that in the Airbnb elevate area. And then people. People searching for services like that will see it as a personal chef. There are a lot of apps and companies that want to market with you. There is Cozy Meal, which does cooking classes. So people will sign up on their app and book a cooking class through you. Airbnb a lot of places. So you can kind of hand off the marketing in some aspects if you like to do events like that.
- [37:10]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I think this is a really interesting. When we were, like, trying to shop for. For a place to do our annual friendsgiving, and we're looking for Airbnbs or houses to rent in in Mexico. And it seems like a lot of the hosts, the owners of these places, had relationships with local chefs who were like, and if you don't want to bring. You don't want to deal with going out, or you don't. We could bring in our partner chef to prep three meals a day for you. You know, it would be an extra 100 bucks a day or something. There's, like, different, you know, currency, cost of living, everything else. But it was a unique value add where if you have. Have some strategic partnerships, if you're in a tourist area, you don't necessarily want to do the full weekly thing, but you'd be open to doing it every now and again when the requests come in. I could see that being a thing, too.
- [37:54]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah. I mean, nobody wants to go out every single night when they're going out to eat, so it's actually a really great service. I don't do this as much anymore, but I used to spend a lot of time or a lot of events doing vacations because I live in an area where a lot of people come in for vacation in the summer. And so a lot of my clients would travel during the summer, so it allowed me to kind of pick up extra business.
- [38:16]
Nick Loper
Yeah, we came across there was. I want to say it was Southern California, too. Maybe it was in la, but they were doing these luxury picnic setups, and there was some overhead involved because, like, you know, fancy little table and table linens, you know, for this, they'd set up the whole charcuterie platform.
- [38:32]
Jessica Leibovich
But it was, like, so pretty. I've seen them.
- [38:34]
Nick Loper
I forget the price, but it was much higher than I expected somebody to pay for a picnic setup.
- [38:39]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely a premium service. There are so many cool ways to market yourself as a personal chef. It's kind of like. And it's just like anything. Like, I always feel like everything takes effort and work, no matter what we're going to do. Everything takes hard work. But I don't feel like this is a hustle like hustle hard. It's more of a hard work and alignment type of side hustle where, you know, you find people who you're really connected with and you can help instead of having to work so hard to find clients. Because you only need five to ten clients, right?
- [39:14]
Nick Loper
Yeah. And it's a helpful exercise where you're not, you're not trying to serve thousands of people. Right. You don't, you don't need to. And you physically couldn't.
- [39:22]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah. There's not a lot of businesses that you could get to six figures with just five clients and still work Monday through Friday, nine to five. I don't know. I don't know a lot of businesses like that. So in that way it's very unique. But again, it is a service based industry.
- [39:39]
Nick Loper
Right. And have some level of security in that. Well, if you, instead of a job, if you got one client.
- [39:45]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah.
- [39:45]
Nick Loper
And you get fired, then you lose 100% of your income. Like, well, if I lost one, one client, I lost 10 to 20% of my income instead. And I go replace them.
- [39:53]
Jessica Leibovich
That's true, actually.
- [39:54]
Nick Loper
So you've been doing this a couple decades. Like any big surprises or any big mistakes that you see new personal chefs.
- [40:01]
Jessica Leibovich
Making, I would say the biggest mistake is getting locked in with either the wrong client or too low of a price or agreeing to something that they know they shouldn't do. Because as a personal chef, once you're locked in with the client, it's really hard to. You can't go back and say, you know, I think I want to raise my price or I think I don't want to cook this much food. So that would be my biggest mistake I see people make is agreeing to stuff because they're so, they want a client, so they just go, you know, they, they drop all their boundaries.
- [40:33]
Nick Loper
Okay. Yeah. You price too low at the beginning or it's just like it's not a great fit. And now, and now you're kind of stuck.
- [40:38]
Jessica Leibovich
Or promise the world, you know, that people are asking too many things and the chefs don't know how to set parameters on their business. Because I think a lot of people, they come from this, they come to this business because they love to cook and they want to help and they, they like doing it. But the business side, they're a little bit clueless on and they don't know how to really communicate that part.
- [41:02]
Nick Loper
Yeah. I think a lot of people fall into that boat of, well, I have this, I have this skill and I just flip a switch and say, well, now I'm in business. Like, well, there's a few freelancer skills or entrepreneur skills that you gotta learn along, along the way that we talked about the mindset and the marketing and positioning and everything else.
- [41:20]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah. And also, like, as a personal chef, the interesting thing is you're dealing with people who are very business savvy. Right. Your clients, and you may not be. So if you're coming in and you're gonna get steamrolled, they're gonna push your boundaries, you know, because they can't. I'm not saying they want to. They just don't know. They're not mind readers. They don't know where your boundaries are. And that's why it's really important for business owners, especially personal chefs, to be able to communicate that. And that's one of the things I see them really struggle with, is because. And that's confidence mindset. That's all of it. That's why I always say confidence mindset is the first step to pricing, to your pricing strategy.
- [42:04]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I like this call to put up some boundaries, put up some guardrails from the early days. What are you willing to do? What are you not willing to do? And kind of stick to your North Star guidance on that. So I appreciate you sharing that. You've alluded to it a couple times. The prosperous personal chef is. Is the program that Jessica has created. You can find it@chefjessica.com tell us a little bit about it. Who's it for? What do you. What's inside?
- [42:29]
Jessica Leibovich
It's basically start to finish, walking you through the business of starting, growing, sustaining a personal chef business. That being said, there is a ton of stuff in there that's done for you. The assessment, the sample menus, all of that is in there. And then anybody who goes through the academy also gets my full support because I want to make sure that they're successful. So I include three full calls to make sure they are on page with their going through the right direction. Because even I find that as a self study course, it's not as successful as if you have my support. Because people still kind of get off the rails with their marketing and their boundaries and all of that.
- [43:16]
Nick Loper
Yeah, well, I think it's a fun example of kind of packaging up years of knowledge and expertise and sometimes like the actual resources and templates and stuff that you use. And I imagine people were asking like, hey, could I, could I pick your brain on how to get Started on my own or how did you get customers? You're like, well, you know, you get, you get sick of answering the same questions over and over again. You're like, well, let me put if there's some demand for this.
- [43:38]
Jessica Leibovich
Yeah, it was also like, ah, like watching you watching a train wreck. Or like you, you, it's like you seeing almost like, like your child wants to go to Disneyland but won't put their shoes on. That's kind of what it was like watching with chefs and seeing them doing the wrong thing over and over again as personal chefs. And people constantly posting questions that are like, how much should I charge for this? Or things like that. Just when I felt like I gotta get this information out there because somebody needs to document the right way to do this. There's too much misinformation and too many people doing it the wrong way.
- [44:16]
Nick Loper
Oh, very good. We'll link that up. Chefjessica.com you can find your free guide to getting high paying VIP clients over there. We'll link that up in the show notes. This has been fun. Hopefully some lessons and takeaways. Regardless of what kind of local service business that you're running, you talked about you may not be cooking, may not come naturally to you, but lots of tools and tactics I think that you'll be able to apply and different mindset shifts that you might be able to apply to different business models as well as. Now let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side Hustle Nation connection.
- [44:49]
Jessica Leibovich
I think that if you want to grow a successful business, it's all about connection. And building that connection with your clients is truly the secret to success, in my opinion.
- [45:01]
Nick Loper
That's so true. It's all about your network and building that level of trust and who knows you, how they know you. We talked about the strategic partnership angles, talked about the introductory offer angles like the free samples at Costco. The example I come back to a lot of times like, oh, I don't know if I want to commit to having you here every week. Let me see about this first.
- [45:23]
Jessica Leibovich
I call it dipping your toe in the water.
- [45:26]
Nick Loper
Yes. Love that angle. I love the angle of doing low risk, low key speaking events or presentations to showcase your expertise and build trust. Lots of cool, cool marketing tactics. Here again, chefjessica.com is where you can find her. You also find the full text summary of this episode links to all the resources mentioned@sidehustlenation.com Chef, while you're there, go ahead and download your free listener bonus for this episode. That's 101 service business ideas that you might be able to apply some of Jessica's same strategy to once again. Side hustlenation.com chef or just follow the link in the episode description. It'll get you right over there. Big thanks to Jessica for sharing her insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up Sidehustlenation.com deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side Hustle Show. Hustle on.