Chef Training Kills Your Business

When you start your food business, you are excited. Your food tastes amazing. Your friends are there to cheer you on. Your opening day is a success. Forward to a month later, you are wondering where the customers are. 

It’s probably your Chef mind. As a chef, preparation is key to quality of food. Planning is meticulous with measurements sometimes down to how many grams of salt. If measurements are off, the dish won’t come out. If ingredients are missing, the dish is aborted. Order matters when making a dish. Your station needs to be cleaned every time . To be kept spotless. A good chef is one with an orderly mind. And follows prep. 

And this is dangerous for the business you started. Business is messy. It requires levels of the unknown. It requires taking leaps into faith that would turn a cake into a rock. It requires starting and doing regardless of what you have. You work with what you have. And see what comes out. And try again. You change. Entrepreneurship requires being recipeless at the start and figuring it out .

You need to leave the structured chef mind behind and become a semi-structured business minded for the business to kick off. 

Here are 7 tips to achieve this:

1. train people on how you want the food to be. 

Customers will initially come because of your standards. They will stay if the standards remain the same or improve

2. hire someone to take point on maintaining the food quality and distance yourself. Let that person become responsible

3. focus on the customer needs. 

Observe the customer, talk to the customer. Listen to the customer and tell the kitchen staff. This may require you to do research on fulfilling the customer needs before telling the kitchen

4. Learn to document and delegate your processes. 

Chefs often fear recipes being stolen. Fact is businesses thrive on systems and processes more than recipes. A restaurant with better systems will thrive more than a restaurant with awesome recipes and poor systems

5. follow the money. 

How does money move in and out of your business? Follow each coin and understand points to improve and leakages to block

6. observe all your staff. 

Watch them, listen to them, understand where they can be placed. Understand their dynamics. Staff behaviour can signal when things are going right or wrong. Beware of staff where only one person speaks on behalf of the others. That is a cartel forming which could torpedo your business

7. separate your business finances from your personal finances. 

Pay yourself a salary even if it token. Otherwise you will end up stealing from your own business by taking money unplanned from the business coffers. 

Bonus tip: 

Be self aware of your strengths and weaknesses. Lean into your strengths and get people or partners who are strong in your weaknesses. We are all gifted in different but not all areas. 

Abid Weere Businge

Kii-Impact