A new age of personal chefs in Austin.
What it’s felt like being a personal chef in Austin through the pandemic.
There are times in life where we think that everything is going great and that it could not get much better and there are times in our life where we think the entire world is falling apart. Whether or not we believe that kind of stuff is on us but when the entire world actually is falling apart, it is hard to know what to do about it. Especially when you have never dealt with something like this before. Prior to the pandemic, Gather and Forge Private Chef services was on its way to its first million dollar year. That obviously came to a screeching halt and we had to start to innovate. I want to write down some stuff for the loyal customer base that we have but also for myself so I can look back on this and remember exactly how trying this time has been.
It was March 13th, 2020 and my family was in California, we had made plans to attend Disneyland with my sisters and we were about to embark on a load of fun. Business was great, we had just had a meeting about how we would get to the $1M mark, and we were cruising along about to smash our goals. COVID-19 had already showed itself to the world but nobody really knew what was about to be next. Well, I will remind you. The following day, Disneyland announces that it will be closing its gates for the 4th time in history due to COVID-19 and we were going to be the last ones aloud on the grounds. What in the world was going on. I sat with my old man that night and asked him the basic questions about an economic downturn and he gave me advice that I will hold onto for the rest of my life.. I asked him “What am I supposed to do when the world shuts down, Dad?” he tells me with a very serious and straight face- “Buddy, you have to survive”. I looked at him hoping for some great advice that he always gives me when I need it and that is when I knew we were in for a crazy next few weeks… at the least. I continued to ask him about other recessions that he had gone through in his life and we talked economics for some time and then we laid that conversation to rest. I was flying back to Austin the next day to face what I would later learn to be the toughest time in my life as an entrepreneur.
The following day, we landed back in Austin and I started to try to unpack what was about to happen, but really I didn’t know anything, much less what to do with my company at the time. What I did know was that things were about to get really weird and extremely messy. In a serious of events that I can not make up, it went down like this… As the news started to unravel and we were told death tolls and we were seeing cases in the United States go up, fear started to set in to my customers and people started to cancel their booking with Gather and Forge. We started to get requests from people saying that they wanted their deposit back and that they were cancelling their services until further notice. this was the first time in my life where I watched my bank account deplete by nearly 30% in one week. I kid you not, within 1 week, we had lost over $40,000 and lost the next 3 months of dinner parties and private chef cook dates. We were dead in the water. Or so I thought.
After doing what I think everybody else was doing when all of this was going down and the turmoil that was unshaping right before my eyes (drinking heavy amounts of whiskey for a week) I had come up with a plan. We were going to take this as an opportunity for a clean slate. We knew that we had to change things and we knew that we had to change them quick. There was no real answer in front of my face but there was an underlying value that I knew that I wanted to be known for after this. Those things were; taking care of my the people that wanted to help the cause and continuing to be able to operate the business. We didn’t need to make money through this, we simply needed to survive. I went into a mode that I know best.. scramble, do, think later.
At this point, we were 1 week into the lockdown, businesses were shuttering, we were in complete disarray as not only a country but as a planet. I cannot even believe that we were going through this but within that 1 week, I had figured out the pivot. The pivot that would change that landscape of the business model all together. We decided that we were going to subtract some revenue streams and focus on scalability, sustainability, and quality. Those were the 3 main things that we cared about. From there, we developed a logo, and got to work. The rules were simply, there were 3 chefs left on the team, and we had to do what 7 were doing prior. We started Family Meal, a meal delivery service that would serve the greater Austin area. This meant that each of us would come up with 2 dishes each and we would cook to the best of our ability trying to completely go farm to table. Without any experience in the space at all, we dove in. There was some fear as this was going to take capital away from the business in order to grow a new process, pay the team for working overtime, and continue to keep sane.
Family meal has been going now for 12 weeks, and we are very proud that it has been able to to hold itself together through all of the pandemic. As we enter into summer, which is usually our slowest time of year, we hope to work on new projects that will generate more streams of income. This is where we believe that the world is going so it is on us to do what we have to do to survive. I cannot imagine what it was like owning a restaurant, and I don’t know if I would want to. As chefs, we always work hard, I just think that is the nature of the beast when it comes to this line of work, but what we have never seen before is government telling us we can’t work at all. It all happened so fast, it all seemed like we were living in a artificial world, it all changed the way I believe businesses will operate in the future.
For the small amount of people that will read this, I don’t know how the pandemic changed your life but in our line of work, I think we are setup pretty nicely for what is to come. Now more than ever, people want to be at home.. I think that most households in Austin are staying home (I say this because I haven’t fought traffic in over 3 months) and that means that the party is going to have to come to them. Just 2 weeks ago, we started to do more dinner parties. We are getting requests basically inviting us into peoples homes so they can enjoy their family and friends again. It has been such a crazy and wild ride that I don’t doubt anything anymore. What I do know is that it is always going to be wise to have a backup plan and more than one stream of steady income. Gather and Forge was almost taken out by this thing but with a strong will to succeed and a fire in the belly, we are coming out of this in an okay position. We are not where we were last year but we are on the road to what looks like some sort of recovery and that is promising to say the least.
Through all of this, I had a contract worker quite literally duplicate my website, steal my clients, and replicate my services. You see, most people have no idea how much work that I have put into Gather and Forge Private Chef Services. Nobody has seen it like me and that does make me proud but it also opens the gate for people to come in and take all of that hard work and brand it as their own. It makes me angry and sad at the same time and that is something that I haven’t felt in a very long time. I have worked 35 hours straight for this company, I have cried and felt helpless, I have learned and invested so much of my time and money into this that I could not even begin to believe that somebody would come in and take it as their own. A person that boasts about their creativity went ahead and copied my website verbatim. I guess that tells me that we are doing something right but it has also taught me that there is always going to be snakes in the grass and to be careful who you let in your garden.
Being a private chef in Austin has been a blessing. We have come across an immense amount of support from our loyal followers and we have been trying to do the right thing from the beginning. The work has been tough and the hours have been long but the payoff is that we still have a business, and that in and of itself is an accomplishment. For now, we innovate again and we try to see the silver lining in all of this. What is most important to us that we remain true to what we are and who we are, how we do business and how we don’t. This doesn’t mean that we change things at the drop of a hat and decide to be unethical, it means that we plant our feet into the ground and brace for the prosperous future of Gather and Forge. We might not be the richest company in all of Texas but we sure do feel proud of the strides we have taken in unprecedented times. We will always love serving Austin with our personal chef services, and we will always love Austin and because of that, we want to say thank you to everybody that has supported us through this, even if funds were tight, we appreciate you more than you know. We move forward, even if it gets tougher before it gets back to “normal”.
-Ryan