Pivot! Pivot!

the realities of finding consistent work in food

Recently, as I was building out my pro forma for the second half of the year, I had to delete two large bids from my spreadsheet. Cue the sweating. For the past six months, I’ve been doing about 4-5x pop-ups a month, grossing anywhere from $900-$2,000 per pop-up and taking home around 60-70% of that. I’m in my first full-time year at Hej Hej, and I’m aiming for an average of around $6,000-$8,000 in gross sales per month. I was hitting that goal with my pop-ups, but I decided to switch to one strategic pop-up a month so I can free up time to focus on things that are long-term and sustainable. But with that comes less financial security and less consistency, so landing big jobs is so helpful.

When you work for yourself, it’s business development all day, every day. Luckily, I like this aspect of my job. It’s somewhat comforting knowing that if I am low on money, I have a few levers I can pull to get things in motion. Like when I was eight years old and poured my dad's shampoo into snack-sized Ziplock bags sealed with duct tape and sold them door to door to buy candy. Should I bring that back? Who doesn’t want a homemade shampoo pod of Head & Shoulders? I miss the 90’s, guys.

PS I highly recommend creating a pro forma spreadsheet (if you’re not already) and revisiting it and updating it often. If you’re not familiar, a pro forma is a financial document that predicts your earnings month by month using assumptions rather than real data. Then, as each month concludes, you update the actual financial data for the month alongside your projections. I have a line for each pop-up I’m planning on doing, my private chef work, teaching classes, and anything else that comes up. You not only start to see trends with your busy and slow periods, but you are face-to-face with what you’re expected to earn for the entire year. If you’re like me, you make your pro forma and realize you’re way under where you thought you’d be. Or, you realize you might have been a little heavy-handed with those pop-up sales projections, and they’re all about 35% less, whoopsies! This also builds a good fire under you to drum up more business and keep momentum going. If you’re interested in a very simple pro forma spreadsheet template, just comment on this Substack post, and I’ll send you a Google Sheet link!

Although there’s difficulty locking in work in multiple freelance industries, I’m starting to think food has to be one of the toughest. There are a number of reasons why this happens, maybe direction simply changed, maybe you had a verbal commitment that couldn’t be carried out, maybe a late cancel came in, or maybe the decision process took weeks on end and resulted in a no. Or maybe the client sees your price and realizes that food service is more expensive than they thought! Here are a few tips I’ve learned along the way to protect your time and (hopefully) manage expectations.

Sell yourself and know your worth

When it comes to being humble, yes - everyone needs to have a slice of humble pie. Arrogance in cooking is my least favorite thing of all time. Yet, in the short time I’ve been in food, I’ve learned that believing in yourself and your product is so important. It was uncomfortable for me to start expressing this in person and on social media, but I saw so many chefs and business owners I admired getting excited about what they create that I started to follow suit. There’s a fine line here, so don’t be an a-hole. But if you’re proud of something you’ve made, or you know something turned out delicious, tell people! If you think you could provide the best experience for the price, let them know. I’m not afraid of being direct, but a part of me still shrivels up and offers free food with almost every quote I send. I’m scared of being seen as too expensive and losing the bid. I’m getting better at this, and sometimes I do like to throw in something for fun just to make everyone extra happy. But overall, if I price myself in a way where I’m fairly compensated and the client is getting their value, I enjoy the work so much more.

Create a quote template

One thing I’ve started doing lately has been leading with my quote. I have a quote template spreadsheet to calculate costs and then a quote template/invoice document that I create for each bid and use as the conversation centerpiece. This way, your client can see the total estimate, including travel fees, additional labor, event fees, and local tax + service charge up front. You can adjust as needed and keep a record of what you talked about, even if it doesn’t get booked. Also, define your minimum and don’t be afraid to use it. I’ve had to turn down pop-ups and events because I would make much less than I would if I were running my pop-up that day. I communicate my minimum to the client, and if they are really interested, they will still move forward for the additional cost.

Contracts and verbal commitments

Welp, I’m over here dishing out advice, but I need to take it on this one. I don’t know if I want the red tape of a long, complicated contract, but I am planning on adding in some language to my quotes with a cancellation policy, payment schedule, and other expectations that require a signature to execute. If I were doing much larger bids, I would find some sort of contract that protects both parties and use that (if they didn’t require one on their end already). Unfortunately, I’ve only had a handful of verbal commitments (even well-intended) that materialized into something real. I try to manage expectations on those and only see them as real revenue once signed.

No scarcity mindset

I used to think I needed to scoop up every job that I could, but there’s value in getting back time that you’re spending on a 50/50 booking and time you could be doing something else. This all comes down to personal preference and tolerance for being in limbo, but I found that if I don’t know that I’m booking something in 2 weeks, I’m going to have to move on and see what’s next. It can feel uncomfortable, but I politely let my clients know about my booking deadline, and I stay true to it. In most cases, this has resulted in faster booking vs lost work.

Time to pivot

When you lose out on a bid and need to act fast to fill in the gaps, it’s so helpful to have an organized account of your leads and actual clients. For me, this also includes a list of every location I’ve popped up at with contact information and notes. I know who might be open to a last-minute pop-up that can still draw a crowd, for example!

If you know me, you know I love Asana. Asana is a project management tool (with a free plan) where you can organize your business by project boards and tasks. As a former project manager in almost all of my roles before food, I like the added level of taking the time to fill in this information. On my business development board, I have a section for new leads, old leads, current clients, and prospective clients, and their contact information. Outreach made easy! I have an identical board for pop-ups. If you have any questions about how to set up an Asana account, please let me know. It’s truly my passion ✨.

Thanks for reading, as always 🍓

Amelia