Your niche is the ticket to move in your area of interest with your personal chef business. For some it may be working with folks who are severely overweight while for others it may be special health challenges. Whatever your focus is you can design your PC business around it. Here's how.

Start with your areas of interest.
Create your template.
Research the need.
Hang your shingle.

Starting With Your Areas of Interest
Who do you want to deal with? and/or What foods do you want to specialize in?

When you have a passion or desire to help people that fit into your category of interest, you have the makings of a successful business. Reason being that you end up with a bigger picture mindset than just cooking food. You become a part of someone else's solution. My areas of interest lie with those who are health conscious or open to a healthy lifestyle, vegetarian along with those who have serious health challenges: Diabetes; Obesity; MS; Chronic Yeast Disorders. That's my niche. What is yours?

When I take on a client, my purpose is to give them the nourishment that will help their systems deal with or, when at all possible, eradicate their issues. It becomes one of the driving inspirations for doing what I do. It's not just a job or contract its a mission with an intended positive outcome in mind.

Creating Your Template
Templates to growing businesses are like air to lungs. They allow you to continually florish without having to keep on reinventing the proverbial wheel. To create your template you'll need to look at some things:

1. What are you templating?


2. What questions do you need to ask?


3. How do you support it?


4. How does it support you?


5. How do you research it?


6. How do you maintain it?


7. How can you diversify it?


8. How do you grow it?


9. How do you automate it?

Researching the Need
Nowadays, research is an easy thing to do. We have so many resources at our fingertips: Internet; Libraries; Books; Consultants and Industry Experts; etc. With all that is available to us we can access the pertinent information to deliver the best possible products and programs to our clientele without much challenge.

Here's how I do it:
When I'm researching online I'll start by 'googling' what I need. Example: If I'm looking for information on diabetes/diabetics I'd start by:

1. typing my question or statement into the search bar. Things like:




• What is diabetes?


• What can diabetics eat?


• Diabetic recipes




2. Look in:




• Web


• Google Scholar


• Images


• Blogs


• News, etc.




3. Store your findings.




• I store mine in my mind mapping software

Once I've done this I have the foundational materials to work with to design a successful program for my clientele with diabetes. This is my starting point; and as I create recipes and do more research I add it all to my mind map.

Hanging Your Shingle
There are many ways to "hang your shingle". When you hang your shingle, you're basically stating that you are ready/open for business. This is when you start your marketing processes.

All in all, if your aim is to establish your niche in the growing Personal Chef industry and you want it setup in a way that you won't end up pulling your hair out later, structure it in a way from the very beginning (and for those who have been running a PC business and are in need of structure) that will allow you to grow it properly for the best possible results.

So remember to: 1. Start with your areas of interest; 2. Create your template; 3. Research the need; then 4. Hang your shingle.

Until next time...