KEEP MOVING FORWARD
There are constant changes going on daily in the life of a small business owner and there are moments where you ask yourself “what is it all for?”.
Over the last 4.5 years Gather and Forge has gone through many different “life cycles”, almost to the point where we forget where it all started. We talk more about this on our podcast that will debut in the next couple of weeks to a month. Still, this is not a job for the faint hearted, this is a job that takes some serious mental fortitude and true grit to get to what I like to call “the light at the end of the tunnel”. The more we focus on building a business, the more mature we get, the bigger the decisions, the harder the falls and the more risk we face because as they say, the bigger they are the harder they fall.
When we started this personal chef company in Austin, Texas we didn’t really know at all what we were actually getting into. We thought that it would be a nice change in pace from our restaurant days and that seemed to be the biggest goal at the time… make more money and work less hours. Those words constantly haunt me as we try to build this thing because that is the furthest thing from the truth. in the beginning, that was certainly the case but nowadays, we are constantly on the grind and constantly trying to innovate our process to suit not only our customers but also our chefs. You see, there are levels to this and making the wrong or right move is literally one decision from a disaster but here is the thing… you have to try it to test it and that means you have to spend some money just to see if it will reward you with a payoff. People don’t see this side of the business, they just think there is a clear roadmap to “the light”. They don’t see the 90-100 hour long work weeks, or the checks that have to be written to get the job done, people only see the face… but behind that face is a machine that is constantly working. My brain. There are endless duties that an owner must complete on a daily basis and nobody sees it and it doesn’t matter if they did because they simply wouldn’t get it. Of course, if you have built a business than you would automatically understand what I am saying here but I am talking about the people that are in your inner circle here.
Back about 2 years ago when Gather and Forge started to break free from what was providing me and one employee a semi decent life I was faced with some decisions that I was not quite sure how to handle. Those decisions came as a direct reflection of the work we had put into our website. This stuff doesnt just happen over night, or ever a weekend, it comes through being wickedly dialed in on what exactly you are trying to do. You see, we were seeing the “word of mouth” marketing paying off, people were telling their friends and family and we would get most of our work that way. It wasn’t until I started to dive into SEO marketing and taking myself to online courses that I really started to open up a can of worms. I dove straight in to learning how to rank my website over my competitors but here is the thing, I didn’t think that it would actually work. This is where Gather and Forge really started to sprout. After hundreds of hours dialing in our website, I started to see it crawl through google and what came next was half the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and half what would end up putting me into the biggest tailspin of my life. We were receiving more requests than I knew what to do with. This is where the problems started to arise.
I remember cooking for something like 5 weeks straight, saying yes to everything I could but what I was not aware of was a little thing they call time management. You see, in order to scale, you have to do your homework. If you don’t, you will very quickly realize that the amount of time in one day is not enough to wear 10 hats. I ws trying to cook, service clients, answer emails (sometimes 30 custom menus at a time), do accounting, learn marketing and then I had this bright idea to pick up photography just to add more to my plate. Why not. Where this landed Gather and Forge was in a very dark hole where I literally could not keep up with what was happening at work. I didn’t know what to do so I did what I know.. work harder. There was a time where I worked for 39 hours straight… seriously.. 39 straight hours. This was kind of where my brain put itself into alert mode and I started to realize that if we were going to get bigger, we needed people to help fill some of my shoes.
After our busy season (October-February) I was able to sit back and take a methodical approach to bringing people on. You see, I knew that we could bring some people on because I went back and looked at some hard data. Gather and Forge had over $300,000 worth of income sitting in UNANSWERED emails. That means that people inquired with us but I was too overloaded with work to even get back to them. When I did this math, I cried and sat there in disbelief that I was now terrible at my job. This is what people do not teach you in the real world, these are the decisions that you are faced with when you start to grow, the problem is there is nobody to help you when you are the last line of defense for yourself. My head was spinning constantly, my body was gaining weight, I started drinking more than I should have been, and I was seriously thinking about just quitting. That would have been stupid, but it did cross my mind. I was simply overwhelmed and did not know how to face it. This is the phase of my business life that I call the personal destruction phase. It was short lived but almost required to get to the next level.
After pouting for almost a month I had come up with a solution. The first thing that came to mind was taking it back to the basics. “There has to be people out there that want to cook and earn more money while working less hours”. There were people trying to start a personal chef business in Austin, Texas that would have loved to be in the shoes I was in. There were people all over facebook groups dying to get their first client and here we were with too much work. What a time and what a decision on my part to face everything and rise. I started small, bring somebody on that is a better cook than me and that I do not have to babysit. Check. Next to the finances (I failed on this one, pretty much because I was scared to death of knowing- don’t make that move) so I called a bunch of accountants and finally got somebody that was on team Gather and Forge and that was an immediate worry off the shoulders. Next was not so direct, we were still getting more and more inquiries and still we were letting go of work. Solution- bring more people on that are better than me at cooking and focus on building the process in the background. Well, I tried to build systems and processes and again found myself unequipped with the tools to do this properly. I did an okay job but by no means was an expert in these kinds of things.
The next phase of the business is what I call hold on for dear life, she’s about to explode. I reached out to a facebook group basically as a cry for help for an automations expert. Somebody that could help me build out a process, keep track of our customers, and streamline the communication between chef and client. It was here that I found out just how important it is to be involved but not so involved that you step on peoples toes. You brought them on for a reason, and that is because they are experts in the field. This phase is what felt like a flash. Our operations officer now had an idea of what she wanted to do with the business and I let her run with it. We started an uphill battle because we were playing catch up and we didn’t really have time to breathe but what we did have was a system, a system that was getting more and more refined every single day. This was a huge milestone in what would end up becoming one of the biggest assets on the team. We could finally create freely, think outside the box, have room to do what we do best…cook.
Now 4.5 years later Gather and Forge personal chef business is chugging along quite nicely. Of course it is a constant struggle with the above problems still showing themselves in weird little ways but what we have is a team. A solid team of hardworking people that are always moving the needle forward and always pressing even harder when times get tough.
Gather and Forge has never raised any money. I built this company mainly on my own and have stuck it out through some of the most trying times in my life, I have not seen an insane payoff but I don’t work for anybody and my team doesn’t live in poverty. Those 2 things alone make me a proud papa to Gather and Forge and they will remain the most important aspects of being a good boss. I am now 30 and I can start to see a little flickering beam of light at the end of that tunnel that was once so dark I couldn’t even see my own hand 6 inches from my face. The key to all of this is facing everything head on and making a conscious decision to change things. Of course, things are not all sunshine and rainbows but we are moving forward and that is something I keep having to remind myself- KEEP MOVING FORWARD.
That is what it is all for. The business is bigger than me now and I face more responsibility than ever before. The difference now is that I have a team of strong and mentally tough people that surround me and most of the time support my decisions. Without them and some key players, this whole thing wouldn’t work at all. This post is for them, because they deserve all the credit and they deserve to be seen as well. One day I will see a payoff, but until then we KEEP MOVING FORWARD.
-Ryan