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Long story short, I started my business 10 years ago with a little less than $2k to my name. My original goal was just to overtake my earnings at the time of $40k/yr. In the beginning things were rough... real rough. My first 3 months were crickets drawing my bank account down to cents.. Fast forward to the 4th month and I finally got a client. Because I was so young, my overhead was minimal so one client got me by. To not bore you will my life story, I have grown the business to \~$1M annually without taking on any outside money. The ride has been wild and I no longer perform the actual service that we offer. I have figured out how to scale a rather unscalable business in a way that really nobody else has figured out. Here is the thing... the burnout I feel is debilitating to the point where it is hard for me to get through my days. I really used to love what it is we do and to my knowledge we are the only ones doing this at this scale without private equity or VC. All of this said, I know I am leaving TONS of $$ on the table and really no matter how hard I try, I just can't seem to build what needs to be built in order to scale further. This is part of the debilitation that I feel. I have swung 40 times (thats an exaggeration) and stuck out for one reason or another. Whether it is I don't have enough money to build it or I find somebody that says they can build it and they can't. I hate the feeling of being lost or without direction and really I am starting to actually lose my damn mind. The worst part is it is only me at the top and I have nobody to really talk to about all this. Running solo in the desert trying to find rain clouds and for whatever reason I just keep finding salt flats. Advice?
EDIT, UPDATE & ANSWERED QUESTIONS: The business is a private chef business located in Austin, Texas. When I started, I was cooking at the best restaurant here at the time that is named Odd Duck. It was grueling work and I was not getting paid for my time like I thought I should have been. Anyways, one day I was cleaning up the grill station and a couple across the open kitchen bar asked me if I would be interested in doing a dinner party for them. I said "sure" not knowing anything about it at all. I reached out to them the week after and met them at their home... it turned out to be THE penthouse of the four seasons residence here in ATX. They wanted tacos for 30 people.. I performed the service and they wrote me a check for $3600+ $700 in tip. This is where I knew I had something. In my mind, I immediately said "There has got to me more people like this". 2 months later I had built my website, created a brand image, and opened a bank account & LLC. I gave my 2 weeks notice with zero clients and put on my chef coat in the middle of Texas summer and went door to door at the biggest houses I could find. I would pound pavement for 6 hours a day for 3 months to hear nothing but crickets (turns out, knowing what I know now, summer is the WORST time here for my business). As stated above on the 4th month, one client reached out and I closed that deal for weekly meal prep @ $500/wk+groceries. I was able to float.. Over the next 4-5 months I had earned roughly $35k. I kept cooking solo for the next 4.5 years, 7 days a week, all holidays, etc.
In the 5th year, I sat down at my computer because I was behind on office work and come to find out that I had missed roughly $300,000 in potential revenue by simply not having the bandwidth to take on more work by myself. I hired another chef (and this is why it is an unscalable business) but that didn't help much because most requests come for basically 3 days of the week. Thursday, Friday and Saturday. This means that even if both of us were at a dinner party cooking, I was still missing out on between 1-8 requests for service on that Saturday. This continued to happen week after week after week. I tried hiring people on a base pay weekly + they keep 100% of their tip. This blew up in my face in said summer slump because I was paying the base but the chefs were not working. It was working but I wasn't making any money because the summer would bleed me dry. Right at this time Covid hits.. I have to lay everybody off.. you all know how that went.. I came up with a meal delivery service and barely got through this stage but I figured out how to keep the business running. During this time, I told 3 of my chefs "If you stay with me, I will split evenly whatever comes in so we can all stay afloat during this time". Well about 3 months into the pandemic, here in Texas, our Governor came on the TV and announced that we were "open to gatherings of 14 people and less". Being in the dinner party scene, my business' phones went crazy. Right away, people (past and present clients) wanted to get together with their friends and family at the house to have a party.
A new era is born. Since the old way wasn't working (paying a base pay weekly + tip) I knew things had to change. During the meal delivery days, I instinctively went with that "rev split model" and it seemed to work out. So I kept with it. 50% to the chef and 50% to me and the chef keeps 100% of the tip they receive. This is where things finally changed and how I was able to make it to my first $1M year. The beauty is that the chef gets to work less than they work in a restaurant but earn double to quadruple what they were earning in the restaurant. I stopped cooking and started to figure out how to scale this model and operate the business. This is where I am at... 4 years later... 3 broken process buildouts... a software stack that is everywhere.. and I am beginning to break. Yes, what I have works but it is clunky and make shifted. I have, I can't even count (in the thousands) how many leads that "went with another option" because we are high in pricing compared to competitors (that are only a one man show). I know how to fix this, I know what needs to be built, but the way things are right now, it cannot be done. I have tried many different things but at the end of the day people (developers & automation specialists) tell me the same thing. "what you are trying to build is going to cost you \~$3-$500,000 and we can't promise you that it will solve your main concerns".
Yes, what I am trying to build out is complex. Yes, I understand that it is going to take $$ to do it. No, I do not have half a million dollars to roll the dice on something that is not going to move my needle FOR SURE.
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