Lisa Brooks Never Wants to Work in a Restaurant

Breakout success with a personal chef business leads to more control, better profit margins, and the benefits of "cloning yourself."

After working for years as a healthcare executive, Lisa Brooks quit her job to start a personal chef business based out of Charlotte, North Carolina. Two decades later, she now oversees a rapidly expanding operation that employs 10 other chefs and runs meal events almost daily all over the area. She’s also launched a training and coaching program to help other aspiring chefs learn how to start their own businesses outside the usual hospitality career tracks.

What was your relationship like with food and cooking, before you decided to make it a career? 

I was that person who was always having friends over and hosting people. I created my own Sunday dinners. My coworkers would come over, and so would my college classmates. My apartment was always a hub where people could come and just get together. 

This was when you still worked in healthcare? Where was that?

That was in Chapel Hill. I lived there for 22 years. 

Were you thinking about actually working with food during that time? 

I’d never considered cooking for a living. Not once. 

So what changed? 

It was through prayer. That was a pretty cushy job, but it was super stressful. I was becoming so uncomfortable in that corporate environment. You get that uncomfortable, and your body’s telling you, the stress is telling you—I got to make a change. I was married young, and I was divorced young. I was a single mom. I had to work my way up at that company because I didn’t have a degree in that field. And I didn’t want to make a lateral move to some other company and be in the same environment. 

I just had to take an inventory. What can I do? Where do I go from here? So I prayed about it, and it came to me that I can cook. I knew I didn’t want to work in a restaurant. I just knew that wasn’t the life for me. So I researched food jobs, asking what can I do? I saw “food stylist,” and I thought, oh, I could do that. And then I read about “personal chefs.” I’d never heard of a personal chef before. I immediately turned in that direction. 

“I knew I didn’t want to work in a restaurant. I just knew that wasn’t the life for me.”

You were already focused on becoming a personal chef when you started culinary school? 

Yeah. I made the decision in January 2010, and I researched culinary schools in North Carolina. There were three schools here at that time, and so I moved back home to Charlotte. My son was graduating high school, but he was coming to college here too. So by May 22nd of that year, I was moved here and cooking for my first client. And I started school that August. 

Oh, so you started your personal chef business right away?

Absolutely. I was cooking privately for people the entire time I was in culinary school. 

My impression is that culinary school trains people to work in traditional hospitality, not for other careers in food.

Right, it’s training you toward working in restaurants and hotels. It’s certainly not training you to be a personal chef. 

How did that affect your experience in culinary school, if you weren’t there to learn about hospitality exactly? 

Well, I’ve been cooking my whole life. My friends were like, “Why are you going to culinary school when you already know how to cook?” But I wanted the validity behind it. When I built my website, when I reached out to customers, I wanted to be able to say I have a degree in this. I took all those cooking classes, the baking classes, the garde manger—all the things you learn in culinary school. I took fruit carving! Things I would never have gotten good at otherwise. It all increased my skillset so much. But I had to seek out learning about how to run a personal chef business outside of culinary school. That’s just not something that’s taught at all. 

That seems to be the case with anyone working as a personal chef, even if they’ve worked at restaurants a long time. 

Oh, exactly. Which is why I started teaching it myself. 

This part of your business that involves training, coaching, mentoring—was that always something you intended to do?

First of all, when it comes to mentoring within my business—taking interns from CPCC Culinary Arts—that happened organically and almost immediately upon my graduation from culinary school. By 2013, I was taking interns with the intention of growing them up in my business. After doing that for several years, December 2020 was when the social media platform called Clubhouse was gaining popularity. They had all these chefs’ chat rooms, and when I’d go in there and introduce myself and tell people what I do, I would get so many DMs. “Oh, my God, can you mentor me, can I get a phone call from you.” And I was like, okay! I started doing these one-hour calls for nothing. For free! 

But then I got to where I was talking to 20 or 30 people a month, and I couldn’t keep doing that. I had to sit down and write a curriculum so that I don’t have to tell about all that over and over again. So I created the Personal Chef Playbook, and I launched an online course called “Kickstart Your Personal Chef Business.” It’s designed to be a six-week course. It’s about how to actually run a business—not teaching you anything about food. How you go about marketing, how to set your menus, how to set your prices, how to price your time. Then I started a second course for people who already have a one-person personal chef business, and it teaches them how to grow a team of personal chefs.

That’s a big step, going from a solo operation to running an independent team. How many people do you employ these days? 

Ten chefs, countless servers, and a full-time administrative assistant.  

What does somebody need to achieve, practically speaking, to scale up a personal chef business like that?

You’ve got to have the foundational things in place. You’ve got to have a good functioning website. A lot of people—younger folks especially—think they can depend entirely on social media. Having your web presence established, having your menus and recipes documented—which is another thing people are so stubborn about doing, but you cannot replicate what you do if you don’t have it recorded. Even now, if I’m cooking for a client today, and they’re like, “Oh, my God, that thing you made two weeks ago, can you make it again?” If I don’t have a recipe for whatever it was, I cannot duplicate it. 

“What you’re trying to do is clone yourself. You need to fuse your culinary DNA into the people that come into your organization so they understand your process, how you do things, your recipes.”

That’s what I call being “cloneable.” What you’re trying to do is clone yourself. You need to fuse your culinary DNA into the people that come into your organization so they understand your process, how you do things, your recipes. You also need to figure out how to build and establish a culture, just like any business. You got to set your culture and your vision up front. So rather than just ruling by force, you point back to your core values. 

When it comes to building teams, people are so afraid another chef is going to come along and steal their staff. I teach them how to grow a chef. Don’t look for established chefs who have been in the business for 20 years to come work for you, because yeah, that would be a risk. But if you grow your chefs—pick out seedlings, and water them, and talk to them, and give them sunshine, they’ll grow up in your “household.” They’ll learn your ways, and they’ll be loyal.  

How was your business affected by the pandemic?

We doubled our business in the pandemic—almost tripled it. After the first three months of quarantine, people still wanted to celebrate special moments. But restaurants were closed. We came up with our COVID policy, we all masked up, we sanitized. I think a lot of people didn’t even know we existed before then, but they found out about us because we were one of the few services running during the pandemic. We did an extra $200,000 in 2020, and 2021 was our biggest year ever.

That seems like a lot.

It was major. It was the opposite of what was going on with restaurants. 

Other than the fact that you don’t operate a permanent brick-and-mortar location, how is cooking and working as a personal chef different than working and cooking in a restaurant?

It’s very different. Just the fact that someone can cook is not enough to be a personal chef. You have to have personality. There’s no veil, there’s no wall between you and the customer. Over the years, I’ve had people come work for me from the restaurant industry, and they often just don’t have the personality for it. They’re not used to actually interacting at all. It’s almost like a performance we do when we’re announcing courses or telling stories. If you’re just used to being on the line and cooking behind that wall, it’s very difficult. 

But otherwise, just on the perspective of the pure business numbers, there’s way less overheard in being a personal chef. 

I’m guessing your margins are probably a little better than a typical restaurant. 

The margins are way better. A super-profitable, successful restaurant does 10% margin at the outside. Most do more like 6% or 7%. We have quite a bit larger margin than that. 

Restaurants are competing in the market against other restaurants. People have so many choices. But if you want to have an in-home dining experience like we provide? Very few choices. 

Have you had people working for you go off and start their own businesses, using what they’ve learned?

Oh, absolutely. Keisha Brynn, she’s killing it right now. Chef Joya—probably the number-one vegan chef  in the country—she was my mentee too.  

Part of your family story is how your grandmother used to work as a maid and cook at these wealthy white homes in Charlotte—the kind of homes where you often work now as a personal chef, serving food inspired by what you learned from her and others in your family. How does that sit in your mind when you’re in these homes?

That was not lost on me. My grandma and her mom taught me everything—that’s where my passion came from, and my affinity for food and cooking and storytelling. Which I think is the true magic of the business. All that came from them. It came from those ladies. And they would probably be shocked and amazed that we’re able to do what we do, and the money we’re able to do it for.