Learn how to cook professional-quality meals in other people's homes and build a personal chef business from your first client to a full schedule.
Before you cook for anyone else, you need to cook like a pro. This phase covers knife skills, mise-en-place (prepping and organizing all your ingredients before you start cooking), the Maillard reaction (how and why food browns), building flavor with whole spices, making stock from scratch, mother sauces, and saving a broken sauce. You'll practice these skills by cooking full meals at home until your technique is consistent and confident.
Personal chefs don't just cook what they want — they cook what the client needs. This phase teaches you how to plan balanced weekly menus, work around allergies and dietary restrictions (keto, diabetic-friendly, halal, vegan), build grocery lists from a menu, and adjust portions for different household sizes. You'll learn how to ask the right questions in a client consultation so you know exactly what to cook.
You're cooking in other people's homes and handling their food — you need to know the rules. This phase walks you through getting your food handler's certification (like ServSafe), understanding safe cooking temperatures, proper food storage, cross-contamination prevention, and what your state or county requires for a personal chef to operate legally. You'll finish this phase with your certification in hand.
Now you put it all together by cooking full multi-course meals for friends, family, neighbors, or community members — for free. You'll practice doing a client consultation, planning a custom menu, shopping on a budget, showing up at someone's home, cooking a full meal in an unfamiliar kitchen, and cleaning up after yourself. Do this at least five times. Collect honest feedback every time and take photos of your finished plates.
This phase teaches you how to price your services so you actually make money. You'll learn how to calculate food cost per plate, set per-meal and weekly rates, decide whether to charge flat fees or hourly, handle grocery purchasing (do you bill the client separately or build it into your rate?), and figure out how many clients per week you need to cover your bills. You'll build your own rate sheet based on your local grocery prices and what personal chefs in your area charge.
Now that you know how to plan menus and price meals by hand, you'll use ChatGPT to generate custom weekly menus based on a client's dietary needs in minutes instead of hours. You'll use Google Sheets to auto-calculate grocery costs and portion scaling, and use Canva to create clean, professional-looking weekly menu PDFs you can send to clients. This phase is about doing the work you already know how to do — just faster.
This phase is about getting people to hire you. You'll learn how to write a simple personal chef service description, set up a Google Business Profile, post on Nextdoor and local Facebook groups, ask your free-meal clients for testimonials, and pitch yourself to busy families, elderly neighbors, and new parents in your area. You'll also learn how to run a tasting session — a low-cost way to let potential clients try your food before committing.
Once you have a few paying clients, you need to keep them and add more without burning out. This phase covers scheduling multiple clients per week, batching your grocery shopping, using Google Calendar and Google Sheets to track client preferences and upcoming menus, handling cancellations and rebooking, and asking for referrals. You'll use ChatGPT to quickly draft client emails, weekly menu updates, and shopping lists so you spend more time cooking and less time on paperwork. The goal is a steady roster of repeat clients who look forward to your meals every week.
Name your project and Ari will coach you through every phase.
Free • No credit card • AI-coached