We recently connected with Maggie Lawson and have shared our conversation below.
Maggie, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.
I started my business in 2011 and in some ways I wasn’t trying to start a business at all. I spent 5 years working with young people teaching them about cooking and nutrition and spent a few years trying to get work in my field again while I worked as a personal assistant/cook for an elderly couple but it was a time of economic downturn and I kept striking out. I had also started a non-profit with a few other friends and at around that time it seemed clear that wasn’t working out either.
It was definitely a low moment in my life with very little money in one of the most expensive places in the world, the San Francisco Bay Area. Fortunately, I was living very cheaply in a huge co-op with lots of interesting people and one of my housemates had a friend who was starting out as a life coach. She offered to coach me in exchange for being her personal chef. I was feeling desperate and happy for any sort of support. I remember this moment when I was sharing with her the myriad of ideas I had to make money (and I had many ideas) She reflected back to me, “All your ideas involve working for yourself, have you considered you might want to be an entrepreneur?” It took me off guard. When the non-profit project didn’t work out I chalked it up to me being a failure, not that specific thing being a failure. I agreed with her that I did in fact want to work for myself and that I would try getting a few more personal chef clients. Coincidentally, around the same time I started looking for personal chef clients, I landed a part-time job teaching. The first five years were grueling and I was basically the only chef who in some ways was learning to be a. personal chef. I’d hire friends on occasion to help out here and there. I knew I didn’t want to hire anyone else until I was clear I could be a good employer to myself. This meant, taking time off, getting health insurance, paying myself from a separate business account, and just treating my time and efforts with respect. In 2016, I got into a really competitive Masters of Fine Arts program with a full tuition scholarship, My goal had always been to get my masters with no debt and I knew I couldn’t do my masters and be both the business owner and the service provider and support myself financially. This is when I took the leap and started hiring other chefs. I had a good friend at the time who was a chef and just very organized and good at creating systems. The summer before I started my masters, I paid her to consult and help me set up systems to employ other chefs. We created a whole scheduling system using google calendar and drafted an employee manual. She became one of the first chefs I employed. There were definitely some speed bumps. One of the chefs I hired was not a great employee but a long-term client wanted to work with her over me and I ended up losing one of my best clients. That was a huge blow but in the end things started unfolding and employing other chefs ended up really reinvigorating my love of cooking and I felt so excited to market what we were doing to new clients. I had been doing it by myself for so long that it felt really supportive and collaborative to be working in a team. By the time I graduated in 2018 I had 3 other solid chefs on my team. It was also around this time that I realized I wanted to relocate back to Cincinnati, Ohio where my parents lived. My mom had been in the hospital for the final month of my grad school experience and it didn’t feel good to live so far away from them anymore. My business was around eight years old at this point and I had weathered the really hard start-up years and it was growing rapidly. I didn’t want to just shut it down so I could move back to Ohio. I started working on a plan to transition it into something else. My longest-term employee, Erika Minkowsky, had approached me many times over the years about going into business with her. In March of 2019, when I was 100% clear I was ready to move back to Ohio I approached her and asked her if she’d want to buy the business outright or become my partner and I would start some part of the business in Ohio. I was open to both at that moment but I’m very grateful she chose the partnership model. I worked with a business broker to assess the value and come up with a sale price for 50% of the business. In the end it wasn’t a huge sum but it was a price Erika could afford and meant that she was buying in. Part of it she paid back to me over time with zero interest. We also worked with another business coach to have some hard conversations and come up with partnership agreements. Once this process was fully complete, I moved back to Cincinnati in January 2020. About 8 weeks later the world started falling apart. It was definitely a baptism with fire. Erika was the mother to a 2.5 year old and had to shoulder all the childcare with her partner. I started dealing with a very scary chronic health issue in June of 2020. We learned to work together as partners under very difficult circumstances. I’m grateful we pulled through and I feel grateful that we were able to work with and accept some of the difficult parts of each others’ personalities and the places our work styles don’t match up. I started getting clients in Ohio in July 2020 and Erika had a vision to expand the chef team in California. We had a long wait list for our services so it made sense but I had always felt hesitant to scale up for fear of losing out on my time and energy to make art. It’s been four years since I moved to Cincinnati. We now have an entire chef team in Cincinnati and around 20 weekly clients. We followed Erika’s lead and scaled up the chef team in California, we have 11 chefs working for us in the Bay Area. We’ve also hired an admin team. If anything a business on this scale affords me the time and energy to step out of the kitchen and work on the business development side which has been really exciting. I’m also working on strengthening and documenting our systems so we can maintain our standards on this scale. I didn’t set out to have a business this size but each growth opportunity has been a risk I was willing to take to have the life outside of this work that I wanted for myself and now for my daughter.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I am a visual artist and has been a culinary professional for over 18 years. After moving back from Oakland, CA in 2020, I am excited to participate in Cincinnati’s growing food and small-scale farming scene. I am passionate about social justice, healing for herself and my community, and bringing more beauty into the world through art and food. I speaks fluent French and Spanish and loves being in the mountains and swimming in hot springs.
I am the co-owner of Goosefoot Cook and Grow in Cincinnati and The Heirloom Chef in the San Francisco Bay Area, our chefs work hard to provide our community with delicious, locally sourced meals personalized to fit their needs for either weekly meals or intimate celebratory cocktail and dinner parties.. We package our weekly meals in sustainable and oven-proof glass containers for clients’ convenience. We both cook in home and deliver our meals personally, allowing us to maintain a relationship with clients so we can refine their menus as tastes or dietary needs change.
I am proud of the values our brands embody and the amazing team of chefs we get to work with.
These values are as follows
SUSTAINABILITY
We prioritize sourcing locally, including the best seasonal meats and produce from our community of vendors.
PERSONALIZATION
We provide you and your family with colorful, flavorful and delicious meals designed just for you.
GIVING BACK
We value our community and are committed to mentoring our chefs, making local food more accessible, building partnerships, and facilitating conversations to help co-create a more resilient food system.
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
For me I aspire to be more of a coach than a manager. I hire people who intrinsically share the values of the business and have a proven track record of high quality work and let them know I’m here to support them in stepping into their role in a really positive way that will help the entire team. I look to work with folks who I can sense the role will fit well into their current life and their future life goals. Sometimes folks fail and I’m also there to help keep them accountable and help find solutions for moving forward in a better way. Sometimes that has meant working on professional skills like project management, sometimes that has meant working through personal challenges to do better at work, other times it has meant transitioning into a whole new role.
I also believe that investing in our team is one of the best investments we can make for the business and also allows me to live out my personal value of being a good employer and challenging the sub-par norms around employment in the food system. Recently, this has meant increasing the benefits for our team to include retirement benefits. I also work to get a ton of feedback from the team. They are working in the business in a different way than I am so there perspective is critical. I meet with the chefs weekly and quarterly we hold an entire team meeting.
Lastly, we schedule seasonal team building activities like a dinner at a nice restaurant and in Ohio we often visit our farm partners and get to know their farms and share food with the farmers themselves.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I had a really hard relationship to money when I started the business. I had struggled to support myself on my non-profit salary and had mostly relied on my partner to feel financially stable. We split up right before I started the business so I felt like I was in a bit of a free fall around money. I lived in a the most expensive real estate market in the US and was constantly in fear or losing my housing. I had to unlearn this idea that money is hard to come by and that I wasn’t good with money. I remember using the metaphor that money and I had been in an on again off again relationship for years and that I wanted to get into a stable long-term relationship with money. I worked a lot on cultivating that kind of care and consistent attention to my personal finances and that relationship helped me do the same with my business. I worked with a mentor who was also a small business owner, she and I still check in weekly. I also joined a group that helped me work on my relationship to money in community.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.goosefootcookandgrow.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goosefoot_cook_and_grow/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100076403821749
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggie-lawson-664b041b/
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/goosefoot-cook-and-grow-cincinnati?osq=Goosefoot
- Other: www.maggielawsonart.com www.theheirloomchef.com
Image Credits
Manman Studios-Mandy Lehman Elisa Fay Nikita Gross Dani Padgett