We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Stephen Servis a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Stephen, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love for you to start by sharing your thoughts about the pros and cons of family businesses.

We have a wonderful outlook on Family Business. Fortunately for us, myself and my identical twin brother (Nicolas) are the two co owners of Servis Events. Without each other we would not be able to operate the way we do. Market the way we do. And share the stories that we have the way we do at all of our events. In addition to that, our parents work together as real estate investors and property managers and have recently purchased a farm property in Pipersville, PA for us to all start a collaborative family business offering unique lodging experiences, supper club type dinner events, retreat weekends, educational workshops, etc..

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

We got into culinary arts from going to MBIT (Middle Bucks Institute of Technology) in high school. We made the decision on a a Wim because we got an hour less school everyday by going to trade school. It was the best decision we ever made. After falling in love with the craft and the way the school operated we stared diving into the restaurant industry, which stole our hearts and kept us very engaged for over 10 years.

When covid began we found ourselves unable to cook in a professional setting anymore and needed to figure out a way to keep our skills sharp and continue to educate ourselves. We decided to go live on an organic vegetable farm in Vienna, Maine (Flying Pond Farm) in the summer of 2020 through the WWOOF program (World Wide Opportunites on Organic Farms.) We pitched our in home, private dinning business to the family we were living with and they really helped us create a plan of attack and business model. We came home in September of 2020 and got right to work.

Now a days we work full time for Servis Events which is an intimate, fine dinning, in home dinner experience. We take our influence and love for fine food and local ingredients and we do all of the sourcing, meeting farmers, and shopping for the events. We only use ingredients that we can find from local farmers we have relationships with or from supporting the small businesses within our community. We change our menus monthly so show case the seasonal ingredients and we also provide all of the equipment for the events. We bring the plates, silverware, cook ware, prepped food, flower bouquets, napkins, printed menus, water glasses and special alkaline, ionized water, etc., and we also take it all back to our kitchen to clean so there is no mess or clean up in your kitchen. Its like we were never even there!

We are most proud that we have been able to stay true to our vision of cooking real farm to table, Bucks County cuisine. We spend so much time creating relationships with farmers and business owners that we then talk about and educate our guests on the local people around us, and why eating this seasonal and farm to table way so much for nurturing and nutrient dense. We really feel a true connection to our community and the land that grows our food.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

We are identical twin brothers. We have always been best friends since birth but didn’t want to be the “same” as we were growing up. After getting into kitchens and finding our individualities we could not enjoy working together anymore. Plus being identical twin, heavily tattooed, chefs is a super easy marketing tool!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Within our first 6 months or so of our business we were unaware of how many fake emails and scammers there are out there. We got scammed into trying to book an event for a fella who had an amazingly full proof back story and excuses for any type of questions we asked him. After him proposing he wanted to pay in advance and us charging his credit card, we come to find out through the credit card companies that it was all a scam and ended up costing us over $7,000 of our personal savings. Feeling defeated and extremely scared that we had no money to fall back on, and a brand new business that fluctuates with peoples spending habits, we wanted to quit! Fortunately we reached out to our local community, explained our story and what happened to us, and the response was overwhelming. Within 48 hours we had sooo many people donate to us, and we made back all of the money we lost and kept on moving forward. Thank you to everyone who donated! You know who you are!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.servis-events.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/servisevents
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/servistwinsevents
• Other: Email: [email protected] Phone Number: 2678859675