We were lucky to catch up with Denise Power recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Denise , thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the decision of whether to donate a percentage of sales to an organization or cause – we’d love to hear the backstory of how you thought through this.

Into our second year of business now, we are excited and hopeful to be able to launch a new program in the coming months through which we will be donating a portion of our profits and also making it possible for our clients to make donations toward helping to feed local children in need through a partnership with Denton’s Lovepacs.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I have always loved creating recipes and meals for myself, friends, family, and anyone else who would let me feed them. Both of my parents are excellent cooks in their own rights. They each have very different styles of cooking, and so it’s really fun to recognize in myself a mixture of influences from both of them – from the way I plan all the way to how I execute a certain recipe (or lack of one).

After spending the last 10+ years of my professional life establishing and growing my own companies (LM Organics for the bulk of that time, then selling LMO and moving on to teaching budgeting and meal prep after that), it seemed like an exciting (and logical) next business attempt to try my hand at actually preparing and selling the meals that I love to create instead of simply sharing and selling the recipes.

Over the last year, Power Meal Prep has really evolved as I have different things to see what the local population really needs and wants as well as bringing on 1 assistant cook and 2 kitchen assistants who have made my time in the kitchen exponentially more fun and efficient! :)

In October of last year, we introduced a monthly Freezer Meal menu option available for pre-orders. Freezer meals were not a part of my original vision for Power Meal Prep, thinking people had enough of those options already, but surprisingly to me, the monthly freezer meals quickly become the most popular part of our business.

We post a new limited fresh weekly menu each week that is to be ordered by Tuesdays and picked up on Fridays. Our freezer meal menu is similarly posted each month on our social media pages with a specific date and time window for pickups, and people simply DM or comment with which of the meals they want to order, how many of each, and an email address where we can send their invoice.

We have plans for a much more streamlined system for ordering all of our meals, but it requires me to have the time to implement the switch-over of ordering platforms, and I’m busy enough (thankfully) that I simply don’t have the time to finish that project currently. So, we’re making do with what we have for now!

In August (less than 2 weeks away, actually), we will be hosting our next Prep Together in-person event, and we couldn’t be more excited!

At these events, participants purchase an event ticket, show up, fellowship, prep meals together, and leave 3 hours later with 2 cooler bags filled with 12 meals to fill their families’ freezer and feed them 2+ weeks of dinners – ready for the slow cooker, pressure cooker, or oven on the busiest of days.

This time we will be prepping the freezer meals from our brand new cookbook, “Simple Favorites: Freezer Meal Prep” which is not even available for purchase yet. It’s such a fun, encouraging, and practical way to spend an afternoon!

Our team handles all the time-consuming prep like planning, grocery shopping, cleaning, and chopping produce so that our clients can fly through their prep and leave feeling encouraged in their prepping skills and excited to try (and share) all of their ready-to-go meals.

It’s really been such a joy to be able to flex my creativity in order to create these cookbooks as well as the menus, freezer meals (each month), and the fresh meals (each week).

We truly do have the most incredible clients, and knowing that me doing what I enjoy actually helps them feel less stress and makes their lives easier is just icing on the cake.

I really believe that I have the best job ever, even though my clients regularly tell me that they don’t know HOW I do what I do because the thought of being in the kitchen that much gives them anxiety.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Honestly, the bulk of our clients (probably as many as 95%) have simply come from happy clients sharing our information with their friends.

I had a client tell me several months ago that she sent Power Meal Prep’s social media handle to several text threads she was on, encouraging them all to check us out because of how much she was loving our food and the convenience of our healthy meals.

She said that several of the people she sent our information to responded with comments like, “Oh, girl… We’ve been using her for MONTHS. We love her food!”

My client responded to her friends with, “OK, WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME ABOUT THIS?? You’re all dead to me.”

We stood in the driveway and just laughed our heads off about this, and she promised to tell all of her friends just so she wouldn’t be guilty of the same offense toward anyone else.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

One of the ways that I make sure that our business is where it needs to be, financially speaking, is with regular budget check-ins.

I break our business expenses into the following categories: Operating Expenses, Payroll, Sales Tax Collected, Income Tax, and Profit.

Since implementing our current budgeting strategy about 6 months ago, I’ve had a much easier time being able to get a snapshot of “where we are” at any given time through the months.

Recently, during one of my regular budget check-ins, I realized we were coming in a little short in our Operating Expenses category, so instead of panicking or taking money from any of those other categories, I decided to do a flash-sale of some extra freezer meals we had in our freezers from the past few months of prep weeks.

I always try to make a couple of extras of each meal during our preps, if we are able to, and I was certainly glad to have those meals on hand for that flash sale!

Thankfully, we were able to sell what we needed within the 24 hours I was hoping for, and it also allowed clear out a lot of room in our freezers for fresh meals, which is always a good thing!

Contact Info:

• Website: powermealprep.com
• Instagram: @PowerMealPrepTX
• Facebook: @PowerMealPrepTX

Image Credits
Darby McFall (@lumenmediagroup) and Brenda Turrubiarte (@brendaturrubiarte_photo)