We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lisa Balcom. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lisa below.
Lisa, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you happier as a business owner? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job?
I think about that from time to time. Despite the constant demand on my attention and time, I don’t think I could give up being a business owner to have a regular job again. After creating, building and growing a business through a pandemic and then through what seems to be a recession, I’ve definitely seen my fair share of challenges to overcome. At the end of the day, however, I cannot imagine myself doing anything else. Working for someone else would be nearly impossible for me at this point. Not having control over my time, my role and not being in a place of leadership would most likely make me miserable. Being an entrepreneur is far from glamorous, but its also intensely rewarding. Its not for everyone, but for those willing to put in the work, there’s really nothing else.
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?
From server to acclaimed pastry chef to now restaurant owner, Lisa Balcom has always been passionate about cooking and baking. With more than 24 years in the hospitality industry, Lisa began her career working as a server and bartender in her small hometown, Hillsborough, N.J.
While living in Savannah, GA and going to school for Interior Design, Lisa found her passion for cooking and especially baking. In her time off from bartending and going to school, she would pour over cookbooks cover to cover, read cooking magazines like Bon Appetit & Gourmet Magazine, and obsessively watch Food Network cooking shows. Days off would be spent hunting down ingredients at local gourmet markets and evenings would be spent cooking or baking whatever inspired her at the time. She decided to quit interior design school and move to Charlotte, N.C. to pursue her degree in Baking and Pastry at Johnson & Wales.
Lisa followed her passion and enrolled at Charlotte’s Johnson & Wales, graduating Magna Cum Laude in 2011. Immediately after graduating, she was offered a job working in the pastry kitchen at the Ballantyne Hotel & Lodge, a luxury hotel outside Charlotte in Ballantyne, N.C., where she met her now-husband Patrick. At Ballantyne, Lisa deepend her love of pastry and began to learn about craft cocktails.
Wanting to develop their skills further and gain exposure to a booming food scene, Lisa and Patrick moved to Charleston, S.C. Tired of working a low paying kitchen job and enduring a high cost of living, Lisa decided to move back to the front of the house, landing a server and bartending position at one of Charleston’s finest restaurants, the Charleston Grill. Here, Lisa honed what would later become foundations of Farow: fine dining, elevated hospitality and wine expertise. However, she couldn’t fully keep herself out of the kitchen and started a side hustle making custom cookies and cakes. After six years in Charleston, the couple moved to Colorado, where she worked in the pastry kitchen at Safta under James Beard Award-winning Chef Alon Shaya. She went on to lead the pastry program at Boulder’s beloved Blackbelly restaurant alongside her husband Patrick, who was the sous chef.
When the pandemic struck, the two began working on a business plan to open a small bakery in Longmont, while eventually shifting to a dinner concept in Niwot, Colo. The two opened Farow in September 2021. After only a matter of months open, Farow was a recipient of the Slow Food Snail of Approval award for a commitment to ethical sourcing, as well as earning a number of awards from Boulder Weekly including Best New Restaurant Boulder, and the write in category for Best Restaurant East County, Best Happy Hour, Best Organic Restaurant, Fine Dining Restaurant, Appetizers and Desserts.
At the heart of Farow is a passionate commitment to building a more sustainable food system, which includes paying farmers a fair wage, only using purveyors who prioritize animal welfare and sustainable farming practices, and paying their employees a livable wage. Beyond sourcing 90% of their ingredients from with in 10 miles of the restaurant and other local producers, Farow highlights their beloved producers with summer farm stands at the restaurant, monthly field trips to local farms and artisans for their team, and regular in-restaurant cocktail classes and dinners that highlight select artisans.
In addition to the rotating menu, Farow’s incredible bar offerings include a unique and exciting wine program featuring producers focused on organic and biodynamic wines from around the world. The cocktail program flows with the seasons, just like the dinner menu, and changes with availability of fresh ingredients. Cocktails include homemade syrups and infused spirits, a rotating “cocktail of the day,” and a robust mocktail menu that receives the same love and attention as its alcoholic counterpart.
In just a matter of months, Farow was a recipient of the Slow Food Snail of Approval award for a commitment to ethical sourcing as well as earned a number of awards from Boulder Weekly including Best Organic Restaurant, Fine Dining Restaurant, Appetizers and Desserts.
Never one to rest on their laurels, in December 2022, Lisa and Patrick opened a delivery-only pizza concept Pie Dog that operates out of the Farow kitchen and uses only freshly milled organic flour, homemade pizza sauce, locally sourced meats and produce.
If you have multiple revenue streams in your business, would you mind opening up about what those streams are and how they fit together?
We just recently opened a pizza ghost kitchen out of our current restaurant. Starting up a new brick and mortar is EXPENSIVE. Not only in cost of build out, goods, etc. but expensive in time setting it up, developing training programs, hiring, training, and ongoing education amongst a myriad of other obligations. The ghost kitchen concept popped up when the pandemic was in full swing, and while I’d heard about them, never really considered it. Our current restaurant was a pizza shop before we took over the space and they left this fantastic brick oven that we’d mostly been using for making bread and roasting vegetables. We provide a family meal daily for our team and from time to time we would have extra focaccia dough, so the kitchen would cook up some pizzas. The whole team would rave over those early pizzas.
While attending a restaurant summit in Scottsdale this past fall, one of the guest speakers did an entire presentation on ghost kitchens. It shed a lot of light on how to generate extra revenue for the restaurant with minimal start up investment. We set up a website & social accounts, set up a DBA from our original LLC, set up accounts with a couple 3rd party delivery services, ordered in a couple extra ingredients and we were in business! At the current moment, our chef for Farow is manning the pizza oven 5 nights a week while the main restaurant is open. Once volume picks up, we are considering hiring and training a full time pizza employee or two. For a start up, however, it was really easy. Especially having a kitchen already set up. It was really a no brainer. If at some point in the future this really takes off, we may just have a separate pizza restaurant. For right now, we’ve leveraged our current audience and space to bring in some extra cash flow and hit a family market that our fine dining restaurant doesn’t generally hit.
We also sell apparel, gift cards and collaborated with a local candle maker to create custom scents for us. We often burn them at the host stand to make our entry way smell great and entice guests to purchase some on their way out.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Social media is a fickle thing. The algorithms are always shifting and what’s popular is always changing. In the beginning, we used a lot of really high quality photos, hashtags and consistent daily posting. Now we rely heavily on reels, video shorts and video in general. A lot of the platforms have shifted and give priority to video content. Static photos are pretty much dead. Always have hashtags on your posts. Post every single day AT LEAST once, but preferably several times a day. Reuse your content if you need to or find other people on socials talking about your company and repost or share them to your stories to hit some social proof- plus free content for you! Our company specifically works with local farms, so I often share their posts in my stories. I love cross promoting our audiences because they align with one another and it helps support both of us.
Another really great way to gain traction is to follow other people in your market, like neighboring businesses, people, influencers etc. It usually results in them following you back or you becoming a suggested follow when someone else follows their business. Its a great way to passively continue to put your name out there.
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Image Credits
Ellie Harris, Lisa Balcom, Joanie Schrantz