We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Rodolfo Reyes. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Rodolfo below.

Rodolfo, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

I come from very humble beginnings, I have only one sibling and we were taught to earn our way through life. We were expected to be honest and hardworking. Even after a long and late night of partying, our father would wake us up the next morning to do the oil change on a car or install new brake pads. It taught us how to be useful, resourceful and never to take anyone’s job for granted. As an adult this type of upbringing has allowed me to climb the ladder at work, it has pushed me to keep going and reaching higher. It has given me grit and resilience to deal with the hardships of being a business owner, I believe its more important to be able to prepare for and withstand the rough patches and learn from them than merely wishing on a perfect outcome.

Rodolfo, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I became a chef/business owner after a long time of paying my dues in the food service industry. I began at a very early age in a sports bar in north Phoenix as the gap filler. Busser didn’t show? I was the busser that day. Dishwasher quit? I was the dishwasher. Cook walk out? Guess who was the cook? That’s how I got into food service, from there a more than 27 year run began and I can’t wait to see what’s around the corner. I have worked with just about every type of person in the industry and have learned from the best and the worst. The best obviously taught me how to excel and achieve goals, the worst have made mistakes for me to avoid without me having the repercussions.

I have worked in various food outlets, from the sports bar I started in to world class golf clubs, from resorts to business hotels and conference centers. I sharpened my craft through real, hands on experience. Doing the long hours working full time while going to culinary school.

At Culinary Brigade Private Chef we believe in doing business this way, the right way. We believe in hard work paying off, in promises meaning something. We believe in doing the right thing for our clients, for our employees and form our community. When we provide our services, be it private chef, meal prep or a cooking class, we always put our best foot forward.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

Funding for Culinary Brigade Private Chef came from side jobs. While working full time as an executive chef, I would take on small catering jobs, from taco catering to small backyard weddings. Eventually this lead to me discovering what private chef work was. After a couple years of doing private chef gigs, I subleased kitchen space from a friend who owned a catering company in order to handle more jobs. Once business started showing more promise, we took the leap and leased our very own production kitchen. We put in a cash flow, a lot of the savings, a bit of a business loan and a lot of belief in our ability to make it work.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Navigating the waters of owning a business hasn’t been easy to say the least. There are endless moving parts and all of them have a specific way of being dealt with. When we leased our production kitchen, we were bright eyed and dreaming of a relatively seamless transition from my friend’s place to our own. We were ready to stretch our legs and take over the new space. This quickly took a turn, dealing with over 4 weeks of back forth to get our gas service turned on, to running around securing kitchen equipment. Once we cleaned the space and turned things on we found that the walk-in freezer had blown and the unit had to be replaced entirely, which meant a huge unexpected bill. To top it off, the kitchen became available at a time when the high season ends in the are and business grinds to a halt. Investing 95% of any money available to us at the time, we braced to take on three months (or so we thought) of down time while tripling our overhead.

Summer came and went, we kept above water and were ready for the season to kick in and for us to have our very first full season all on our own. Then, almost overnight competition got bigger, the market got a bit more cluttered. Clients began watching their money a bit more and speeding less on services like ours. What seemed like the start if the season ended up dragging a couple months longer than usual.One of our company cars decided it was putting their notice to stop working for us as did one of the recently purchased ovens.

After months of spending money we no longer had and doing everything we could to keep things going, we managed to strike deals with great partners. We continue to fight for business and continue to do our job to the best of our abilities to this day.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.culinarybrigade.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/culinarybrigadechef/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chefrreyes/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodolfo-reyes-5020706/
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/culinary-brigade-private-chef-phoenix#reviews