We recently connected with Tessa Farley and have shared our conversation below.

Tessa, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I started cooking when I was 9 years old. My mom got sick and I wanted to make her feel better by cooking her a meal. She was so surprised that I cooked a full course meal all from watching her cook over the years. I sold plates out of my college apartment… people were amazed that at 18 I was cooking cornbread dressing and collard greens like they came out of a grandmother’s kitchen. When I was 30, I went to Culinary School and learned the art of cooking, I’d worked in restaurants from 18-38 working my way up from a server to Operations Manager in multi-million dollar companies… But Culinary School was different, it taught me how to break down recipes & how to create food art. In 2021, I decided to leave my career and pursue my own endeavors. Catering was absolutely not part of my plan, until my baby cousin came to me about catering her wedding in 2022. I had been out of the industry for over a year and I had no idea how doing her wedding would reignite my fire for the food industry. Simply Sated By Tessa was born in August 2022… By the end of the year, we’d grossed over $50,000 in sales.

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

Being in the food industry for so long one of the key values that I’d both learned and taught my employees was Customer Service. You can be the best at what you do, but if you lack people skills and the ability to satisfy your clientele, it will be hard to succeed.

Creating an experience for our clients is what separates us from our competitors. Consistent communication, not treating clients like a burden are all the ingredients of a successful business.

85% of our clientele are brides and grooms… they’ve never been married before and they have no idea what they want… It is our job to help them bring their dreams to fruition. To answer as many questions as they can think of, and to make sure they know we are here to serve and support them.

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

One of our first event was at a large manufacturing warehouse for the Holiday Party. Everything that could go wrong, went wrong. The oven stopped working; it slowed down our cooking time dramatically. We had to be set up by 11am for their breaktime at 12pm. We arrived at 12pm, they were furious. All I could do was rush to set up and apologize… cherry on top of the whole chaotic situation, I had forgotten their drinks all together.

Before I could leave the lot, I sent an email apologizing and offering them 15% off their next order. They reordered with us for Christmas and we WOW’D them. I needed them to know how important their business was to us.

I could have just left them angry, cowered away from the conflict… but meeting it head on and recovering the customer was my first priority.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

My biggest lesson that I had to unlearn was attempting to appease everyone. I had people reach out to me with unreasonable budgets in the beginning. Because I was anxious for my business to grow, I would underprice my services and often ended up paying out of pocket for events.

I had to understand, my services aren’t for everyone. That my quality of service holds value and it was ok to price accordingly.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.blessedhustle.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simply_sated_by_tessa/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sated.by.tessa