Most experts advise small business owners to draft a plan before launching a business. But Scott Growth began with a blog. When he started writing about food and recipes, he found his passion and built a platform for a new business. Growth owns The Chubby Cook, a corporate catering business and recreational cooking school located.
The company, which was established, last April, specializes in homemade-style food with fresh ingredients. While the corporate catering order has 10-person minimum, individual customers can order home-style dishes, like chicken paprika’s, braised beef short ribs, and real” macaroni and cheese to go.
The staff has a definite opinion on what makes good food. The salad dressing and barbecue sauce are made from scratch, in-house, said the executive chef, Michele Lavecchia. And Chubby Cook doesn’t offer fried foods. When it comes to his business, Growth settled upon the right ingredients after a couple of false starts.
Originally, I just wanted to do a cooking school, but I couldn’t get insurance,” he said. Instead, he started catering and ran a lunchtime carry-out in the front of his business. But expenses ate him up. When you’re making sandwiches with fresh ingredients, you have massive amounts of spoilage,” he said.
Although he closed the take-out operation in October, something good came from the experiment. He said it brought lots of exposure that helped with the catering business. The visibility was welcome, even though his blog had 8,000 views each month and about 4,200 followers on Twitter.
I cooked my first Thanksgiving dinner at (age) 9,” she said. With an Eastern European background, she grew up making chicken paprika’s, stuffed cabbage, and other items on the home-style carry-out menu. But necessity pushed her into cooking professionally.
As a single mother, she relied on income from catering to fraternal and social organizations. That journey carried her to the La Casa Bella party center, and to the Sattler Hotel, where she was a grand chef. She also established her own company, Michele’s Fine Catering.
Eight years ago, after her children left home, she pulled out of catering and became a flight attendant. She’d left that profession when her daughter suggested LaVecchia consult with Growth.
Growth cooked lunch for her. They talked and began to work together. Growth said he known he needed someone who had more experience than he if the business was to grow. He’d owned a physician’s staffing service before starting The Chubby Cook. Although cooking and creating recipes is his passion, he was green when it came to meals for parties and large events. He’s looking for more consultants, too, especially when it comes advice on to future cooking classes. The company got insurance, and the sessions.
The classes range from juicing and raw foods to a hands-on session for couples on Valentine’s Day. Participants will work in the industrial kitchen, but they’ll use consumer equipment. That’s to ensure they can reproduce the results once they get home, Growth said. He chuckles over the circuitous route his business has traveled. And he’s looking forward to the road ahead.