— Lisa Doyle

I think that the most important thing that I see is following your passion and what it is that you actually want to do and seeing if it is something that will fit into your community where you work and what you do. I do believe I have attached, uh, an article that you could read about setting up, but in a compact nutshell, I will give you these three or four things aside from following your passion and loving what you do. You know, my children, when they were little, they went to Montessori school, and as you may know, the Montessori, uh, sort of ideology is your work, is your play, and your play is your work. And, uh, I sort of have embraced that myself because I learned a lot when my children were in Montessori. So before you set up that business, you wanna make a business plan. You wanna make sure that that business plan is going to fit into everything that you do. Does your township allow you to get licensure to use your own kitchen to create dishes? Or will you be renting a professional kitchen? Or will you be using a kitchen in a church, which many people do when they're first starting out, some of the prices for renting space in a commercial kitchen or an incubator kitchen as they're sometimes called, can be expensive. So you have to investigate that. You will need to have food handler insurance, which runs about six or $700 a year, depending upon the type of plan that you're looking for. I always tell people to check with their the per their home owner agent to see if there's a way that, uh, food insurance can be squeezed into your present, uh, situation with your insurance person. And then the most important thing is that you have to take the safe Serve exam and you want to get the Food Handler Manager, uh, course. So in, in the event that you have a staff, uh, they are covered by you. So those are a couple of essentials. Your business plan is paramount. And then how do you identify who your target audience will be? And that's another important thing because sometimes what looks great on paper might not fit into what it is that you want to introduce to whomever. However, I say shoot for the stars, do what you love, get this plan going, create beautiful, beautiful food as I know Rouxbe students do, and then just take it from there and give yourself a timeline because, uh, setting, setting a timeline for yourself is very important in terms of being organization, getting equipment, et cetera, et cetera.

Starting a food-based business