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Personal Chef Industry

I am really interested in starting a personal chef company, but what are the startup costs like, and are there any liscences or lawyers needed? Is there any good literature out there that I could read to find out more information.

Ken,

The best resource is to read the open forum archives -- it might take you a little while to slog through them all, but I guarantee you that the answers to most of your questions are there.

Check out my reply to smbanks, located somewhere near this message on this open discussion forum, it contains a lot of the items that you would need to consider -- the cost can vary significantly, depending on what your situation is -- how much equipment you already have, how much your state affects your liability insurance cost, what the fees are for licensing in your state.

However, if the fates are smiling on you -- you could get going for about $1,000. Or it could be $2,000. But only in special circumstances would it be much more than that. (You want to buy advertising; you need to buy health insurance; you want really, really spiffy marketing materials; you want to have your logo professionally designed; you want to buy your own domain name and have a serious website -- as in everything, it's always easy to make things more expensive!)

But just remember that those estimates don't include living expenses -- be sure you've got a nice little cushion so that if it takes you a while to build up your clientele, you're not digging yourself into a financial hole -- or giving up too soon 'cause the rent's due!

The beauty of this profession is that the start-up costs are so low -- and very little overhead! So once you get rolling, you can recover those upfront costs fairly quickly.

But check out the archives -- they're worth their weight in gold -- and will help you decide if PC'ing is for you.

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Meredith
Whisk For Hire
Kensington, MD