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Personal Chef Industry

Hi all

How do you go about finding out if there's a market for PCing in your specific area? I live in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area and am considering becoming a PC. Did any of you hire a marketing professional to help with that aspect of things?

My approach to market research in this business is fairly simple. I call it research by drinving around. If you live in an area where the marjority of married couples both work, have children involved in after school activities, restaurants that are full night after night and the average income is somewhere above the poverty level, then you are in a potentially strong PC area.

In reality, the market for PC's is expanding so dramatically from all the new publicity coming out that the demand is growing faster than the supply. I figure that to reach critical mass in the industry we would have to have at least a half a million PC's working full time across the country...we now have less than five thousand (that number is subject to question) working PC's.

Talk to some of your upscale friends, attorneys, doctors, executives, working mothers and get their opinion. However, do not listen to the opinions of your relatives, they are always negative!

Good luck.

Good heavens, no, don't be paying a marketing professional. (As a former marketing professional, trust me, you can't afford it and it will never be worth it.)

In addition to Jim's recommendations, look in your yellow pages/newspapers for other services that signal that people in your target community have the income, the time pressure and the comfort level to hand over basic daily chores to complete strangers. If the following services seem to be successful in your area, you're in business: housecleaning, nanny, dog walking, yard services, general concierge or errand-running services. If you've got people who are starting businesses that cover chores like waiting in line at DMV for you, coming by to scoop your yard free of dog waste on a regular basis, a variation on the 800-got-junk (pay to have someone haul stuff away -- not just haul it away, but come into your house and carry it away), and the storage pods, where they'll drop off the pod in your yard, you fill it and then they take it away.

Again, time pressured folks who have enough income to pay someone else -- could they haul it out to the curb themselves or drive it over to the storage place themselves? Technically speaking, yes. Is it worth it to them to pay extra to have someone else do it for them? Ooooh, those are our clients!

That type of other business activity is a far more telling sign than income level.