What Cooking Taught Me About Running a Business

Whether you love working in the kitchen or just love eating what comes out of the kitchen, we can all appreciate the amount of effort and skill it takes to produce an Insta-worthy creation of our own accord.

With cooking, it’s about finding the right balance of flavors and perfecting your timing so you can produce the epic outcome you’re going for (anyone who’s tried to time the serving of a Thanksgiving dinner knows just the challenges we’re talking about).

As with any trade, there are methods to the madness and ways to always keep improving. My amateur skills in the kitchen have come with far more failures than I’d care to mention, but along the way, I’ve also noted some important parallels between cooking and running a business, specifically in three key ways:

1. Prepping is where 80 percent of your effort is spent – For the meal to be perfect, you have to plan ahead. That’s why step one on any recipe card (yes, recipe cards are still a thing) says to wash and prep the ingredients.
   
   Having everything you need ready to go means that once you’re in motion with cooking, you won’t get held up with inefficiencies. It also means your chicken won’t burn while you’ve turned your attention back to chopping the zucchini.
   
   When running a business, you need to have your eyes on the prize, but you also must know everything it takes to get there. Too many tangential projects will slow down your growth or leave you with cold and bland disappointment.
   
   
2. Cooking with heat is usually fast but it requires all of your attention – Success requires us to move with gusto – both in the kitchen and in a conference room. And while moving fast can be a good thing, it also requires you to be singularly focused on the task at hand. The minute you start multitasking is the minute your slightly charred steak turns to crusty, unpalatable ash.
   
   
3. The best meals must be savored and celebrated – Hard work deserves to be recognized. When your business succeeds, it’s important to bask in the pride of achieving your goals, reflect on what it took to get there and evaluate how maybe, just maybe you can make it even better next time.

Growing a business, much like producing the perfect pasta dish, requires us to plan ahead, stay sharply focused during the process, and refine as needed to always keep improving.