Have you carved your career path in the food industry? Perhaps you’ve been working as a cook, a pastry chef, a baker or chocolatier for many years and are skilled in your craft? If so, you’ll probably reach the stage at one time or another where you want to spread your wings. Instead of working for other companies, you might have dreams of setting up by yourself and bringing your own vision to life. If so, here are a few directions you could go in.

Restaurant

Many chefs have dreams of cooking in their very own restaurants. Instead of having to follow the rules of your employers, you get to call the shots. You can choose the menu, create your own recipes and generally have more creative freedom. Opening a restaurant is a massive job, there are lots of positions to fill both front of house and behind the scenes. If you’re the one doing the cooking, you’ll need someone to manage the rest of the restaurant for you, including taking bookings, promoting, and finding the right point of sale for small restaurants. You’ll need waiters, a sous chef, pot washers, porters and more. It can take a lot of funding and planning to get set up, but get it right and it’s any chefs dream job.

Cafe

Perhaps you’ve worked in the food industry for years, but aren’t necessarily a trained chef. If so, you can still open your own business with some basic training and a food hygiene certificate. If you open a cafe, you can make sandwiches, cooked breakfasts and other tasty lunches that are relatively easy to make without needing to spend years at catering college. Another idea would be to buy a food truck. You can make good money selling things like burgers, hot dogs, hot chocolate and other drinks at festivals, outside nightclubs and at special events.

Bakery

Do you have a passion for baking? Maybe you’ve worked as a baker or pastry chef, or perhaps you’re self taught but have a real talent for it. If so, you could open your own bakery. You could hire a store and sell from there, or just run things from home. There are some adaptations you’ll need to make to your kitchen, for example, you have to have a separate fridge for home and work. You also can’t have pets in the kitchen (even if it’s just to cut through to the back door) so this is something to consider. But once you’re up and running, you can have a lot of fun creating exciting cakes and bakes.

Catering Company

Caterers are always needed for special events such as weddings, parties and corporate events. As a catering company you can come up with all of your own menus and recipes which is a fun way to use your creativity if you have a passion for food. It’s something you could get into if you’re trained in food, but again could be an idea for those without experience. Take a basic training course and get the right food hygiene certificates. Be sure to do your market research and perfect your recipes.

One of the main reasons that people go into business for themselves, besides wanting to help people and make money on their own terms is that they want to create freedom on their own terms.

However, many business owners find that they end up struggling with this and that they generally have less freedom than if they were working for someone else. This can be a very frustrating thing because as much as they love their business, they feel like they’ve just given themselves another job.

So in this post we’re going to share with you some of the simple ways that you can create more freedom in your business.

Create systems:

In order to create freedom in any area of your life, the best thing that you can do is to have systems and processes in place for everything that you do. This greatly reduces the time that you spend on tasks such as admin, communication, or any other thing that you have to do in your business, such as content creation. Creating systems and processes is certainly not as scary or as difficult as it seems – it’s more or less putting together a way to automate regular activities that you do on a daily basis by breaking them down into simple steps.

Outsource:

Outsourcing is something that is scary for a lot of business owners to contemplate – especially at the beginning. However, if you actually want to grow and scale your business, then you’re going to have to learn to let go since you’re not able to do everything all by yourself.

This is one secret that successful business owners have and that helps them to grow and scale their business and even operate multiple businesses successfully because they understand that their time is valuable and that they should only be focusing on the things that are directly related to growing their business – everything else can be outsourced or automated.

So, for example, if you want to outsource your IT to a company like NTS or hire an admin assistant for a few hours per week to do the things that you’re not particularly great at, then this is going to free up so much of your time.

Automate:

Automating the tasks that you do in your business on a daily basis such as booking in calls with clients or potential clients, and even things like sending emails or proposals can really save so much of your time.

Whatever area you can automate in your business should be automated as much as possible without losing the aspect of human communication.

Have a schedule:

Starting your day and your week right with a schedule is the best way to create more time and freedom in your business by knowing exactly what you’re working on and when instead of just going in at the beginning of the day and tackling random tasks here and there and at the end of the day not really knowing what you got done.

You should have a schedule that plans out your week so that you know what priority tasks need to be done first, and everything else gets done in line with that.

Having a schedule is so important to spending your time correctly in your business and creating the much-needed Freedom that you desire.