Private Dining Operations Guide #10: Hiring Your First Full-Time Assistant
When to make your first hire, what to give away first, and how to afford it. You can’t be the one doing all of it and still grow. Delegate to elevate.
There was a stretch where I was answering client inquiries at 4:00 AM (sometimes I still do, I love being up early, but in the beginning it wasn’t always by choice). Or I’d be on the treadmill at the gym replying to emails with one thumb, or writing someone back about their anniversary dinner while a sauce was reducing. It wasn’t that I was letting leads go cold on purpose. It’s that the entire business ran through one person, me, and the only way to keep it moving was to fold the admin into every gap in my day and my life. When it got really busy, a potential client would reach out and I couldn’t get back to them fast enough to nurture the relationship, and they’d go with whoever answered them sooner. That’s the cost of being a solopreneur.
This guide is about the first real hire that gets you out of that, how to know when you’re ready, what to hand off first, and how to hand it off well so it doesn’t come straight back to you.
Working In the Business vs. On the Business
Here’s the trap for a private chef. You are the product and the founder at the same time. You’re prepping and cooking all day, and you’re also the only one who can grow the business, set the strategy, and think about where this is all going. Those two jobs fight each other for the same hours, and the cooking always wins because the cooking has a hard deadline. The events are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday whether or not you did anything to build the business this week.
When I had seven events in a week, or even just three back when I was less experienced at the logistics than I am now, my entire life was the kitchen. Sometimes overnight prep, then service, then cleanup, then start again. I felt alone in it. And the part that hurt the business most wasn’t the exhaustion, it was that I had nothing left in the tank for the work that actually grows a company. I couldn’t get better at consultation calls because by the time I got on the phone I was fried. I couldn’t think ahead, couldn’t read the client well enough to make strategic suggestions or upsell. I was in survival mode often, and survival mode is a ceiling.
First, Are You Actually Ready?
Delegation is not a cure for not having enough work. It’s a cure for having too much of the wrong work. So before you spend money on help, run an honest test:
Are client emails getting answered in a respectful window, or are inquiries sitting for days because you’re busy cooking?
Are your purveyors getting paid on time, or do they keep bugging you about tomatoes because nobody’s minding the inbox?
Are you tracking who reached out and what they wanted, or is it living in your head?
Are these things slipping because you're avoiding them, or because you genuinely don't have the hours? There's a real difference between too busy to do the work and too undisciplined to.
If those basic needs are failing because you’re too busy cooking to meet them, that’s your signal. Those are the things a business cannot afford to drop. You have to pay your purveyors on time. Someone has to be in the inbox when an inquiry comes in. Someone has to get back to a lead before your competitor does.
If instead those things are slipping because you don’t want to set aside the time to do them, delegation might be too early and you should have a serious conversation with yourself about how bad you actually want this. “Not being good at it” is an excuse — there has never been an easier time in history to access online information about anything. Hell, AI can teach you how to do this. There are whole business universities for basically free on Coursera.
You hire help when you are at capacity. This is how you afford it. But sure - you can also take the risk and bring someone on if it means your time is now open to generate clients, revenue and the reputation to grow. But then you have to devote your time to those tasks to make it make sense.
Once you know you're ready, the real question is what to hand off first, and how to hand it off well so it doesn't come straight back to you. Here's our process at Vendador: