It's actually Cook to Chef to Entrepreneur

0:00This episode starts with a question, when do you go from cook to chef? And I've certainly found that asking that question within your shot of any opinionated industry professional is nearly guaranteed to lead to some thoughts being shared. And sometimes those thoughts are civilized and curious and inquisitive, more often than not, though they are firmly held thoughts. It's gonna cause some bubbling up of some outrage. And sometimes you're gonna hear these things that are tied to that one thing that one chef told you years ago. And I'm certainly guilty here myself, your honor. Seven years ago, I made a podcast episode on this very topic because I was frustrated personally when I would attempt to apply some other people's definitions to the work that I do in helping you folks. And so that is the goal of today's episode. I want to refine this model going from cook to chef. I want to expand on it from cook to chef to entrepreneur. That's something you might have heard me talk about in previous episodes here on the show. And mostly provide the case for you

1:00on why my thinking has changed here. So we're gonna get into all of that today and more. It has been a minute since a planal episode of the repertoire podcast is certainly good to be back. For those that are new, we do these repertoire report episodes on the repertoire podcast every single week, breaking down the news and industry happenings and all things, chef and restaurant and food to help keep you informed as a working professional. Most of you folks are. But in these main episodes, these sit much closer to the mission which is to increase capability in hospitality. I want more can-do professionals out there in the world and in the restaurants and the clubs and the hotels and any of these hospitality experience giving environments. And so if getting more free insights like this sounds good to you, please hit subscribe, please like the video, rate the show. You can support us in literally the time it takes for me to pause and say this every single episode. And so if you're down to make that a part of your routine in listening to these, it just gets a big thank you for me to you. I really appreciate it. Let's get into it. Okay, so in the hope of saving you the eight minutes and 48 seconds of listening to that almost seven year old

2:00episode, the too long didn't watch of that video is that my working definition for chef was someone who cooks and gets paid in a professional transaction. I stand behind a lot of what else I said in that video to this day. I'm gonna build on that more in just a second, but to kind of knock out some of the negatives first, I don't think I defined cook very well. And I would say the easiest rebuttal to that piece of content, to my argument, which made it very easy to dunk on me at the time was, okay, Justin, I'm cooking food at a McDonald's and I'm getting paid, call me a chef. And so I sat with that. I said, okay, fair point. And so the updated model, what I'm happy to bring you folks now, is I'm gonna run this through to outline it. I'm gonna kind of give you all of the insights and then we'll go piece by piece to kind of pick it apart. And so in this new updated definition, you are a cook. If you work with food, you are a chef. If you work with food and you own responsibility, those are the two kind of like distinctions where you go from cook to chef. And I'll explain why those matter, why the details kind of hash out in separate scenarios that may or may not apply, depending on the context that you're working in.

3:02And then we'll go into the entrepreneur part later on in the video. So let's start with this cook to chef idea. We'll start with the former. So prep cook, fry cook, line cook. Home cook is the title that maybe I have more thoughts on, we'll save that for another episode or video. But as a cook, you might get paid. You might not get paid as part of something like an internship program or an externship program. It might be context wise, a small independent restaurant. It might be a large chain. It might be a two Michelin star restaurant. That's doing a fine dining tasting menu. It might be on a boat. It might be in an institutionalized facility like a senior nursing home. It can be in a large team. It can be in like the smallest team that I can remember I ever worked in was my first kitchen position. When the structure of the brigade, if you could even call it that, was the head chef, me, and then the dishwasher. That was basically as big and large and complex as the organization got it. Then I've gone all the way to the other side of the spectrum where it's 15, 20, 30 plus cooks in the kitchen and then I've landed in the middle and done these arrangements where it's like, there's five of us, there's seven of us in the kitchen

4:04and we're the kind of team that is doing dinner service across the entire week. So I don't believe that the setting changes much about the definition. But I do think that this Venn diagram merging of almost my previous definition of a chef kind of with the cook side of it, where there's a professional, Spartans from 300, what is your profession? It kind of comes into play here. And so I'll also remind you, which I think updates this and makes it a little bit more clear here, is that there are scenarios where you can work in a kitchen and not be a cook yet. Because this definition accounts for that. So if you're a dishwasher, for example, a rule that almost all of us have had, it's a crucial part of a kitchen's day to day. You are a part of the team in the kitchen, but that exists as a place before becoming a cook. And again, this is all my opinion. I'm really trying to be precise with the definition so we can use them productively in conversation. And we've also covered stories and questions from subreddits that kind of rhyme with this on previous episodes of, hey, I'm in this title, or I'm really trying to go for this type of position, but my experience is only in XYZ thing. And titles get used in those questions.

5:05And so when we have a more shared language, I feel like that tends to let the content and the context that you folks are providing be a little bit more productive. So we can kind of like get to the point faster, if that makes sense. So moving on, we have defined cook, chef is next. You are a chef, the moment that the equation looks like food plus responsibility. And so saying that more clearly again in the aim of being precise, you are someone who works with food and owns responsibility. And so I laid this out two years ago with my friend Chris Speer on his podcast, chef, without restaurants. And so this is not new for me to share, especially if I've worked with you in a coaching call recently and this has been something that we've discussed. This is not a new idea that I have been spouting. But to me, I haven't updated my own content on this. So this kind of like serves to kill multiple birds with this stone. But this cuts through the noise and operationalizes this in a way that I found it's very easy to understand. So let's talk about responsibility. This is responsibility of the product, responsibility of other people, responsibility of the financial,

6:05responsibility of when you create new things, responsibility not to get someone sick from cross-contamination, responsibility to take this plate and walk it to table 12 and give the spiel to that couple that is on the date of what this third course is. This is a responsibility in ordering these things that kind of like orbit around food, these things that need to be taken responsibility of accountability for food. And the list goes on here. And not to you know, pick on any McDonald's cooks who might be listening. Hello, how are you? But staying on that comparison because I got dunked on so hard with it, to be honest, accepting responsibility in that context being a cook at McDonald's typically means you're about to find yourself in, you know, one of two paths. The first is if you're noticing, huh, I like responsibility. I want to manage people. I want to manage operations. I want to talk to customers. This kind of kicks you from cook at McDonald's to a citizen manager at McDonald's, shift lead, restaurant manager to a point. You know, if you work your way all the way up there. And I think if we swap in other places with this idea, the Chipotle's of the world,

7:06the sandwich chains, Taco Bell, for example. And then the second path, if you're not going to go that route and stay in that organization, you have this, I call it a glimpse, a glimmer almost of chef life that kind of hits you when you're behind the cutting board chopping chicken at that Chipotle, or you're making sandwiches at Jimmy John's. And honestly, I didn't give enough credit to this type of moment because you folks have told me enough times that this story happened to you. And it really exemplifies why most cooks are lacking in the responsibility department, right? Because in a McDonald's, they have so masterfully neutered and blunted decision making and variation with operational infrastructure in those businesses. That's why a quarter pounder with cheese in Seattle or a quarter pounder with cheese in Milwaukee aimed to be exactly the same. In fact, if you were to say in that moment of feeling empowered with your responsibility, I want to see this burger patty a little bit longer. Or I want to put a little bit less mustard here. Or I want to add an extra pickle slice

8:06on this particular burger. It's actually not allowed. And so what happens? You start looking to see, where can I channel this energy, this gusto, this ambition that I have? Where can I grow to grow this part of me? And so instead of getting promoted internally inside of McDonald's, or insert your example of a cook role that you might be thinking of right now, you end up applying to a restaurant or a catering company, or you get hired working for a private chef in your area who does really cool dinners for clients. And so that leads me into becoming or being a chef, which remember is that combination of working with food plus responsibility. And it's the first part of this that I've noticed makes people's brains hurt is the timing. They're like, wait, wait, wait, just an, I've been in this industry for four months. And based on how I behave at work, that's me. Are you saying that I'm a chef? And my answer is an emphatic, absolutely yes. And that stays consistent with what I said publicly and went reasonably viral for, at least for the size of my channel at the time, and also got some hate for back in 2019,

9:07where I initially made that video. So let me explain. You do not skip becoming a cook if that happened to you. You're saying, Justin, I've been in the industry for, insert your timeframe, four months, seven months, 12 months, you did not skip being a cook. I'm here to remind you. The first day, the first week, the first three months when you were being trained and brought up to speed and you were shadowing somebody and you got onboarded, you were working with food, and it was not expected that you would make any decisions. If something went wrong or you made a mistake, sure. Maybe you got yelled at, but chances are the person who was in charge of bringing you onto that team, educating you on some of these things, they got reprimanded worse. And for myself, this was drilled to me in my time in Thomas Keller Kitchens, both at Perse, when I was not getting paid, as an extern, as well as my time as a chef to Bertie at the French laundry. All right, this is interesting. The top ranked job stressor for restaurant employees is actually being understaffed. And another stat, 56% of professionals ranked their co-workers and their team as being a bigger driver

10:08for daily work satisfaction than pay. I did not see that coming. And then speaking of pay, low pay is actually tied with difficult managers as a top driver of why people leave a job at a restaurant. I'm certainly dealt with difficult managers myself. I know you folks have as well. And these were all news to me from a new comprehensive data report, fresh for 2026 with answers from over a thousand different restaurant workers. This is not just one little tiny survey. And it is put together visually in a really compelling way by our friends at Seven Shifts who are kindly sponsoring this part of the episode. If you haven't seen this yet, you've got to scroll through this yourself to experience this. And because it covers so many individual professionals, if you care about anything that's included in this report yourself at work for your role that you happen to be in, things like staff happiness, employee motivators, turnover drivers, effective communication, and tech in operations, this is a lot of the stuff that we cover here on the show. And it allows you to get insights beyond the four walls and the team that you're working with right now. If these insights help you to make better decisions in the coming weeks, this absolutely pays for itself.

11:08Oh wait, except for the fact that this, what restaurant employees want in 2026 report is absolutely free. There isn't even an email opt in. You can just dive in right now. The link is in the show notes. Thanks again to Seven Shifts, not just for supporting the show, but for all they do for the industry. The expectations in those places, not just from Chef Keller, but from anyone in the leadership in that brigade, is that you act as if the station that you are running is your own little microcosm of a restaurant. You track what prep you have. You manage the allergies and you propose those plating suggestions for the dish on the new menu item that you have tonight. You taste your own purees. You manage your own orders for the next day. You obviously give them to the sous chef to actually place those orders, but like you will get asked the question, what do you need to order for tomorrow? And it's on you to have that answer. Other things like you'll delegate prep to the Komi team. Now, are there things missing compared to actually running a real restaurant? Absolutely. And this is not a substitution or a call that, somebody coming out of that experience is they ran the restaurant at the French laundry or anything like that. But does this kind of structure allow

12:09for things like the menu to be changed every single day? And for the consistent three Michelin Star awards that come through and for the really technical executions and for people to leave those organizations being pretty capable chefs, I will argue yes. And so I'm not claiming this to be my idea. My aim is to make it easier for you to make these changes, adjust your behavior at work, because you sometimes hear these things like, oh, just be the chef of the station. But what does that mean? And what do I need to do differently tomorrow at work if I want to get closer to that outcome? And so where I come back to to kind of like, again, update in a, you know, maybe vernacular that wasn't available seven years ago, responsibility maxing. I implored you in that intermezzo episode all those years back to call yourself a chef, see how it feels. And for some people, that is all they needed to hear. They came through in the comments. The permission that I gave was enough. And for others doing this kind of exposed to gap and the awareness of this I found is super powerful because it shines this light, the spotlight, this flashlight on what you might need to work on,

13:10the things that you're avoiding responsibility for, the behaviors that you're doing that a chef in quotes wouldn't do. Because yes, I reference these titles or these identities in a binary. You're either a cook or a chef. And then once you qualify, you exist. What I call like on a spectrum or continuum, you can either be a chef with responsibilities, but you lack follow through with them, or you make excuses or you don't have a growth mindset or you backstab people. There's like levels to all of these. And so as I go through each of these, you qualify as a cook and then where are you on the spectrum? You qualify as a chef based on this definition, where are you on a spectrum? And then as we get into entrepreneur, you have to keep this in the back of your mind as we get to that part of the episode, you qualify as an entrepreneur, where are you on this spectrum? My point is not to negatively downtalk anybody or poo poo you or say that you're not worthy for any of these things. It's mostly to acknowledge that there are levels here. And I'm sure that you can bring to mind people that you've worked with who are great chefs. And then you can also probably bring to mind people who are not great chefs. And so maybe as an exercise for yourself,

14:11dot point some of those things. When you say, okay, this person from this definition qualifies what about either working with them or my experience with them was good or bad? What are these things and traits and skills and behaviors that they're doing and really getting down to those brass tax? I find to be incredibly valuable. And so my point that seems to be relatively contrarian is that cook to chef happens pretty fast. And then you have this amazing opportunity to learn and iterate and fail and improve as a chef over time. All of this happens in the journey of building a repertoire. That's why I named this company, this, this, why the show goes under this title, you become more capable and more skilled and more experienced. And then you take this repertoire that you've built and you present it to your next opportunity or the market most more times than not. And the market is this force, this entity that in my experience, 9.9 times out of 10 wants a chef. I talked about this way back seven years ago. The restaurant you're applying to wants a chef. The client you want to close wants a chef.

15:13The cookbook you're pitching. It should be written by a chef, I would argue. The guests you're hoping will come to your pop up. They want to come to a chef's pop up. The chef who's better than you that you really want to work for and be mentored by, they want to hire chefs. Maybe making this really personal for you, they want you to be a chef. Another point that's kind of related here is this language that I expressed my distaste for all those years ago of I'm just a cook. It's not serving you in any of these professional interactions. And now there will be people. I can already hear them typing right now who have some common pushbacks that even though I've updated this, I scroll through the comments of that video. I tried to get some common rebuttals that might come through. And I want to kind of go through those in some sort of a rapid fire fashion before we get on to the next step or progression, which is going to entrepreneur. This first angle people will take is all about humility. People will say that keeping your identity as a cook keeps you humble. It prevents you from becoming a tyrant of a chef or a diva celebrity personality or somebody

16:13who barks orders in the perfectly starts chef whites but refuses to mop the floors after service. Instead, with this model, you can call yourself a chef, reap all the benefits that come with the title that I shared above. And you just hold firm in the fact that you're the type of chef who doesn't do any of these behaviors that you labeled as undesirable. And that's why I find it valuable as you're talking about people who inspire you or who have been particularly impactful for you in your career to list out some of those qualities. And again, that's why the spectrum analogy really benefits me here because you're saying, oh, yes, that person is a chef. They just don't happen to be a very good one or one that I would want to work for in the future. And that's OK. You know what I mean? Like you can continue to move on. You can be amicable with this person. And then you can instead decide that I'm going to make decisions and behave in such a way that it is more aligned with my values or the ways that I want to see myself grow professionally. Another comment that got a lot of likes in the comments of that first video was this idea of a cook knows how a chef knows why. Ah, yes. The one liner that fits on a fortune cookie

17:14and is nearly guaranteed to come up in this conversation, not just on my videos, but in other pieces of content, whether it's like an Instagram reel or a Reddit post that somebody posts. And it is this kind of like, oh, just put it on the table and like this ends the argument or something like that. And so again, trying to give it its credence here to steal man that and give this argument its due, it means that if you're a cook, your job is to follow instructions and do what is asked of you. And the chef's job is to have a more multi-faceted understanding to be able to solve problems, to have an interconnected web of, oh, this is why the sauce isn't emulsifying. This is why saving waste here will impact food cost and profitability for this organization. This is why we do it this way. This is the underlying strategy here. That is my generous interpretation of what I think people are saying when they make that argument. And my argument back to that person is wouldn't it be better to have an entire kitchen of people who know both how and why? Like don't we want more of that across the board in the teams that we're running or the that we're working with inside of? And better still, isn't that typically how

18:17kitchens end up naturally operating? This is a bit of an outlier example. So forgive me if I'm maybe reaching here to the upper echelons of fine dining here. But I'm reminded in the height of the El Buides where Farad Adre would talk about the unpaid stagiers working in the stations there. Specifically when there was a project for a dish that they were doing that were acquired boiling soy milk and then taking the Uba skins off of the top of the soy milk. And it was this incredibly tricky project. They would literally have like almost like trials, which was written about in this book. I have it here in my desk. It's the Sorcerer's apprentice from Lisa Abenda. I was kind of like going back and just researching how this stuff would go. They would like line up a bunch of stagiers, have them do the Uba skins. And based on who was able to kind of like do them. The most consistently or without breaking them, it would be like, okay, you're the one who's going to be on the station. And he would go around the kitchen for on Adre would. And he would just say, oh, yeah, those people are the experts. I leave it to them on this kitchen task. And so you can test this for yourself. If you're the person who says you aren't a chef until you're the head of the kitchen,

19:20try asking a cook that you work with. Again, if you're going to take the stance and be on the side of the argument, ask a cook that you work with. A few of these why-based questions about things we actually care about on their station and chances are they know a lot. And hopefully what's great about me technically agreeing with you or you agreeing with me here. I don't care. I don't need to win here is that we arrive at the same place of yes, there are more chefs than we previously thought. Because if you're really going to take that stance, you need to also show to me that you can go up to each of those cooks that you would label. And you could say, oh, this person only knows how. They don't know why anything is happening on their station. And you just throw up your hands and you say, that's how we want it to be because there's one chef at the top. And every single person that works under this person is just a cook. I just don't agree with that. I don't think it leads to productive outcomes. And I don't think that's what we want the industry to look like going forward. Even though it might fit this model, that again, some chef might have told you years ago or some author wrote about years ago that you're going to point to and say, like, oh, this is how things should be structured.

20:20All right, last common rebuttal that I sometimes see here that I'm trying to address. Hopefully, quickly here is the dictionary definition person. The person that says, your definition of these things goes against the translated definition of the French chief or the top of the hierarchy or the brigade. And these are the people who think that that can only be one chef in the kitchen. And everything else orbits around them kind of similar to my last point here. And my pushback or argument against that is that my model does not break just because you add a prefix or suffix to the word chef. I think roles and responsibilities and organizational charts are immensely helpful inside of teams. And so I already kind of shared the example of where chef to party immensely helped me in taking more responsibility in roles that I've been in. You can call it a chef to cuisine at the top of the brigade. And then, you know, put a head chef or executive chef above them. It's all just levers and dials on what food you're working with and what responsibilities you have. Because remember, a chef is someone who works with food and owns responsibility. And this is maybe the second contrarian part of this steak and this model that I have

21:23just been really experiencing a lot of positive benefit from sharing that I've learned is that it is effectively not enough. So as much as I would love to, you know, dust my hands and pat myself on the back and say, it goes from cook to chef and these definitions help. It does not end there. And so enter the progression beyond chef, which is entrepreneur. It feels like every single week when we are talking about on repertoire, port episodes where covering scandals and drama and case studies of chefs experiencing issues that absolutely run the gamut. So you have financial mismanagement and HR disasters and food safety concerns and branding problems and social media outrage and technology issues and partnership fallouts. And you start to look around and you say, why is this happening? Maybe if it's not the thing that grabs the headline, it just is this felt sense of, man, this is really hard. And this ends up being really personal because this happened to me. I myself started hosting pop ups after cooking restaurants and it was my first real crack at running my own thing.

22:24And that's what this model is all about. I didn't call it that at the time, but that was my first experience going from chef to entrepreneur. And I'm here to argue that it's more like going from cook to chef than you think. And we can learn from your experience that you probably already have to improve. And so let me make this case for you. And fair warning, this is my current working definition for entrepreneur, just like how my chef definition as a model was broken in certain contexts, I will update you folks if there's an opportunity to refine this. But I have done my own fair share of testing on this. I've had a lot of conversations with you folks on this. This has had like real in the field experience and kicking the tires. And so it feels reasonably solid for now. But please poke holes in this because this helps me polish this model and this idea. And it does genuinely help. I am not opposed to receiving feedback at all here. I want it. If anything, I'm inviting it for me folks. And so in the spirit of defining terms, an entrepreneur has two qualifiers, just like a chef does. An entrepreneur is someone whose responsibilities go beyond just food. That's number one.

23:24And an entrepreneur is someone who is a recipient of asymmetric upside. And so allow me to explain we're going to go one by one here. I'll start with a story about the responsibilities going beyond just food. So I was a sous chef at this restaurant called Lease Forkett on the West Coast of Norway. I got promoted after being a chef to party. I worked on the most difficult station in that restaurant. And then when I got promoted, I was an AM sous chef managing the apprentices and I was doing the blitchery and I was doing the prep list items for the dinner team to kind of like take pressure off the chef to parties for service that evening. And then eventually I got promoted again to developing dishes for the tasting menu and running expo on the past every single night during service. And so in that chef role, I had responsibilities. And nearly every single one of them had a straight line you could draw to the food. But in this particular restaurant and other businesses too that are, you know, not fine dining, insert your example here. That is not where responsibilities end in that business. Marketing efforts lead to more reservations and that leads to more revenue. Building your pervade relationships leads to better pricing or access,

24:26which leads to better margins. Another example might be recruiting optimizations lead to better hiring, which leads to better retention, which saves money on needing to recruit an interview and trained and hire more food. This thing that is so crucial to a chef is obviously present with each of these responsibilities. You can tie foods to each one of these things because it's a restaurant, but I look at the word beyond to do a lot of the heavy lifting here when we talk about progressing from chef to entrepreneur. Your responsibilities are going beyond food. Some examples, it's less about the banging flavor combinations of that particular dish, but more about what's the margin on this dish, the financial implications here. You have this felt sense of presentation is not going out the window entirely, but you also start to factor in things like how the hot app station is going to plate 65 of these in an evening. You're starting to put your operational hat on a little bit more. Maybe all of a sudden you decide that it might be worthwhile to update the website in certain ways because of how you're noticing how it affects your brand and how you're perceived. Each of those examples is the food is one layer, but you're going certain levels

25:28of abstraction beyond it. And this is so far at least in the way that I explain it to people simultaneously, the biggest frustration and the biggest opportunity when it comes to making this shift. It is it's frustrating and it's challenging because it really feels like a step back. You can crush it on the line. You can do this technique really well. You can work this station and in a better than anybody else can in the brigade, but you go beyond just the food and it illuminates gaps that you have in your skill set. And my argument that's helped a lot of you folks in coaching sessions so far has been to what I referenced earlier coming back to what you did when you went from cook to chef because if you take any of these beyond food situations that you find yourself in marketing, financials, tech operations, negotiating, recruiting strategy, each of these have accompanying skills that you can improve. And that is the mindset that I want everybody who is wanting to make this transition to step into and aside from the, you know, rare, so vaunt that might be listening right now. Most of us were not an expert in any of these domains on day one.

26:30And if you bring to mind any of the challenges that you are proud about overcoming in your current collection of skills as a chef, chances are you probably have a similar journey that you can bring to mind. You ventured into this new skill. Maybe it was like thrust upon you. Maybe you didn't make the call, but you started a little shaky. Maybe you made some embarrassing mistakes. But then what happened? You got better and maybe that's the researching new ways to do the thing. Maybe that's your mentorship. Maybe that's through putting in the reps hashtag more reps. We talk about that here in repertoire on the series when we talk about skill development, specifically on like, nice skills in plating. But as we progress forward and as we start to get more interest in other skills outside of, you know, just cooking and food, maybe we will start to create more exercises there. Those are things that I'm going to need to develop because I see that gap so often. By the way, if you're interested in any of the reps series, those are free videos to watch and then they usually come with accompanying like resources and templates and downloads. And so you can find those. I'm going to link those in the description for you folks to. And when it comes to skill development, I'll speak personally what's

27:30worked for me so far. I need to be reminded of this too. I'm not perfect at this by any stretch of the imagination. But I say to myself, beginners mind, I'm not great at this yet. But at best, I can improve it. I can identify the skills required. I can measure my performance. I can seek out ways to get better. And then at the very least, because remember an entrepreneur's responsibilities go beyond just food. I can hire for this. And I can delegate this. It's still my responsibility as the entrepreneur that this gets done. And it's under my purview and I've decided this is important. But the actual work might not be mine. And this kind of gets met as you're starting to think about entrepreneurship because things like delegation is also a skill. And so you're going to get to this point where you're like, Oh man, not only am I not good at this, but I'm not good at delegating this yet. So speaking qualifiers, let's break down that second qualifier. So the first one is you are someone who is going taking your responsibilities that you own and they're going to go beyond just food. The second qualifier, someone who is a recipient of asymmetric upside. And so for a lot of us, this is a big reason, maybe not the only, but it's there.

28:32Why we take this transition into entrepreneurship. We want to increase or remove entirely the ceiling that we're experiencing, ideally financially, but there's other things that you can benefit from, you know, having this a to asymmetric upside in your effort as an entrepreneur. Examples of this in business of this asymmetric upside manifest in all sorts of different ways. You have enterprise value, you have valuation multiples, you have equity percentages and ownership arrangements and articles of incorporation that benefit you as someone who is getting involved as an entrepreneur here. The point that I want to bring to your attention and acknowledge is that the asymmetric upside potential is often missing when you're in an hourly or salaried position. I certainly felt that I don't discredit those or downplay those or speak negatively on those. Like I needed to experience all of those roles and seasons of my career. I'm incredibly thankful for those points in my in my life and like checkpoints on the journey, so to speak, but it did reach this point for me where I was like, I was craving more, I was wanting more, I was seeing other people achieve

29:32things that I felt like I wanted to kind of step into. And so that's why I decided to kind of like make this transition. I'm in no way throwing shade. I'm just aiming to be precise on the definition here. If you manage a culinary program as a chef to cuisine and the restaurant is more profitable that quarter, you'll hopefully get a bonus, but that ends up being, you know, relatively linear as a reward as opposed to being outsized. Right. So if you compare this to what you might do as an entrepreneur to add something like $600,000 in EBITDA, which is like repeatable or ideally recurring, and you can get a modest four times multiple on that, you just increase the value of that business by over $2 million. That is what I'm talking about when I say asymmetric upside. Now I talk about all this upside as if it's this thing you can just like get served to you on a silver platter. It's just going to happen for you if you decide to make the leap. Again, I would be doing a disservice if I did not talk about the fact that this upside is not guaranteed. There is a risk here. There is downside potential. And typically not always the greater the risk, the more asymmetric the upside. If you founded the business, there is no proven success yet.

30:35You might own 100% of that business and that's great, but like that means nothing, you know, on day one, compare that to if you're going to decide to join a business as a business partner. Once the company is established and you might get, I don't know, 18% of that business and invests over three years, you're still getting what I would argue is asymmetric upside because in the case of some sort of liquidity event like the company getting acquired because you joined when some of that risk was dampened, you get less upside. You're still going to get the upside. It's just not going to be as big as if you were coming in as, you know, like a founder or like in day one of that business. All right. Rebuttal time when it comes to the entrepreneur definition. I hope that me answering these helps to add color to my definition and again, like give some sort of context to why I landed here because again, I can already hear it. There's somebody typing a very long disagreement and to hopefully this helps explain a little bit further. I do have some help here. I have been particularly interested in this book by Derek Sivers. It is called useful, not true. I'm just going to pause it and put it on screen here.

31:36I'm also going to link this in the description, not to summarize this book and make this episode even longer, but I will certainly share at least some of the key takeaways that have certainly influenced this mental model of mine. Because for someone like myself who has a fascination with teaching and frameworks and behavioral psychology, I am personally prone to thinking to the point of overthinking. And Derek so masterfully writes about how competing priorities and people's preferences and uncertainty about the future and interpretations of reality often land us in this very perplexing place of not being true. And that's like for someone like me, that's hard to contend with and grapple with. And I've shared this quote before from Greg Northcraft, Tim Ferris on his podcast again, to insert another, you know, person's insights here to kind of like make my case even stronger here. Greg defined an expert of someone who has a predictable model that works. That's it. And I think that's so tightly summarized. And I find myself fusing these together.

32:37I want this model to be predictive for you. I want it to work for you and I want it to be useful for you. Even though when pressed to the limits of, you know, vocabulary and language and even in contrast of other people's definitions, my definitions that I'm using for cook and chef and entrepreneur might not be what you quote, unquote label true. And so as an example, you take someone like David Cennara, he's one of the goats of modern podcasting. He talks about entrepreneurship exclusively on his show. He has shared his definition, simplify definition slash translation of the French, someone who undertakes entrepreneur. David Cennara says, if you are someone who takes has ideas and does them, you are an entrepreneur. But that is not useful for me because when I was a sous chef and I had an idea for a new dish on the tasting menu, I took that idea. I developed that dish. I served it to guests. I would not consider myself an entrepreneur in that context. I had a boss. I did not have equity stake in that business. I was not even getting a profit chair from that restaurant. And so I might have been learning some new skills.

33:38Yes, but I was not at least in my definition and entrepreneur yet. Or let's bring in another thought leader person of authority here, where you're going to take one of the most impactful books for me as an entrepreneur. Michael Gerber is the email revisited. He has a line in that book that reads quote, the entrepreneur is not the person who does the work. The entrepreneur is the person who conceives of the work to be done. And quote, and so many people in like, especially the productivity space have, you know, gushed a nauseam about this book and what it's on for their business and how you need to think about constructing yours. And it pains me to disagree with that line. Again, specifically about the definition of not disagreeing about the point. I am fatically agree with the takeaway that it is super valuable to not be the cornerstone that when removed causes the entire business to fall to pieces. But on day one of starting a business for most people, it requires doing a lot of the work, wearing multiple hats, figuring things out in addition to conceiving the work to be done. You're like, you're doing both things that he talks about in that quote. And so I look at that and I say parts of it might be true.

34:42You might push towards that as a goal, but in definition land, maybe that's not necessarily useful. And so in my mind, it was like it's worth iterating on and like again, being more precise. Okay, a few more rapid fire rebuttals here. Other titles that you might encounter at this stage of your journey. Founder owner partner, freelancer, even. And in my mind, this is kind of like that every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square concept. Every entrepreneur is this four-sided geometric shape. And depending on those other characteristics, what angles do you have the length of the sides, it can be called these other titles, square, rhombus, parallel, gram. And so you can adopt those identities and whatever way is useful and appropriate for you. I do, I do not care. But if you're going to join a coaching session with me, I'm probably going to talk about entrepreneurship because I think that opens up the doors and it expands your horizons and it's an identity that is like kind of like worth adopting if you're going to decide to operate in this way. And so now that we've explored both qualifiers for an entrepreneur in an

35:46effort to again be as precise as I can, I want to give examples of one being missing because I think that it helps showcase why both are required. And so I kind of gave that example of the chef to cuisine or the sous chef in this position who is like having ideas and bringing them into the world. Let's pick it. Let's pick on somebody else here. You're ahead of operations and that's your role. You manage the recipe catalog alongside the chef to cuisine and you handle pervay or relationships and you do inventory and you sometimes interview people for potential roles. So you're like, sweet, I am going beyond just food. But you would, by definition, not be an entrepreneur because you might have a salary and then maybe a performance based bonus. But you're missing again in my definition, half of it, which is this asymmetric upside potential. And again, I need to be super clear here. And this is not throwing shade at that person or anybody in a head of operations role. I actually love those types of roles. I was like in the process of accepting a offer for a head of operations role at one point in my career because I love it so much.

36:46But I think what's interesting about the way that incentives are aligned in those types of arrangements is how it influences people's behavior. And so that is if you have the beyond food thing, but you're missing the upside thing, if we flip it, let's say you have the asymmetric upside in the business, but you don't have the responsibilities food or otherwise in that organization, that sounds a lot like an investor to me, right? And so again, no shade investors can be great. Don't get me wrong. Just like any of the titles or identities that we talked about today, there can be great ones and not so great ones. But that person, the investor in my definition and in my mind, not an entrepreneur, at least not in this business. They might have other projects in their life where they are an entrepreneur, but as an example, you can have one without the other and it kind of like negates or invalidates you from having that title, just like chef in my mind. So when does this practically matter? How does the rubber meet the road here? The benefits for that I've personally experienced is that it changes your goals. It recalibrates your priorities.

37:46It increases or removes the ceiling that you might bump up against. It might even change your content diet. If you look around my office here, if you were to come visit my office and you look at my bookshelves here, the ratio of cookbooks to books about some facets of entrepreneurship that have slowly creeped in over time, that's a direct response to me noticing skills that I have lacked and I am attempting to learn through reading and what others have already figured out. That's one way to make progress. It's not just the books either. I listen to interviews with founders and I read blogs and I'm following investors on X and I will share some other posts in the description that branch off of this because I think that, you know, if I can give you a rabbit hole to go down and it provides value to you, you know, that's potentially interesting. One of the ones that kind of like piggybacks off of the freelancers idea is Seth Godin, the author, has this mental model about freelancers and how they differ for entrepreneurs. Again, it's not doesn't fit my definition, but it might be useful to you. So I'll link that below.

38:47The other one that again, kind of piggybacks off of one of these titles or identities is biology has this mental model around the difference between a founder and a inheritor and that certainly applies to some of these edge cases that you might be able to bring to mind where, you know, a chef has worked at a restaurant for 12 years and then the owners are having him or her take over. What are the implications from that? And, you know, that type of arrangement. Again, it's this funny thing of giving permission. Like when I tell people, dude, it's okay to call yourself a chef. It's like you see their posture change, their eyes light up a little bit. Like their shoulders relax in some ways. It really kind of depends on the person, but it is one of these funny things where you notice their behavior change because they were, you know, having this self talk or somebody told him this thing that I can't call myself this or I can't step into this yet. Yet is sometimes like a common thing that people, you know, use. Another line that I, you know, have encountered numerous times is like this timidness or this like it's cringed to call myself. An entrepreneur. If it's helpful here, you might use language like I'm becoming more entrepreneurial in my role.

39:51Are you exploring entrepreneurial principles at work? Because, you know, maybe you're not quite ready to call yourself this thing yet. And sometimes that manifests itself as imposter syndrome or if it's a frustration or a feeling of being lost in a new roller with overwhelm with responsibilities. And the aim of all of this is that it's helpful and useful. And so if the insight itself is useful or maybe if it's not useful for you and you want to explore a coaching track together to figure this out, whether it's navigating this transition yourself or we have coaching tracks for doubling the profit in your business or launching your first thing. It's the zero to one coaching track. We have one for building systems so you can unlock yourself as the key person or even taking one of the models that we talk about here at repertoire and achieving those results for yourself. You can certainly apply for coaching in the description. We really specialize or have leaned into a three month outcome driven approach to coaching that directly maps towards your goals. I was actually digging into it a fun stat that kind of has like aggregated over the years for us is that we have actually crossed a million dollars in increased business that is directly connected to coaching work that we've done.

40:53And so, you know, as much as that is like a pad on our back that this is much more a kudos to the amazing clients and the follow through from what you folks are working on with us. But you know, it's a small pat on our back and nonetheless again, you can learn more in the description, even if you've never done coaching in the past, I think it's something like 85% plus of clients that start to work with us. This is like our their first coaching relationship. And so if this feels new to you or this feels kind of foreign, we walk you through all of those insights and specifics because we're here to help. So if you enjoyed this one, consider this the first of many and expanding on these core beliefs and models that I'm developing here at repertoire. The next one I think on my docket is the experience engine concept that I've written about in the past, but I have yet to do a full podcast episode breakdown on. And so if you're excited for that or interested in digging into that a little bit more, please make sure that you're subscribed here on the channel, either on the YouTube channel or on your favorite podcast player of choice so that you don't miss that one. Please leave your comments or thoughts down below. I just love getting into it in conversation with you folks. Leave a like on this video if you're watching on YouTube, rate the show. If you're listening on Apple podcasts or Spotify, thank you so much for your attention as always.

41:56My name is Justin Conner and I hope you have a good one.