As many of you know, I always start a new year with a post full of reflection and good intentions to my clients, customers, friends and family, looking back on the past as I fondly recall our adventures and accomplishments as a business and family. But the reality is that not every year is going to be a great year, and if I’m being completely honest, we skidded into the end of 2023 in a cloud of drunken, exhausted, carb-filled smoke shouting, “Wow! Where did the time (and money) go?”
Food, and by extension the food business, is a very personal thing. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot of private information about my customers – photos with their feet on the scale as they go through a weekly cleanse, their health and personal issues as I handoff meals, their favorite flavors, children’s allergies, success in losing ten pounds or struggles as they fall off the wagon, when it’s their birthday, baby shower, wedding, holiday celebration. So it only feels appropriate to share my own secrets with the people who have trusted me with their tastebuds, health and families.
The trouble with sharing personal information is that it’s rarely just your own secret to share. A fallout with a friend involves two sides, a work problem may share another business’s secrets, a bad breakup might divulge a partner’s transgressions. Yet sharing secrets is the very thing that allows my customers to see me as both an accomplished business owner and a flawed human being, investing in both our professional and personal relationship, something I believe is critical to a small business’s longevity.
This year, we made some very difficult but necessary business decisions that cost us quite a bit of money. I still stand behind these decisions, but I won’t lie – the financial toll, while an investment into our licensing, future business relationships, kitchen space and customers, was steep, and happened just around the same time as my husband took his own financial hit at work. Despite the stress of supporting a 9 child family, a giant fixer upper house, and a grocery budget that made our $1,000 electric bills look tiny, the business continued to grow month over month. As did I.
And I don’t mean the philosophical type of growing. I mean the gross, sneaky, moving out of jeans and into stretch pants kind of growing. The mean kind of growing that happened not from cheating on my strict low carb diet, but from stress, lack of sleep, and too much drinking. Drinking caffeine to wake myself up after a long night, and a keto-friendly Tito’s and club soda after a grueling 24 hour shift of cooking, kids and more cooking, assuring myself that 0 carbs was 0 carbs even as I gained a pound here and there. Doing a cleanse to lose the extra 5 pounds, then putting it on and then some the following week, until it was 10 pounds, then 20, then just getting to the point where I stopped looking.
I gained 28 pounds this year. After losing nearly 85 pounds over the first 4 years of doing keto, this has been by far my worst setback and not a great endorsement to customers eating the same food as me, watching my meals definitely not work the way I claim they will.
In fact, I completely failed all of the resolutions I swore to keep last year. Goals of “health, wealth and happiness.” Yikes. My short list did not involve swearing less, thank goodness, because it would’ve just been another check on the failure list. Lose 20 pounds (NO). Call my family at least once a month (sorry, guys). Put money back into the bank (a hard no). Post once a month (nope). Say I love you to each of my kids every day (better, but no). Fail fail fail fail fail. Another “f” word comes to mind but I’m swearing less this year. Definitely. 2024 is already looking up.
So now what? Sometimes, it takes a lot of falling down to figure out the best way to keep yourself standing, and after a rough year I’m more than ready to accomplish big things in 2024. It’s time for a hard reset.
Money: there’s only so much we can do to fix our current financial situation. Food prices have stayed high, and as we have grown, our other business expenses have also gone up significantly, eating into an already paper thin profit margin. 5 of our 9 kids are now teenagers, making our grocery bill slightly worse than ridiculous. With the extremely long heat wave last year, 5 of our electric bills topped $900 for the first time (the highest ever before that was around $600).
Don’t worry, this paragraph isn’t explaining to you why we’re raising prices. It’s to explain to “2024 me” why “2023 me” was an idiot when I set a goal of doubling my savings account. This year, the goal will be to save money by cutting out optional costs – going out to dinner, online groceries versus going to the store when possible, brand name versus generic household items, bulk ordering to save on shipping, etc. And if I save even $1.00, 2024 is already looking up.
Diet: I never, ever cheat, because for me, cheating is a slippery slope back to my carb addiction, which is 100% a real thing. Case in point: after not cheating for 4 straight years, not even on Christmas or birthdays, I decided to have a big ol’ cheat weekend in acknowledgement of the new, extremely strict diet I was starting for 2024. Despite the horrifying stomachache I gave myself after Chinese takeout on Friday night, I continued on to fried calamari, chocolate chip cookies, cheetos, bloody Marys and even potato chips with French onion dip over the rest of the weekend. It felt terrible and I felt terrible.
On January 1st I committed to the carnivore diet for 30 days. Water, black coffee, butter, scrambled eggs, bacon, steak, seafood – not the worst way to drop a few (or 30) pounds and to kick my creeping Tito’s habit. 2024 is already looking up.
My van needs repairs, the house is falling apart, from the aging roof to the 6 foot tall pile of laundry and everything in between. I don’t have enough energy for the kids, time for the business, or extra money for pretty much anything. But you know what I do have? Determination. Fortitude. Passion. Ideas. Recipes. Hope. And you guys. As much as I hate my 3rd straight overnight of cooking, that’s how much I’ve loved meeting and getting to know so many new people over the last several years – learning who is strictly NO gluten, who hates mushrooms, or who bought a new puppy.
I’ve also got a plan. On day 3 of my extremely strict cleanse I feel better already. My husband and I are staying in every night for the month of January, so we can’t help but save some money. We’ve got new meals and some big exciting expansion plans underway this year that I can’t wait to share with you. And, we survived a 9 kid Christmas and don’t need to worry about it for at least 11 more months. 2024 is already looking up!
So, dear customers, please ask me about my diet just like I ask about yours. Please support my small business so I can continue to support you. Please ignore the fact that I’m stocking the stores in the same sweatpants as yesterday with no makeup on, because that just means I worked extra hard on your food. And please, keep telling me your secrets, and I’ll keep telling you mine. We can only grow stronger, bigger and better than ever if we’re all in this together. 2024 is already looking up.
Anything But Carbs Kitchen 