Cooking Up Teamwork

When you think about corporate team-building activities, scavenger hunts, leadership seminars, group workshops and a certain obstacle course involving ropes comes to mind. And food is just what is served to the participants at the end of the day. For team-building company CEO Chef, Inc., the end-of-the-day food should act as a metaphor for change a testament to what the participants have learned about working as a team. “What we focus on primarily are the people and the participants in our program. They in turn focus on the food. Because of that, the food comes out sensational,” CEO and Founder Jim Connolly said. “On the outside it looks like a cooking class. When you are in it, you know you’re not,you’re in a business simulation.” A typical program begins with participants walking into a room expecting a lavish dinner prepared for them, only to see tables topped with spatulas, knives, cutting boards and raw ingredients. Turns out, they will be preparing their own lavish dinner. With only the help of simple guidelines and knife-handling skills, participants end their program by eating a gourmet buffet of multicultural dishes they’ve created themselves. Throughout the program, participants learn to work together as a team, creating such dishes as stuffed crimini mushroom caps and filo dough triangles filled with spinach, all while getting to know each other better on a more personal level rather than just as coworkers. “The food is delicious and it really sends them off on a real positive message,” Connolly said. “That’s the powerful part of the program, when it comes to the ending and they realize what they did accomplish without any recipes, doing this in a hotel conference room and in an hour and 45 minutes, yet they do a fantastic job.” Creating the Program Currently working out of a satellite office in Northridge, Connolly also has offices in Beverly Hills and San Jose. However, 13 years ago, his team-building program, then called Team Cuisine, was just a part-time job. Before starting Team Cuisine, Connolly owned a restaurant in Silicon Valley, that was also a cooking school, for 17 years. At the time, Connolly was approached by one of his clients from his hands-on cooking class who admired his work and wanted him to do the same with her department. Connolly, who also has a background in organizational development and group dynamics, jumped at the idea and switched from culinary mode to training mode. “I started asking her training-type questions. For instance, ‘Why do you want to do this?’ ‘What is it that you want to accomplish with your team?’ ‘Is this just a fun event, which is important to have too, or is it a fun event with a meaning behind it, and what would you like that meaning to be?'” he said. From that first team-building program the basic design of what later became CEO Chef was created. It took six months to put together a plan and open for business, and with the success of Team Cuisine’s first customer, Hewlett Packard, came more companies signing up for the culinary team-building program. “I was doing a lot of good in the corporate world helping people understand their roles in their company,” he said. “I quickly realized I needed to do this full-time.” Cooking as a Team The bottom line of CEO Chef is team building. “Unless people can work together as a team successfully, they will not be effective as a company,” said Carol Cole-Lewis, chief financial officer and chief of operations and compliance. “What [that] means is learning how to resolve conflicts satisfactorily. It does not mean not having conflicts because constructive conflict (disagreements) is essential for a proper functioning team.” Unlike other culinary programs that focus more on the chef and correct cooking styles, CEO Chef focuses more on the participants, communication and leadership. Food is important, Cole explains, and everybody ends up with a great result, but what makes CEO Chef different is the process by which the food is made. Jimm Hughey, business and professional coach, has been to several CEO Chef programs and sees what sets it apart from other similar programs. “CEO Chef has learned how to set up a larger format for people in similar organizations,” Hughey said. “Because they’ve taken on this larger picture, they are able to work with more people and bring a larger team together. That’s a different dynamic.” With the ability to handle a group as small as 10 people to one with as many as 300, CEO Chef creates a win-win-win situation for all parties involved, especially hotels. Because this program is not a cooking class, when it is done at hotels, resorts or wineries, the food and beverages used are bought through the hotel. Hotels benefit from this by keeping the client in-house and profiting from the revenues of the food and beverages. “It’s a win for them, it’s a win for us and ultimately, the most important thing, it’s a win for our customers who benefit the most,” Connolly said. “It’s nice to be in a position as a company to be able to help other people win in business too.” Building The Business Clients of CEO Chef include Amgen, Kaiser Permanente, Bank of America and Time Warner, Inc. Most of their business is referral and word-of-mouth and about 90 percent of business comes from repeat clients. “More than anything else, we built our business on having a great reputation and really focusing on giving our clients a great product so they would want to use us again, try different programs we offer or find out what different programs we can customize for them,” Connolly said. That’s been the company’s main growth point since Bruce Finch joined them as vice president of sales and marketing in April. Having come from the business world himself, Finch has noticed the landscape has changed. Earnings have become so important to a company that every dollar spent is scrutinized. “When companies are cutting back, the first thing they cut are the fun-type things,” Finch said. “This goes far beyond just a fun outing. This is something that actually has a return investment. It pays back to the corporation long after the event is over.” Time spent outside the office is an investment, Finch believes, and a lot of companies are looking for ways to have fun and get something out of it the same time. “Everybody in some way or fashion can relate to food. If you don’t cook you eat. If you eat, you’re curious as to how things are made. If you know how things are made, you want to do it better every time,” Finch said. “At any given level, there’s participation and enthusiasm.” At the end of each event after the buffet has been completed, stronger relationships created and previously unknown leadership skills illuminated participants are asked, “If you can do this program with all the success that you’ve had today making this delicious, multicultural gourmet buffet, even with all these challenges, when you bring this to your world, what can you do?” Connolly says they can’t help but answer back, “Anything.” SPOTLIGHT: CEO Chef, Inc. Year Founded: 1994 (2002 in L.A. County) Locations: Northridge, Beverly Hills, San Jose Revenues in 2005: $350,000 Revenues in 2007: (projected): $1.7 million Employees in 2005: 3 Employees in 2006: 4 Driving Force: Fitness training program that emphases low-impact toning and exercises.