Martha Stewart, Ina Garten and the financial lessons celebrity cooks offer

Before I landed on life as a writer, I had dreams of becoming a chef, inspired by kitschy yet comforting cooking shows from celebrity chefs like Emeril Lagasse and Ina Garten. 

Even though my days aren’t filled with barks of “Yes, chef,” I find that these types of celebrity chefs — especially some of the original food influencers like Julia Child and Martha Stewart — still provide plenty of business and financial lessons that I can apply to my own life and career. 

No, I’m not planning to take stock tips from Stewart anytime soon. But when it comes to honing a craft, building a personal brand and finding ways to diversify income, there’s a lot these chefs can teach us, even though the days of “stand and stir” cooking shows are in the rearview mirror.

As “Martha,” the new Netflix documentary on Stewart reveals, her personal life was often tumultuous, yet her ambition and resolve enabled her to persevere. Garten’s new memoir, “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” similarly documents how she overcame personal challenges, and through hard work and determination was able to capitalize on opportunities when luck presented them.

1. Monetize your skills 

While luck and connections certainly factor into becoming a celebrity, a big part of their success depends on the seemingly simple — yet often hard to execute — act of monetizing their skills. Being a talented chef can then be parlayed into broader success, especially when combined with skills in areas like communication if hosting a TV show or writing a cookbook. 

This sounds obvious, but plenty of people fall into career paths where they aren’t putting their skills to optimal use. In fact, 10 years after graduating, 45% of those with bachelor’s degrees end up working jobs that typically don’t require a college degree, according to a report by the Burning Glass Institute and Strada Institute for the Future of Work.

So, if you find yourself at a job where you feel like your skills are underutilized, you might take cues from celebrity chefs by monetizing what you’re good at. That could mean taking a new career path or starting a business, whether you have technical skills like being an expert coder or so-called soft skills like being empathetic or funny.

“Find out from your friends and relatives what they would pay for from you. That’s a fantastic way to scope out which of your skills and expertise is monetizable with a built-in market,” said Taylor Price, a Gen Z personal finance expert and founder of Priceless Tay. 

Relatedly, celebrity chefs are often passionate about their skills, too. It’s one thing to be a talented chef, but if you hate the work it’s hard to parlay that into an extraordinary career. 

“If we can take inventory of our skills, knowledge and desire, and align it with what’s doing well, what’s stable, and what we think is going to be doing well, then we can take advantage of the skills, knowledge and desire that we have and make it applicable to business,” said David Meltzer, founder of David Meltzer Enterprises and former CEO of Leigh Steinberg Sports & Entertainment agency.

2. Go deep, then wide

Nowadays, seemingly everyone has a side hustle. 

“You can’t go onto TikTok or Instagram these days without people talking about their side hustle and how you can make six figures with one. And it’s one of those things where if it’s too good to be true, it’s probably not true. It’s really hard to do a side hustle,” especially a high-paying one, said Ari Lightman, digital media and marketing professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Instead, to really amplify your finances and have a side hustle that can grow into a lucrative business, you might take cues from celebrity chefs who go deep before going wide.

In other words, instead of spreading yourself too thin right off the bat, it can pay to sharpen your skills in one area first — like becoming a great chef — before branching out into new income streams or business ventures. Even then, like when celebrity chefs go on to host TV shows, they often build up a following through that medium before expanding into additional areas, like selling their own line of pantry items.

“I think you have to be really good at one platform in terms of growing a following before you branch out to others,” said Lightman.

For example, if you’re creating a content-focused business, it’s not necessarily realistic to jump into product sales right away. Instead, you need to first build an audience as you improve at creating content and connecting with viewers or readers.

“One really good example is Nona Gracie on TikTok,” said Price. “First building a brand personality, her team gathered emails for a newsletter before introducing a product line. Only after they built a strong brand did they launch an olive oil line, successfully marketing the product through their own social channels, and showcased how being a creator can evolve into a personal-brand-leveraged business.”

And you don’t have to be a mass-market influencer to have success. Even on a small scale, building a personal brand and finding like-minded people for whatever skills you’re trying to monetize — anything from a lawyer selling negotiation classes to someone with 3D printing skills creating custom wedding cake toppers — can lead to business and financial success.

“Today, we can build the thing that really makes these revenue streams possible, which is the ability for anyone in the world to build a community of people that are of your essence, of your frequency, that want to help you or know people that can help you,” said Meltzer. 

If you can build that community, you have “people that will buy from you and sell for you for life. And that’s what creates the multiple streams of income,” he added.

3. Hustle isn’t a bad word

Lastly, whether you’re trying to get a raise or launch a new business, you can take cues from celebrity chefs who often have the determination to put in extensive work to get where they want to go within a crowded field. And that’s arguably become even more important as the barriers to entry have come down in terms of building a brand.

“You have to hustle, and you have to really, really work at defining your brand and making sure people understand your brand in relation to all the other brands out there,” said Lightman.

You might cringe at the word hustle, but that doesn’t mean you have to go down a rabbit hole of vapid brofluencers. Instead, it’s more about working hard while understanding that reaching your goals takes time, and it’s important to stay tuned into what others are looking for so that you’re not hustling toward a dead end.

“Hustle culture has got a bad rap associated with it, almost like it’s synonymous with toxicity in the workplace. But when I think about it, it’s just that there are people out there that have resiliency, they have great determination, they make things happen for themselves,” said Lightman.

“You have to be resilient, you have to be adaptable, but in the same sense, you have to be really good at interacting with people and understanding what they want, what they need, what they constitute as valuable for them and how they want to receive that good or service,” he added.

Ultimately, celebrity chefs can teach us a lot more than just how to cook a souffle or chop an onion without crying. These entrepreneurs and personal brand experts often provide great examples of turning your skills and passions into something lucrative, and following their cues could help you earn more and build a more fulfilling career.