We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kim Gandhi a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Kim, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
I think resilience has to come from within. Don’t get me wrong- I had parents that had many stages in their life where they had to pivot and when things didn’t go as planned or what they hoped, they figured it out.
Nothing in life is free and life is usually not easy or goes as you hoped it would.
I think it’s important when you have a setback, you take the time to get through these various stages to bounce back hopefully better than before.
1. Take stock of the situation- is it life threatening or forcing you to major change in your life to accomodate or merely something you wished was going better than what it is.
2. Take time to be sad about it. Could be a few minutes or a few days or whatever time limit you set for yourself. Take full advantage of the time to withdraw from the world and cry, scream, hit pillows at the wall etc. Just do NO harm to anyone or yourself. If you feel like doing harm- reach out to someone to help you get out of that mindset. Grieving for something or someone lost is a step to healing and bouncing back. Don’t let it linger tho- once your set time has elapsed, be done with it.
3. Lay out your next steps to helping you get back to a more positive place. Look at the pros and cons of each approach and execute on the one that you feel best about.
Bad days will come. Plan for them ahead of time and many times you can avoid pieces of it when you make smaller pivots. A manager I respect once told me- it’s better to go around the mountain than try to go over it most times and you will be more successful. I wish I had heard that earlier in my career but it resonated with me and I visualize how to get around the mountain and still succeed often now.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
Food Fire + Knives is your premier network of private chefs and personal chefs for an in home dining experience. Our mission has always been to support local Chefs through freedom of creativity, schedule flexibility, and deserved pay for one of the toughest and lowest paid industries. The Chefs are industry leaders in current restaurant roles as well as local Private Chefs.
My part in FFK is a little bit of everything from helping hosts find chefs, to helping chefs grow their business, fielding questions about the service and finding new partners and customers daily. Never a dull day and always changing which makes time fly and keeps me motivated!
We just rolled out our new website! We are very proud of it and it showcases our chefs well plus really helps gives insight into what their menus are as well as the chef’s background. We look for improvements to it daily to keep improving both the customer and chef experience.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
1. Communication – any and every kind that is available to you.
2. Organized – Juggling many hats throughout my career- it was important to sort out priorities and if you aren’t organized, it become very fragmented and disjointed.
3. Flexibility- learn how to bend and also be ready to pivot in another direction.
If you are early in your journey, find a mentor. I know it’s been said before, but learn from those that went before you- they may not make the choices you make but their insight into what they did when confronted with various scenarios can be helpful to you as you progress in your career. Mentoring is NOT the same as telling someone what to do. Mentors will listen and give examples of choices and decisions but then cheer you on as you make your own decisions. Those are the people that you want in your corner.
What would you advise – going all in on your strengths or investing on areas where you aren’t as strong to be more well-rounded?
Love this question. Always lead with your strengths but pay attention to your weaknesses too. Some are worth investing effort in and others are best left to find people around you that have those strengths. My best teams were those that had a mixture of strengths and they learned to lean on their team mates on items they were not as strong at. Many times they learned how to get stronger by that teamwork and thus the team kept getting better and better.
Look- I will never be a great artist. I can’t draw to save my life. But give me a process to look at and I will see how to re-engineer it to be a strong one from end to end and having each part participate in the success of the process vs one part being strong but sacrificing other parts of the end to end process to cause the overall process to perform poorly.
Another story- I love to cook- but I’m not at the level of our chefs. I learn from them each time I’m with them but I will always be affectionately “Home Skillet”. But they can’t do what I do at Food Fire + Knives with invoicing, customer service, sales and marketing. We have an amazing partnership because I trust them to do amazing things in the kitchen and they trust me to do the care and feeding of the business. Teamwork in action!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.foodfireknives.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/foodfire_knives/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/foodfireknives/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salesforce2/
Image Credits
Amber Cate, Andrea Williams
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