How Chef Josh Katt Built a Fast-Growing Food Service Empire—Without Setting Any Goals

Chef Josh Katt, the founder and CEO of Kitchfix, isn’t a goal guy. In fact, when I posed the first of our two big questions on #WeGotGoals—what’s a big goal you’ve achieved, why was it important to you, and how did you get there?—he couldn’t really come up with an answer. Don’t take that to mean he’s achieved less than other guests we’ve had on the show. In about five years, Katt has built Kitchfix from a small personal chef business into a citywide meal delivery and catering company. He has more than 60 employees and a Gold Coast storefront, not to mention packaged products like Paleo granola and waffles available in-store and online, nationwide. Maybe it’s just a matter of semantics. Katt prefers to discuss things in terms of passions and beliefs, guiding principles he aims to follow. Eating a healthy, nourishing diet. Knowing where your food comes from. Treating your customers well at every step of the transaction—while also doing right by your employees. Those core elements have taken Katt far beyond where he might have dreamed when he first moved to Chicago from Michigan in 2006. Back then, he thought he’d cook in fine-dining restaurants. Soon, though, he realized the late-night, hard-knock lifestyle just wasn’t what he wanted in the long term. Katt explored a number of different food-related jobs throughout the city, including catering and retail. He worked with a non-profit called Common Threads that taught kids about healthy dishes from around the world. There, he met a woman who asked if he could work as her personal chef. He jumped at the chance, but there was a catch—she was recovering from cancer and eating an anti-inflammatory diet. Katt dove into reading and research, and realized his farm-to-table cooking experience in Michigan aligned perfectly with the type of nourishing dishes her recovery required. What’s more, his heart and soul became part of the recipe. “I really took to the idea that food is very powerful,” Katt says. “It can heal your body.” One client became a few became a few more. Katt eventually realized he could bring costs down by investing in a kitchen—then, of course, he needed a few more clients to make the rent on that space. He worked with gyms to spread the word about his healthy, convenient options. Each step was essentially guided by combining financial practicalities with his guiding principles. “How am I going to make my paycheck? I don’t want to go work in a restaurant. I love cooking, I love having flexibility, so what do I need to do to make that happen?” he asked himself. Kitchfix became the answer. And though he didn’t always know he’d start a company, he did know he’d work hard to help make peoples’ lives better. Now, he does that not only by feeding customers nutritious, delicious meals—he also aims to correct some of the imbalances he’s observed in the life of food-service workers (and the bigger-picture economic disparities he saw in the city). So, he offers jobs to those with criminal records and others who might not be able to find work elsewhere, paying them fairly and including benefits. The stories of transformation, both among those who prepare and devour his meals, fuel him. One woman received thousands of dollars of Kitchfix funds as gifts to sustain her through chemotherapy. Another family was able to delay putting their father in assisted living thanks to the availability of meal delivery. “Now I'm a little removed from the day to day, but I get to see these cool things my team is doing for people,” he says. “This thing that I created five years ago is now doing those things for people; people are using it for good and I'm not really partaking in the actual cooking as much as I used to. It’s a pretty cool feeling.” Katt continues to learn in his transition out of the kitchen and toward scaling his principles into an expanding enterprise. In addition to business development, “part of my growth is really establishing some systems and structure for the team,” he says. “Communicating the vision and communicating the passion that we're talking about is important. Hiring the right people is important. We do food service a lot differently than the average restaurant.” He's coming to appreciate the need for strategy and using terms like “10x” and “BHAG.” But Katt’s goal-getting advice for anyone else who has a deeply held conviction and a desire to make it something bigger remains simple. Don’t think too hard, he says—just take the leap. “I may be on one end of the spectrum of not thinking first or setting a goal and just going for it; there’s certainly room for goals and thought,” he says. “But a lot of people get hung up on that stage, right? Like it's too cerebral and they're not just doing it. So I would say just take a chance, go for it. You'll regret it later if you don’t.” Listen to this week’s episode to hear more about Katt’s own eating habits, the one thing he’d change about the Kitchfix menu if he could do it all over, and his big, ambitious goals for the future (one will make you toss your nachos and hot dogs in surprise). And stick around till the end of the episode to hear our first installment of your own big goals! If you enjoy it, subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts and leave us a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts. ------- JAC:Welcome to #WeGotGoals, a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talk to high achievers about their goals. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen; with me, I have Kristin Geil and Cindy Kuzma. CK:Good morning, Jeana. KG:Hi Jeana. JAC:Good morning. And Cindy, this week you did the podcast live recorded from the Moxy Hotel. CK:I did. So again, you might hear a little bit of background noise. It was a really exciting evening at the Moxy Hotel, but I spoke with Chef Josh Katt of Kitchfix. JAC:And Chef Josh Katt of kitchfix has been evolving the way that he sets goals over the years. Wouldn't you say that's right? CK:Absolutely. I mean he is one of the few guests that we have who has come on and said, yeah, I don't really set goals. Um, that's not really my thing or that hasn't been my thing. Yet he's managed to build a pretty successful business despite not having really intentionally set out with a goal to do so. He works really hard. He has these sort of guiding principles and passions that he's followed and the opportunities have found him, but now that he has kind of stepped away from the chef role and into the CEO role, he's definitely thinking that he needs to focus a little bit more on goals. He's using terms like BHAG and 10x and things that we hear entrepreneurs and ceos talk about when they talk about goals. So I think he has recognized that the way he has done things in the past worked to get him to a certain point and now that he's responsible for a big company and lots of people, he's. He's adjusting his approach to goals and exploring how these new options might work for him. KG:And one thing we know about Kitchfix from working with them and sampling everything on their menu for so many years is that they really care about their customer and being transparent about what food they're serving you, what ingredients they're using, where they're sourcing things from. So we know that they care about the forward facing aspect of the company. But Josh spoke a little bit to how he also makes sure his back of house staff and employees are taken care of as well. CK:Yeah, I thought that was a really interesting and compelling--I mean, one of the reasons honestly, he started the company in the first place was he found restaurant life to be a lot harder than he had anticipated. There's late nights, there's low pay, there's no benefits. It's a lifestyle that can be really hard on people and in addition to building a business that serves healthy food to people who have had cancer or people who are sick, anyone who wants an anti-inflammatory Paleo Whole30 compliant diet, he's also really focused on making life better in all aspects for those workers. So you know, he wants to hire people who maybe don't have a good chance to get a job somewhere else. He wants to give them regular hours and pay and benefits and just create opportunity in the restaurant and catering and food service world. That makes life a little bit better and a little bit different. It's almost like the antithesis of the gig economy right now, w...