Good to Great: How to Scale With an Outsourced CFO

Celebrating Our Client’s Success

WILL STEWART

Will & Steve (MKR Champions 2015)

www.facebook.com/WillandSteve

 

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I’m Will from Will & Steve (MKR Champions 2015). I’m a Husband and now I call Australia home (but still proud of my British heritage).

Q: Can you tell us a bit about your business?

Our business is built around food. We offer a number of different products from menu consultation, recipe development, catering, private dining and most recently completed the manuscript for our cookbook. We provide key note speaking and MC’ing

Q: Where did you grow up?

We both grew up in England. Steve in Essex and Will in Kent.

Q: How did you become interested in cooking and how long have you been doing it?

Steve and I won series 6 of My Kitchen Rules in May in 2015 and incorporated our business with Altus on 22^nd of that Month. 

Q: What accomplishment are you most proud of?

Winning the highest rating television show is going to take a lot of beating but having our own cookbook will overtake that. It will be our CV essentially.

Q: How do you balance your time between work and family?

This is extremely difficult as the nature of food means that we are working when others aren’t. We try our hardest for a work life balance but we love what we do so that helps tremendously. We are committed to ensuring that the priority is our family.

Q: What have been your biggest challenges to date?

Living with Steve for 6 months straight – just kidding.

The hardest challenge has been building and maintaining our brand capitalizing upon our publicity from being on the TV. We are new to the food / media industry so we have had to learn the ropes pretty quickly.

Q: What are your main business goals currently and how will you go about achieving them?

Our main aim is to get a regular cash flow from either contracts selling our products in national supermarkets or brand alignments. This will afford us the opportunity to do what we love such as Volunteering for the likes of OzHarvest and The Cancer Council both of whom we are ambassadors for. We are also pushing hard with Channel 7 to secure more regular Television opportunities. This will ensure that our profile is where it needs to be to meet our brand alignment objectives. If our upcoming cookbook is a success, we will also look to publish again.

Q: What have you been working on lately?

So the main focus for us recently has been our cookbook. We have been working 16 hour days to test cook, write and photograph over 100 recipes. The launch will be in August in time for Father’s Day and we can’t wait.

We have also engaged in discussions to launch a convenience food offering that has projected potential. This could be one of the major revenue streams for the business going forward. We would like to launch the first outlet in the first half of 2016.

Q: If you could give our readers one tip, what would it be?

Believe in yourself.