Forged in Fire
The chef who built the world's most exclusive private jet catering company. The build, the exit, and the brutal lessons.
The Book
A chef-founder's field manual. Thirty years in the trade.
March 2020. A camp bed at the back of one of the largest private jet hangars at Stansted Airport. Nine days without going outside without noticing. Three children in Barcelona, four months away. Over a hundred people on payroll. An entire industry going dark in real time.
Most operators would have closed. I asked my shareholders to put more capital in. Three weeks later we launched a new home-delivery brand called One Fine Dine. It kept us alive for eighteen months. Three years after that, we sold On Air Dining for roughly three times what I had originally thought would be a good exit price.
Then the silence arrived. The kind nobody warned me about.
Cook. Build. Exit. Repeat. is the field manual that thirty years in the trade earned. Written for founders, operators, PE partners, family-office investors, and CEOs who want to know what it actually takes — across the build, the scale, the exit, and what comes after.
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Fourteen field manuals built from the book — diagnostic checklists, decision frameworks, audit tools, and the two cap-table architecture documents extracted from Chapter 17. Each one is a stand-alone tool. Enter your email below to unlock the full library.
Seven structural decisions before you sign. The architecture that protects every party from the version of themselves that will exist when the venture is in trouble.
Chapter 17Six structural levers that define your exit. Liquidation preferences, drag-along, board composition, covenants, vesting, earn-outs.
Chapter 17Run the hit-by-a-bus test on yourself first. If the business stops when you're not there, you haven't built a company. You've built dependency.
Chapter 13Performance is decided before pressure arrives. The audit that maps where your operation is still burning capacity on decisions you should have automated.
Chapter 5Pressure is privilege. Stress is broken systems. The audit that tells you the difference.
Chapter 8 · 12Twenty per cent of your revenue can consume one hundred per cent of your culture. The diagnostic that finds the contamination before it spreads.
Chapter 14Buyers do not buy revenue. They buy systems that run without the operator standing over them. The scorecard for what they will actually look at.
Chapter 18The chapter no business book has put on the page. The year after the deal. Plan for it like you planned for due diligence.
Chapter 20Cash Flow Health Check, Scale Readiness Assessment, Founder Time Audit, Role Clarity Map, Support vs Rescue Matrix, Systems Pyramid Assessment.
Across the manuscript“The kitchen broke me. It also built me. We've taken those environments away — and called it progress. It isn't. We've raised a generation that doesn't know how to take a hit. And it's costing them more than they know.”
From the keynote — Embrace the Heat
Field Notes
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