I’ve said it hundreds of times and you’ve probably heard me say it at least a few times if you’ve ever talked to me. We started Elevated Gatherings because we wanted to cook and serve fresh, local, and delicious food to interesting people, and above all, we want to have fun and we want you to as well. That’s why we’re here. However, there is always that temptation to do things outside of what you do, to chase the dollars so to speak. I talked about this briefly when we were interviewed by Main Street Magazine back in the Fall, and now I’m going to tell you more of that story.

In our almost two years in business, there have been two occasions where we did something we probably shouldn’t have done, and neither one of them went as well as we would have liked. The first one came about just a couple of weeks after we started, when someone I knew casually through a previous job reached out about some drop-off catering for an event they were doing. At the time, we were not equipped to do a job like this but I wanted the business and I wanted to help out this person that I knew. It was a small job, light bites for a fundraiser, and I felt reasonably confident we could pull it off. I took the lead on the cooking since it was all recipes I’ve made before and I was the one who had the time to accomplish everything. I ran myself ragged buying the ingredients, making all of the food, and packaging it up. It all tasted delicious but didn’t look as nice as I might have done if I had more time to do it. But, I didn’t have more time so I sent Clint to deliver everything, hoping for positive feedback and referral business. None of that happened.  (spoiler alert: in 2026 we are going to be equipped for drop-off catering and I promise you it will be worth the wait so stay tuned)

After that first stumble, we regrouped and focused on the thing we were well-equipped to do, the thing we set out to do in the first place, private dinners in people’s homes. I wouldn’t say any event has been “perfect” but they’ve all been what the clients wanted, we’ve gotten positive feedback along the way, and for the most part we’ve had a great time doing them.

So that brings me to the second thing we did that didn’t go that well. In this case, I was again looking to do something for someone I knew from a previous job, in fact someone I used to work for. This was to a be a private dinner in their home for them plus some guests. I wouldn’t say they are an influencer necessarily, but they have a big reach and know a lot of people with deep pockets. Not our target crowd, per se, but also not a crowd we would turn down should they come knocking.

We did like we always do when booking an event, confirming details like when we would do the dinner, how many people, what the menu would be, all of the details. We had our pre-dinner meeting where we confirmed everything, and of course we asked about the kitchen equipment. We were assured everything was in good working order and we would have no issues. As I have said before, you don’t have to have a fancy kitchen. But, if your oven burns everything, we’d like to know that ahead of time so we can adjust and maybe not plan to roast all of the things we are serving you. You might be able to see where I am going here.

Between the two of us, we agree this was our least successful dinner. The oven did us wrong; we burned a tray of root vegetables (although we did salvage enough to serve without anyone being the wiser) and served lava cake to six people and regular cake to two of them. I’m not sure anyone fully noticed because we did present good-looking and good-tasting food to them, and it’s not like I was going to march into the dining room and say, “this oven sucks.” But we know we can cook and it’s disappointing when it doesn’t turn out the way we had hoped. It just wasn’t our night. And after all was said and done, nothing I hoped would happen (social media buzz and referral business), actually happened.

I could go on and on but I’m not here to complain and I’m not going to say anything bad or revealing about our host. When we are in your space, what you say and do are not things we’re going to reveal to the world, no matter how we feel we did in serving you.

You might actually be wondering by now why I’m even telling you this story at all.

I told you this story for a few reasons.

First, because the point of this blog is to show you a bit more of my life, including what it is really like to own a small business. Not everything we do is 100% successful, and it doesn’t always go like we planned. Honestly, it very rarely goes as we planned but we almost always regroup and recover without anyone noticing.

Second, we are real humans and we make real mistakes sometimes. I don’t know about you but if I’m going to hire someone to work for me, I’d rather know they are real and they aren’t pretending to be perfect. Anyone who tells you they’ve never made a mistake is not someone I’d want to give my money to.

The final reason I told you this story is as a precursor to another post I have in the works about staying true to yourself and doing what you are best at. It’s taking me a while to put that one together because it’s going to be more personal than I’ve shared here previously and I’m still deciding how much of the story I want to make public. In working on that one, I thought of this story and thought it would stand alone and set up what is to come.

For now, I’ll leave it there. We all make mistakes. Every person on a cooking competition who burns their food, forgets an ingredient, or doesn’t get it all on the plate is a trained professional who had a bad day. And you know what? We all have bad days. We just have to take our licks, learn from our mistakes, and move on. And if we’re fortunate enough, we won’t make the same mistake twice. We’re doing our best to stay true to ourselves and do just what we want to do. No one does it like us, and when we do what we do, the way only we can do it, that’s how we win and it’s how all of our clients win too.