In February 2015, Monkey Business Catering was launched. We started with a garage to commercial kitchen conversion, a handful of second hand equipment and $10,000 cash. My stash of domestic equipment was even sacrificed to the cause! For the first two years, I worked full time as the manager at Monkey Business Catering and part time as a business trainer for Aurora Training Institute. It was a crazy, intense period. The 2020 COVID shutdown from March to September was another testing time. We saw a complete cancellation on bookings within the first two weeks of the shutdown being announced. So we grieved for a month and then made a plan for business development – converting our lean start-up systems into ones that would work well for us for the next 10 year (of those my favourite was going from paper recipe cards to digitised recipes viewed on iPads). Knowing that our business needed diversification and change to survive the strange post-COVID economic times, we purchased iCooked (a frozen ready to eat meal business) in May 2021, employed a Head Chef (the wonderful Terri), had Kristina come to work in the business full-time and moved from our converted garage kitchen into a 260 square metre warehouse in Harlaxton. The journey has been varied and challenging with many joys but also unavoidable and often heart-breaking moments. God has been a constant through them all.

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