Antonia Lofaso's Advice For Starting A Business

Celebrity chef Antonia Lofaso has never restricted herself as far as her career is concerned. According to her website, she has worked really hard to achieve her present success. She wasn't scared of putting in hard work and working with culinary legends like Wolfgang Puck, learning what she could and improving her skills. She's now many things: a mom, an entrepreneur, a celebrity chef, cookbook author ("The Busy Mom's Cookbook: 100 Recipes for Quick, Delicious, Home-Cooked Meals"), a TV personality ("Top Chef"), and more. 

Even as an entrepreneur, the chef is taking plenty of risks and pushing the envelope as much as she can. Consider Chefletics, for example. The brand exclusively caters to chefs, with outfits designed for culinary professionals as they work in the kitchen. The chef writes on the brand's site, "With the largest lifestyle movement in apparel being athleisure, we designed the chef coat combining the classic look with technology advanced activewear fabric that moves with you, not against you." The innovative venture was launched by Lofaso with her business partners, Mario Guddemi and Salvatore Aurora.

Lofaso also runs many restaurants. Clearly, when it comes to being a successful entrepreneur, Lofaso definitely knows what it takes to be a strong player in the game.

According to Lofaso, building a business from scratch is something that takes a lot of time and effort. She told the website Mom that in her case, she had to begin learning the basics by working as a line cook at 23 years old. While she was too young to be sure about what she wanted in the future, she knew that she would have to build a strong foundation. She said, "When I met my business partners four years ago, I had opened restaurants that were good, closed restaurants that were bad, worked for other people, regurgitated other people's ideas on what they wanted their restaurant to be." Her own restaurant, Scopa Italian Roots, allowed her to be as creative as she possibly could be and gave her more control as a business owner.

As an ambitious entrepreneur, Lofaso knows that it's really tricky to open your own company. She acknowledges that you're leaving behind a security blanket and taking all kinds of risks, which is why it's important to act wisely. She said that it's very important to have a "game plan" in place and to believe in what you're doing. She also offered some practical advice. Lofaso told Mom,"I would always suggest that you don't put all of your own money into it and you get a couple of different partners to share the costs and equity. You don't want to put your savings or your financial retirement in jeopardy."