Judy Jurisich is the founder of the New Orleans Cooking Experience, a school that offers both local and non-local citizens the experience of New Orleans culinary culture in an intimate, sophisticated setting. She relates the decision at 58 to take her life in an entirely new direction, and discusses the establishment of her cooking school, from the trials of managing her establishment to personal revelations.
I worked in television, advertising and marketing for over 30 years. In television I worked as a promotional writer/producer, then as an advertising and promotion director, as a program director, and finally as a station manager. After having traveled around the country (mostly in Atlanta, Detroit and Boston), I decided to get married and come home to New Orleans. My husband was also from New Orleans. I was living in Boston and he was living in Seoul, so we decided to move back to New Orleans. In New Orleans I started a small marketing company that focused on helping companies who wanted to shift public opinion.
When I quit my job in television, I took a personal sabbatical and went to live in Florence, Italy for six months. While in Florence I was struck by the fact that the city seemed to have a lot in common with New Orleans. It was a place with a unique culture and history. I also noticed that lots of people wanted to come for extended stays and take various types of classes, including cooking vacations. It just kind of stuck in my brain that it would be a good thing for New Orleans to offer people.
I deferred developing it and didn’t think much about it, as I opened my own business in N.O. After seven years, when I was about 58, I decided that I really wanted to do something radically different with the rest of my life, and decided to write the business plan for the cooking school and then pursue it.
One of the greatest motivators was that what I wanted to do didn’t exist in New Orleans, so there was a great opportunity. We had and still have some great, more casual cooking schools in the city. However, people were beginning to fall in love with food, cooking, and learning vacations, and they were becoming more sophisticated about these pursuits. New Orleans had nothing like that. And, like Florence, New Orleans and Louisiana have amazing and unique cultural aspects, including world famous cuisine. Our goal was to give guests a truly authentic experience at a high and intimate level.
We had a soft opening in the fall of 2003 to learn what people liked most, least, etc. We adjusted the formats and then finally moved into the House on Bayou Road for a true opening in April, 2004.
A little additional background: I am not a cook, but I do love and appreciate good food. To help me start the school, both Poppy Tooker and Frank Brigtsen came on board to help me develop the class format and offer lots of other guidance. They then stayed on as our only two chefs. As the school grew a bit, we began adding new teachers. Now we have five.
I originally thought our focus would be mostly on vacation programs, but we have found that the majority of guests wanted to take single classes and blend them in with other activities. Also, originally, we offered some culinary related activities, but found that those who did take our vacation programs often wanted to eliminate them and build in other activities of their choosing. So we gradually adjusted the vacation classes to the two weekend programs that we offer today – each featuring two classes and a lot of free time.
Hurricane Katrina was a huge blow to our business. We were shut down from the end of August until January 06. We reopened in January, but there were very few people. We took the opportunity to develop the local/regional market and carved out a separate marketing effort for it. Since there were few visitors throughout 2006, our classes that year were about 80% local/20% non-local with virtually no corporate business at all. Prior to Katrina, our business was 80% national/20% local. Today we are about 50/50. We were also able to provide some wonderful R&R for those in the region whose lives were turned upside down.
I originally thought that the cooking school would be a lot of fun, and it is, but it is huge amount of work. I now work seven days a week, and I’m not sure that’s what I had in mind for retirement. Also, because we lost about a year and a half of true growth because of Katrina, getting the school up and running again was basically starting over, and equally as consuming.
My advice to anyone who wants to start a business after retirement is to research carefully, write a full business plan and go for it. However, they need to understand that starting-up is a bit like giving birth – the baby needs your constant attention, at least for several years. If you don’t want to put forth that much energy, you should look for other things – perhaps a mature business to take over, or start very small and let it grow naturally. You have to be flexible – start with your ideas as you envision them, then pay close attention to what your customers like the most or the least, and keep adjusting. Know that it will cost more money than you think, no matter how much homework you do.
Visit the New Orleans Cooking Experience at http://www.neworleanscookingexperience.com/index.htm