See how Lisa Fearn brought together her skills and passions to create a cookery school for children.
After successful growth and digital support, Lisa is renovating an old cow shed into a much larger cookery school and café.
The business is called Pumpkin Patch. It’s a cooking and gardening school which started about ten years ago primarily for children but now we’ve extended it to adults as well. I have a huge passion for food, but of course, everybody eats three times a day so whether you have a passion or not you need to cook.
Basically, I was in banking years ago and I also trained as a teacher. I’ve got five children so it was very difficult to go back to work full time and the three things I knew most about were children, cookery and gardening so I brought those three skills together and started a cookery school for children.
At the moment, I’m a one-man band but I do have five children and each of them help me at different times doing different roles.
Usually most of my customers come through recommendation, by word of mouth. However, I use quite a lot of different social networking media such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter to market and reach different people.
Parent: I think it’s brilliant and it’s homely, it’s friendly and it’s inviting. I contacted Superfast Business Wales for support because I felt I needed some advice on my website and to see if I could maximise the number of people I was reaching and target different audiences.
Originally, I went on a workshop with Superfast Business Wales, that then gave me a brief idea of how I could gain information and what information I needed. I then received a one to one visit – and he came, and he looked at my existing website and how I could improve it to maximise the number of people I was reaching.
I can’t risk trying it for definite until I know that chicken is cooked.
So using keywords and search engine optimisation does make sure that my website is reaching the right people at the right time and that is then coming back in business.
I also renew content monthly because that brings it to the top of search engine searches.
The heat of the butter cooks the flour and that’s how the pastry cooks and crisps up, okay?
Adopting digital technology has basically made me more accessible to more people, as well as seeing about courses online, they can book courses and that means my business is succesding.
Parent: My daughter saw The Pumpkin Patch website and looked into it and that’s why we have brought him here. Really easy to book him in.
I’m going to chop meat, what colour chopping board? Red!
Having spent ten years cooking here in our house, I’m going to move the whole lot down to a renovated cowshed and it’s going to house the new cookery school and a coffee shop.
A massive pantry, in fact, twenty metre long pantry.
My aim, I guess, will be to move in to the shed, the new premises within the next two or three months and I’ll probably expand and probably have about five or six staff by then.
I definitely recommend that anyone gets in touch with Superfast Business Wales. It can only make things easier and improve things.