Erin Wade is a successful chef, author, and restauranteur. However, before all this, Erin was a highly-paid lawyer in a high-rise in San Francisco. What is the difference between the two jobs? Happiness and love. In a recent article in Fortune Magazine, Erin Wade talks about how she quit her respectable job and started a business of her own in the food industry. Talking about her previous job as a lawyer, Erin shared, “I sounded important at cocktail parties, looked damned respectable in a suit each day, and did work representing some of the largest companies in America. The problem was that I was miserable.”
In the Fortune Magazine article adapted from her book ‘The Mac & Cheese Millionaire: Building a Better Business by Thinking Outside the Box’, Erin shared that she wanted to love who she was at work. “I would hear people talk about being excited to wake up in the morning to go to work and think they were crazy-that maybe I just wasn’t that kind of person. I wanted to love who I was in the world and how I spent my days there. I wanted the people around me to feel the same way,” she wrote.
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She found her love and calling in mac and cheese. “I hoped that the longing I felt for something more meaningful could be found in making delicious food and sharing it with people,” she shared. Erin opened Homeroom, a macaroni and cheese restaurant, in 2011.
Erin is now the world’s leading expert on macaroni and cheese. “I have personally cooked more than 10,000 mac and cheese dishes. I have grated over one metric ton of cheese, boiled thousands of pounds of pasta, and whisked such vast amounts of cream sauce that I developed a wrist injury,” she shared.
Homeroom’s mac and cheese is so popular that it has been featured on The Wall Street Journal, and the Cooking Channel, and its financial performance puts it in the top 1% of restaurants nationwide.
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Erin shared, “When I first put together my Homeroom business plan, I had estimated my take-home pay to be $40,000. I was stunned when in our first year I earned more than I had as a corporate attorney.” After a decade of running Homeroom, Erin sold the restaurant in 2020 to a large, venture-backed restaurant company. She has now become a mac-and-cheese millionaire.
Erin began the restaurant for her love for food, mac and cheese in particular, and the joy of feeding people. Eventually, she enjoyed running a business and learned how to run a profitable company that is also a happy workplace for all employees.
