10 Successful Business Owners Pass On Insight They Wished They Had When Starting Out

Chef Dawn Tyson

Whipping up delicious dishes is what Chef Dawn Tyson, of Dawn’s Dish, does best.

She began her professional culinary career with at A Little Place Called Siam in Baltimore where she ran the kitchen. But after the owner of the restaurant called it quits, Tyson took a break from the culinary world and returned to New York where worked as a publicist for BMG/RCA Records in 1996. But she couldn’t shake her desire to create with food and she started catering and baking for artists, executives and co-workers, ultimately launching her own catering company Dawn’s Dish.

Eventually she opened up a storefront cafe. But pulling 80 hours per week, she needed a break. She closed shop and took a position as a coordinator at the Culinary Institute of America. Now on her own again, she is focused on making Dawn’s Dish a household name. She recently released of her first cookbook, Soul: Southern American Cuisine.

What she wished she knew:

“As a small business owner the struggle is always… meaning there are different kinds of struggles; you have a new intern and they burned all of the cornbread for the party in 30 minutes, or there are two streets in Queens that are called ‘Lexington Avenue’ and your crew went to a different address then you did or you are cooking live on a TV show and the host sneezes in your final ‘presentation’ recipe.

“So, struggling is in the eye of the beholder…..I would call them challenges and challenges can be over come.”