I’m the world’s expert on macaroni and cheese. I know that’s a bold claim, but it’s absolutely true.
I’ve made over 10,000 mac and cheese dishes, grated over a ton of cheese, boiled thousands of pounds of pasta, and whipped tons of cream sauces, which left me with wrist injuries that doctors say are only seen in masturbatory teenage boys.
I have written the international bestselling cookbook and definitive work on the subject, creatively titled “The Mac and Cheese Cookbook.” On Amazon, it is ranked #65,739 of all time among the most popular books, just above Tanya’s Comprehensive Guide to Feline Kidney Disease (#175,890) and just below Fifty Shades of Grey (#25,370).
Restaurant success
I founded Homeroom, a cult favorite mac and cheese restaurant that has been in business for over a decade and sold millions of loaves of mac and cheese. Homeroom’s mac and cheese is so popular it’s been featured everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to the Cooking Channel and has been ranked in the top 1% of restaurants in the nation. Simply put, no one has dedicated their life to these cheesy carbs more than I have.
You may wonder why anyone would spend so much of their life eating macaroni and cheese. (Or, if you really love macaroni, you probably don’t even have to wonder.)
I got into dairy for the same reason most people do crazy things: for love. Not for romance, but for a different kind of love that we rarely talk about: Because I wanted to love who I was at work. I would hear people talk about how excited they were to get up in the morning and go to work, and I thought that was crazy. Maybe I’m not that kind of person. I wanted to love who I was in the world and how I spent my days there, and I wanted those around me to feel the same way.
When I decided to open a mac and cheese restaurant, I was living what people told me was a fairy-tale ending. I’d graduated from a top school and was working as a highly paid lawyer in a comfy high-rise in San Francisco. I swaggered at cocktail parties, wore a suit every day to look great, and had a job representing some of the largest companies in America. The problem was, I was miserable. I was winning at a game I didn’t love, and I’d spent most of my life trying to be perfect.
Opening Homeroom in 2011 was the perfect opportunity for me to fall in love with my job. I hoped that my yearning for something more meaningful would be found in cooking and sharing delicious food with people. That hope turned out to be true, but I ended up falling in love with my job for all the reasons I mentioned at the beginning. Although I started Homeroom because of my love of macaroni and cheese, it was business that I ultimately fell in love with – specifically, how to build a business that is centered around meaning, purpose, and connection.
During my decade leading the team at Homeroom, I came to define success differently than the fairy tale I grew up with. I became obsessed with figuring out why other jobs and workplaces sucked and how we could do them better. Through an embarrassing amount of trial and error, my team and I developed language and systems that maximized meaning, purpose, and connection without creating a sucky workplace. In an industry where the average employee tenure was under 90 days, Homeroom’s average was 2.5 years.
After running Homeroom for 10 years, I sold the restaurants in 2020 to a large venture-backed restaurant company with Silicon Valley heavyweights as investors and an experienced CEO who had led some of America’s most well-known restaurant chains. Though their company was successful in its own right, one Homeroom restaurant was more profitable than five of our restaurants combined.
Recipe for Wealth
When I started Homeroom, I assumed that if I wanted to lead with values I deeply loved, I would have to sacrifice making money. I assumed that financial success was for ruthless, competitive, winner-take-all people. I assumed that values like pursuing passion, maximizing collaboration, and shared success led to bad ideas like communism and John Lennon and Yoko Ono albums.
What I discovered is that the opposite is true: I learned that by playing a completely different game, I could win a game I had never intended to play.
I never expected to become a mac and cheese millionaire. When I first put together my homeroom business plan, I projected my take-home income at $40,000. I was surprised when I made more than I made as a corporate lawyer in the first year. I found that wealth creation was a natural byproduct of striving to create something meaningful for as many people as possible.
Adapted with permission from the publisher, Wiley, from The Mac & Cheese Millionaire: Building a Better Business by Thinking Outside the Box by Erin Wade. Copyright © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. This book is available wherever books and e-books are sold.
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