From cooking at restaurants and catering events, to educating clients about the importance of balanced nutrition and a healthy lifestyle, Marshall O’Brien made his career transition 15 years ago, and now uses online tools like Kapwing to create content to spread the word about holistic health and smart nutrition.

Read on to learn more about Chef Marshall, his business, and how our resize tool - along with others, has helped him grow his business.

"I'm a chef, but not how you might think"

How did you transition from a Chef, to a Chef and business owner?

I always had an interest in people, and helping people. I’m really projecting a lot of my own things, because I want to keep striving to be a better version of myself - be a better human, man, husband, dad. I always say, “I want to give the best of me to my family, not what’s left of me to my family”.

No business owner presented this kind of stuff. So I started out just cooking, and I enjoyed interacting, since I worked in a restaurant and at a catering company, I loved interacting with the customers and employees. Then things just started to lead over to this because I was going into people’s homes to teach them how to cook, or teach them how to prepare meals for their families, what they would need to do to get more nourishing foods into their lives. This transitioned into teaching people how to create a better environment by creating their own ‘safe zone’.

Before I was teaching, I was actually doing cooking team building events, and that was fun, but if you want to have a family, travel, and have a life, this isn’t sustainable. So I went from working in the restaurant and catering at the same time, cooking classes for team building, to cooking in the kitchen teaching people. Then we started working with groups of people, and leveraging working with companies. It started about 15 years ago, when we started doing employee wellness programs. We’re trying to break down the silos and get them to look at all of it together. It’s a slow process, but we’re making progress.

What is the goal of the “Chef Marshall O’Brien Group”?

There are chefs, who cook and work in restaurants, but you also have the health industry that focuses on smoking cessation, fitness, emotional health, alcohol - but all of these are siloed. And we’re trying to bring them all together because they’re all connected. So we’re trying to differentiate ourselves by bringing all of that together in a way where it’s not threatening or intimidating.

Cheesy Oats with Eggs, and more Foods to Reduce Stress... - https://t.co/xSBvl2kbuy pic.twitter.com/GPBxCWO3TA

— Chef Marshall O'Brien (@ChefMarshallGrp) September 29, 2022

Companies hire my company because they want to help their employees improve their performance, job satisfaction, safety, health, and quality of life through smart nutrition. Smart nutrition is nutrition, sleep, hydration, physical activity - it has a lot of different components to it. You can’t exercise your way out of a bad diet if you eat garbage, and if you eat garbage, your sleep is going to stink, if your sleep stinks, your mental clarity is out of whack.

You want to use food in a way that works for you, not against you. So I teach people how nourishing is different than eating - with the right foods, you can perform and feel your best.

How does digital storytelling help with growing your business?

What you’re seeing in my account, I’m only hitting two out of seven buckets of content types that I’d like to be hitting right now, but I’m creating content to post on various platforms in hopes of building more awareness.

Let’s say your company has us doing a health program, you as the end user - the employee, you’re like “who’s this chef dude?”, “interesting video, I didn’t know foods reduce stress, okay, I kind of like it though. I participated in this webinar, I like what they’re doing and they have great recipes.” You’ll want to search me up to know who Chef Marshall’s group is.

@chefmarshallobrien Would you eat this? #haggis #realfood ♬ sans. - Toby Fox

When you search, you’re going to see all of this content pop up, you’ll see our podcast, and a whole list of representation of what we do, and how we help people. Ultimately, I’m trying to empower people to help themselves in their kitchen and their life so they can make the changes they want.

The content that I’m using Kapwing for is going to help build that awareness.

How did you find Kapwing, and how has using a tool like Kapwing impacted your creation workflow?

As you can see from the project in my workspace, I kind of have a template that I use, as well as a system that I do, so I rotate through different images and quotes.

I can make a piece of content, and then I resize my content to fit whatever platform I’m using. You have a tool that automatically converts the video into the right size for a reel, a post, or whatever I need, which is really slick because this tool wasn’t tool wasn’t like this in the past.

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A post shared by Marshall O'Brien (@realchefmarshallobrien)

I’m getting smarter everyday on how to use it. I feel like it’s getting easier - the time it takes to go from project to download keeps shrinking, which is really nice. My current goal with just two content buckets is to do 50 pieces of content a week, but I’m actually doing 70. There are so many features that you have that I haven’t used yet.

As a foodie myself, I had a blast learning more about Chef Marshall and his work. If you also enjoyed this, be sure to keep an eye out for the coming articles featuring creators, the projects they’re working on, and how they use Kapwing to share their messages with the world!

Are you a creator who’s interested in being featured in a spotlight? Check out this blog post for more information on this series, and submit an application to be featured.