From Free Recipes to a Cake Brand, Building a Community & Learning to Lead with Rachi Fernandopulle

Sure. My name is Rachi Fernandopulle, and I’m from Melbourne, a beautiful little city here in Australia. I run a cake business, but before that I did lots of other things. I’m originally from Sri Lanka and left home at 19 to pursue my dream. I went to France to study at one of the world’s best hotel schools, the Institute Paul Bocuse in Lyon, then travelled to China and worked there for a bit, and finally I call Australia, and Melbourne, home. It’s been about ten years now.

It was all accidental, to be quite frank. It started during COVID, the period when everyone was a chef and putting recipes out there because we were all in lockdown. I come from a chef background, so when I saw people putting out things that weren’t even real recipes, I thought, hang on a second, I should be doing this. I made a brand-new Instagram page and started sharing recipes.
People were so interested and asked so many questions that I realized I couldn’t put it all in video format. It needed to be written down: what to do, what not to do, all the FAQs. I wondered why people put recipes on the internet and what they get out of it, so I went down the rabbit hole and came across food blogging. Since COVID had forced me to go part-time at my job, I had a lot of time, so I started a food blog and wrote all the recipes.
I also married well. My husband is in the IT sector, with a lot of digital marketing and SEO experience, so we supplement each other’s skill sets. He made sure the blog came up on top of Google, and the rest was history. Then one day I put out a recipe for a cake, and people started messaging me asking if I could make it for them. I told them I give out recipes, I don’t make cakes. But two or three people asked, so I thought, why not? I made a cake and put it on Instagram, and that went viral. Now I’ve created a cake brand in Melbourne that is a million-dollar business.

I started blogging in 2020 while working full time, and I did it as a hobby for about three years. Then I left my job about two years ago and went all in, and within those two years we got to a million dollars. I had a base that I built while juggling a full-time job, but the real growth happened when I left my job and committed.

I was very naive. I thought I could conquer the world, but coming from that paycheck mentality, I struggled a lot, because now I had to work in order to get paid. Every month wasn’t the same paycheck, and some months I couldn’t pay myself. That’s what happens when you become an entrepreneur: you take on that risk and have to shift your mentality. It took quite some time to get used to, but now I love it, and I wonder why I didn’t do it sooner. It wasn’t like that when I first quit. I was questioning everything.
In the beginning you lose money and you lose time, because you work around the clock in the business and don’t get paid much. Along the way you learn a lot, you realize there’s a way to do this, and things start changing. You make more money and get your time back. But it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s the grind.

It happens all the time, even when I’m not in the shop. If I walk down the street or through a shopping center or the grocery store, people stop me and say, you’re the girl from Instagram, the cake person. It’s a privilege. Sometimes people travel from afar just to take a picture with me. At that time, I didn’t understand the impact I was having. People think anyone can make cakes at home, but I took a blog and a home business to a million-dollar business, and that’s inspiring to people. Before I had staff, calls came straight to me, and people would call at 11 at night just to say how proud they were.
When I decided to go from the home business out into the real world, I ran a small pop-up in a shopping center to see whether people would turn up. People just kept coming. It’s not like I have a million people on my Instagram, but that small community was very, very passionate about my journey. They saw me going from that blog to a home kitchen to a shop front, and they adore that.

If it wasn’t for that community and that customer base, I wouldn’t be where I am. People wanted to learn from me, and some wanted to be like me, so I wanted to give back and created an academy alongside the business. At the moment I do online classes on the cooking side. At some point I’d like to do an entrepreneurial class as well, because it’s not easy to be an entrepreneur or to scale at this level. I made a lot of mistakes, financial and emotional, because I didn’t have the right people or advice around me. I’d love to teach what’s the right way to do it.

It was really hard, because I was a one-woman show. I wore every hat, from cleaning to delivery to making the cakes to bookkeeping. When it came to employing my first staff, it was so hard to give that away that I ended up micromanaging people. Looking back, I was a terrible boss. I wouldn’t work with me. But I came to understand that I can’t scale to this level without a good team, and that I need to transfer ownership to people and make them leaders around me rather than dependents on me.
It’s still a bit hard for me to stop controlling, but I step back a lot. I’ve come a long way, and I’ve built a solid team who wants to go on the journey with me, because this is just the beginning. The people who started with me when I had nothing have been there for me, and I’ll always continue to give them opportunities. It was definitely not easy, and there were a lot of sacrifices along the way. The people around you who understood stayed, and the people who didn’t left.

Life has got a bit easier with AI for running businesses, and when it’s used responsibly, it’s a fantastic tool. Six years ago I didn’t have that. But with my brand, the way I got here was through content, because I built my community through content. Even today, nothing I put out is AI-driven. It’s genuinely me talking to a camera. I don’t have scripts or storylines. If I make a mistake, it’s out there. And I think if I can do this, so many people can, but it’s a lot of hard work.

Because I started as a food blog, I wanted to talk about being a food traveler, since I love traveling. Then people started to know me as Food Voyager, so my business name had to be Food Voyager too. No one would have known me otherwise, so I adapted the name and went with it.

Thank you, Marc. Looking forward to the episode. See you guys soon.