[Top Chicago Business Series] Giving to Your Best Business Relationships with Andrea Herrera of Boxperience

Andrea Herrera is President and Founder of Amazing Edibles Gourmet Catering and Boxperience. Through her companies, she is able to create meaningful connections and build relationships between individuals and communities.

Boxperience creates customized wooden crates filled with premium food, beverages, and monogrammed gifts that are personalized specifically for its recipient. It is the go-to brand for top salespeople, CEOs, and business owners who want to share their gratitude and maintain their most important business relationships.

Andrea’s other company, Amazing Edibles Gourmet Catering, is an award-winning company that has provided catering services for weddings, intimate social events, as well as for corporate and educational events. Some of their past clients include Fortune 500 companies, Non-profit organizations, Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, and many more.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• How Andrea Herrera embraced change and adapted her catering business into a relationship-building business
• Andrea discusses her business model for Boxperience and how she managed to launch it in just four weeks
• Some objections Andrea encountered as she was planning the launch of Boxperience
• What makes the Boxperience customized crates special
• Andrea talks about her decision to pilot Boxperience with 40 business leadership influencers
• How EO (Entrepreneurs Organization) has influenced Andrea’s business
• Andrea’s advice for young female business leaders and entrepreneurs
• Andrea talks about how a low moment in business led to a groundbreaking opportunity with Harpo Studios

In this episode…

Fostering relationships in the current business climate is not just challenging, it’s complicated. There are no more events to go to where you can connect with people, and people aren’t as keen to go to business lunches and dinners. As a result, salespeople, CEOs, and other business leaders are having a hard time starting new relationships and cultivating existing ones on a deeper level. And Andrea Herrera is more than ready to solve this problem.

Through her business, Boxperience, Andrea helps individuals give to their best relationships and create lasting experiences despite physical distance through their personalized git box experience. She has pivoted her catering company into a relationship-building business that allows people to stay connected during these trying times.

Tune in to this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast with Dr. Jeremy Weisz as he talks to Andrea Herrera of Boxperience and Amazing Edibles Gourmet Catering to learn more about how you can give back and maintain your best relationships. They’ll also be discussing how Andrea has always been a person that embraces change, how she pushed past a challenging time in her business, and the value of staying connected in times of difficulty.

Resources Mentioned on this episode

• Amazing Edibles 
• Boxperience
• Andrea Herrera on LinkedIn
• Fran Biderman-Gross on LinkedIn
• John Ruhlin on LinkedIn
• Laura Webb on LinkedIn 

Books 

• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber
• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss
• The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael Singer
• How to Lead a Values-Based Professional Services Firm: 3 Keys to Unlock Purpose and Profit by Don Scales and Fran Biderman-Gross

 

Episode Transcript

Jeremy Weisz

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders and you know, Andrea, I love talking about not just the journey but like actually just some of the bumps in the road because we always hear about people coming out the other side so people can check out other episodes like Julie Clark who started Baby Einstein, she grew it with five employees to $20 million sold to Disney But the most interesting part was she survived cancer twice. She calls herself the cancer assassin and that’s real life like you know, there’s stuff that happens in our personal life that overlays of business and she shared some of those stories. Kim Walsh-Philips has you know, started amazing company As far You know, as far as helping other companies on social media and paid ads, but she talked about at one point in the career, she had to sell her wedding ring to make payroll. So, um, I think she got it back eventually from the pawn shop. But that and many more check out inspiredinsider.com for other episodes. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. Rise25 I cofounded with my business partner, John Corcoran. We help businesses connect to their dream 100 clients referral partners relationships, you know, kind of like I’m gonna introduce Andrew here in a second, but kind of like Andrea, how do you give your best relationships? And that’s kind of how I think on a daily basis, how do I give and I feel like when I have a podcast, I can have someone profile their thought leadership spread the message of their company and allows me to give to them and so we do that for the companies we help launch and run businesses podcast for them. Um, and so you could check it out, you can Rise25.com I, my co founder and I we are bantering like an old married couple in a video on The homepage you can check it out. And if you have questions you can email us anytime support@rise25 media.com I am super excited to introduce today’s guest and big thank you to Fran Biderman-Gross for introducing today’s guest and you could check her out at Advantages.net where they do end to end communications for companies. Andrea Herrera is President and Founder of both Amazing Edibles Gourmet Catering and Boxperience. One of my favorite topics is how do you give to people and send actual lumpy mail so they open it and give them a wow experience? And that’s exactly what Andrea does, Boxperience builds rapport shares your gratitude deepens your most important relationships, and they provide it for top salespeople CEOs to maintain develop their most important business relationships. So they do customize wood crates, filled with premium food beverages, monogram gifts. I don’t know Andrea, if you want to hold it up for a second while while I’m talking about it, but she’s gonna grab it. So if you’re watching the video, not just listening to it, she’s gonna show how cool it looks. It looks amazing. I mean, when I was doing research on this, I’m like says let’s connect if you’re just listening to it and it’s got some wine and some other goodies in there. I’m like I’m definitely gonna buy them for some other people for sure there’s another one. So we have some wine, some cheese, some meats and other things in there. So it looks amazing. And this is her background, Amazing Edibles Gourmet Catering does catering for weddings, corporate and educational markets. So some of their past clients include fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, you know, includes Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo studios, University of Chicago, University of Illinois in northwestern Michigan State, Cornell College and many more. So if you have a fabulous party they want to execute on that’s what they do. They go to homes offices go to cateramazing.com. We will talk and do some shout outs to EO App Dynamics and Healthplex specifically. So, Andrea, thanks for joining me.

Andrea Herrera

Thank you so much for having me, Jeremy. I’m really excited to be here.

Jeremy Weisz

You know what What’s most impressive and we’ll talk about your background because I don’t I really want to dig in to what what’s interesting in your past is English art history and music history major, to running your own company for over 25 years. And in this climate, you know, Cater Amazing, but Boxperience is younger, you know, comparatively, but I’m talking about you embracing change, and starting up Boxperience and how that process started up.

Andrea Herrera

Sure, thank you. I’m so excited English art history, music history in college, went to a small liberal arts college that was on a block plan. So we did a different class every three and a half weeks. So there was constant change constant motion, you had to be really adaptable. Um, I worked in corporate restaurants for about 10 years after college got to the general manager level. I’m now the levy organizations huge

Jeremy Weisz

in Chicago PD

Andrea Herrera

organization. Yes. And they’re across the country. At the time, there were lots of restaurants they moved into stadiums. Um, but I think

Jeremy Weisz

they’re all like Bowl Stadium like that’s they cater all the food there. So like I thought your your teeth on like the probably the most difficult most comprehensive as far as catering goes,

Andrea Herrera

um, it was a great learning space I always when I talk to want to be entrepreneurs, I tell them go work for the best in the industry, learn on their dime, total experience and then go off and learn on your own. So after 10 years, I’d kind of burnt out but my job wrote a motorcycle cross country for the summer and decided if I was going to work that hard, I should do it for myself and thus was born amazing animals. So we’ve done we foster a relationship building a bread breaking events. We’ve done it for 25 years. I have an amazing team. I have a 5000 square foot kitchen, we do cooking classes, we do events at venues around the city, on people’s homes, and in the last three months things have slowed down a little bit. The fact that you can’t get more than 10 people together, at least as of today in the Chicago area, means our event business is basically hibernating.

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