Passion and Purpose
Kevin Curry, BBA ’04, found his direction and destiny with his health and nutrition brand, FitMenCook.
By Alberta Phillips
Kevin Curry’s decision to become an entrepreneur stemmed from a real-life scenario similar to the common anxiety dream: You show up for the final exam completely unprepared in a class you inexplicably neglected.
Certainly, there were signs that Curry, BBA Business Honors ’04, was headed to a dramatic reckoning.
In 2012, he was answering questions from a food blog he started as a hobby a year earlier to “save his diet” and improve his fitness. Readers were flocking to it. The problem was he felt pulled to engage with them while on a work call with his employer, Dell.
“I remember thinking at the time that something would have to give,” Curry says.
His blog, FitMenCook, had become a passion project for his new interest in wellness and was supplanting his desire for a corporate job that had once seemed ideal in the way it blended his zeal for marketing with social media. The tipping point came a year later, as he drove to Austin from Dallas, where he worked from home, for a meeting with his Dell colleagues.
Instead of arriving the night before as usual, Curry dashed out that morning and arrived just minutes before the meeting started. He hopped out of his car but couldn’t find his work bag in the back seat or trunk.
“I was mortified,” he says. “The only thing I brought with me was my gym bag and lunch. I forgot my work bag with my laptop — everything. I thought, ‘How in the world would I explain that I’m here for a meeting to present all this stuff and I don’t even have my laptop?’”
That wake-up call sped his decision to become his own boss. He still keeps the message he sent to his social media followers the day he took the leap: “Today I did something radical. I quit my job,” he posted Jan. 20, 2014, on Instagram. “I walked away from a great-paying job with amazing benefits because of two things: passion and purpose.”
Curry was 33, but he had discovered that, somewhat effortlessly, he had struck a chord with hundreds, then thousands, of others on the same journey to better health. He had amassed nearly half a million followers on Instagram, no small feat when the platform was relatively new.
Since then, he has racked up a string of successes, including a best-selling 2018 cookbook and a top-selling FitMenCook app that consistently ranks in the top three apps in the food and drink category in over 80 countries. It has more than 7,000 five-star reviews on the Apple App Store.
As founder of Dallas-based FitMenCook, Curry continues to write and develop recipes and sell new products for an emerging sector of his business, The Fit Cook. His first product, a line of spice blends, is among the top-grossing seasonings on Amazon.
In addition to tending a growing online community of more than 2 million followers, Curry has made his way into American homes with regular appearances on “Live! With Kelly and Ryan,” the “Rachael Ray Show,” “Today,” and “Good Morning America.” He has been featured in Forbes, Huffington Post, Men’s Health, Guideposts, Self, and Shape magazine. He even got to work with then-first lady Michelle Obama on her Let’s Move! campaign through the Partnership for a Healthier America, still one of his favorite projects.
One of the 2.2%
As a Black business owner, Curry is in rare company. Though Black Americans make up 13% of the population, they owned just 2.2% of the nation’s 5.7 million businesses with at least one paid employee in 2017, according to the Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey.
That number is expected to shrink as the COVID-19 pandemic shutters more businesses. At the same time, the Black Lives Matter movement is drawing attention to the plight of Black businesses and inequities across all aspects of society.
Even before the public’s heightened awareness of such matters, Curry had incorporated diversity practices into his business.
“Diversity and inclusion are topics our team has addressed with potential and current partners,” Curry explains. “A company’s ongoing commitment to representation is especially important if the brand historically hasn’t worked with people who look like me.”
He says he is “blessed” not only to maintain his business but to grow it. He plans to expand into a new line of wellness teas this fall, along with several new spice blends and kitchen products in 2021. In January, he’ll leap into meal preparation to sell online, just in time to help with those New Year’s resolutions to lose weight.
“Today I did something radical. I quit my job. I walked away from a great-paying job with amazing benefits because of two things: passion and purpose.” — Kevin Curry
Though Curry didn’t learn to cook at the McCombs School of Business, he did learn the marketing, management, finance, and technical skills to turn a former hobby into a successful business. His most beneficial lessons weren’t all in a classroom.
Running a business so heavily reliant on social media, he says, “can be overwhelming.” It was the rigor, pace, and environment of the Business Honors Program at McCombs that “prepared me for the unique challenges and added pressure of being under a microscope,” he says.
At McCombs, Curry says he learned multitasking skills that prepared him for a competitive, diverse environment. “I was working in groups with people from different backgrounds, juggling tight project deadlines, and making sure my communications were effective and meaningful.”
How He Did It
Success came in stages for Curry, who benefitted from timing, social media trends, and bootstrapping.
He started blogging to get free advice for controlling his weight from a lifestyle of business travel, late hours at work, attending client lunches and happy hours, and eating lavish meals. He was gaining and losing weight in cycles and feeling bad about his appearance.
“Your health easily can take a back seat to your ambition,” he says. “I posted every single thing I was eating. It wasn’t tied to getting revenue, but just to save my own health and wellness.”
At that time, few people were sharing healthy recipes and tips on Instagram. His posts, along with his personal journey to better health, resonated.
Engagement blew up, prompting Instagram to promote Curry’s content on its “Popular Page,” which Curry says helped many people to find it. In turn, more people shared it, and more followers arrived.
By sharing content on Instagram and Facebook, “I turned them into my own type of blog,” he says. “I wasn’t a chef. I was just a guy clumsily putting things together, trying to lose weight and feel better. And people could see themselves inside that story.”
Some of his posts, including a healthy banana split made with Greek yogurt, went viral. His account exploded, going from 10,000 followers in November 2012, about three months after he started his blog, to over 100,000 by February 2013.
That’s when he started monetizing it. Initially, Curry says, it didn’t occur to him that he could make a living off his blogging until a small brand approached him about making recipes using its product. Afterwards, he began making deals with other small brands and using some of his savings to grow the business. He had proved himself to be a credible voice, learning about nutrition and fitness the same way he had learned business management: by studying, and by trial and error. On a tight budget, he bought and devoured second-hand books. He also got advice from experts, who responded to his posts.
“To some degree, FitMenCook helped save my life because I always felt disconnected from the value I was creating in the world. FitMenCook gave me that. People were emailing me, saying ‘I tried this,’ or ‘I lost five pounds.’” — Kevin Curry
Bigger deals followed with more brands and media companies, such as Men’s Health and Bodybuilding.com, taking his content and sending it out to massive audiences. Media syndicates came knocking: eHow and Tastemade, among them. Curry generated content for those popular platforms and their global audiences.
A World View
Curry embraced those global ties. His world view had expanded at McCombs.
As a 1999 graduate of DeSoto High School in the Dallas area, Curry initially planned to become a missionary, even though he had graduated in the top 5% of his class. That decision mostly was driven by financial concerns, but also Christian values central to his family and a desire to travel. That financial hurdle was removed when Curry got a scholarship to attend The University of Texas at Austin.
At UT, he met students from around the world, enhancing his curiosity about other languages and cultures. He took a year off to study in Ecuador, living with local families and honing his Spanish, which he speaks nearly fluently. That experience inspired translating his company’s food videos into Spanish and helping people with ailments such as diabetes, which Curry notes disproportionately affects people of color.
Curry earned two undergraduate degrees, in business management information systems at McCombs and Hispanic studies at the College of Liberal Arts. His Plan 1 thesis was “Vestiges of African Dialects in Afro Ecuadorian Spanish,“ because, he says, he noticed Black Ecuadorians sounded like Black Cubans and Dominicans, cutting off the ends of words in conversation. “That piqued my curiosity. I wanted to see if there were any patterns or inferences that could be made regarding language and the diaspora.”
After graduating in 2004, Curry worked at KPMG in risk management. He then went on to graduate school from 2006 to 2008, earning a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.
Grappling With Depression
At Harvard, Curry realized he suffered from depression — and had since childhood. Now it was getting worse. Boston’s seasonal changes were more extreme than what he had been used to, and Curry immersed himself in the city’s pub culture. Drinking heavily, he started gaining and losing weight, he says.
When the economic bust hit in 2008, Curry, newly graduated but unemployed and fresh out of an unsuccessful relationship, headed back to his family home in Texas, where he wrestled with alcoholism and thoughts of self-harm.
He saw a therapist and got on medication, which helped restore him mentally, physically, and professionally. He found work through a fellowship at the Dallas City Manager’s Office of Cultural Affairs and got hired at Dell in 2012, first as a contractor and then as its social media manager.
“I became the young kid sitting with the C-suite executives, explaining why social media is the new way of communicating with our clients,” he says.
Ultimately, food and fitness healed him, ending his medication use and turning his life around, he says.
“To some degree, FitMenCook helped save my life because I always felt disconnected from the value I was creating in the world. FitMenCook gave me that. People were emailing me, saying ‘I tried this,’ or ‘I lost five pounds.’”
He says he still remembers that early blog post that brought a big connection.
“Hey, I saw your recipe,” a woman wrote. “Just had it over here for dinner. Cheers from Sweden.”
“I thought, ‘Wow! I just helped someone from Sweden have a healthier dinner.’”
Becoming a Celebrity
Clint Tuttle, a senior lecturer at McCombs, says he never envisioned his friend reaching celebrity status back when they were in business school together. After all, Curry was the down-to-earth guy who played pranks and made people laugh. Even then, however, Curry displayed his authenticity, Tuttle says.
“When you think of these people who are influencers … this persona that he projects is the exact same person he is,” Tuttle says. “It’s not surprising he has become so famous. He just wakes up, turns the camera on, and everybody likes it.”
In growing his brand and rolling out new products, Curry took on a business partner, Donald Short, a former international CEO for The Coca-Cola Co.
“Getting him on board to help structure and advise has been extremely helpful,” Curry says.
Short says he knew when they met in 2018 at one of Curry’s book signings that Curry had the right stuff to be his own brand: a loyal following; curiosity about all things food, fitness, and business; and charisma. Together, they launched “The Fit Cook” in 2019, starting with the spice blends. “Kevin brings the energy to the party,” Short says. “His business was built organically by a young man who was curious and would share with his followers.”
Curry sees more opportunities in the country’s social justice movement in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd.
“This is a tremendous moment for us,” says Curry. “The amount of unrest, and particularly that the calls for justice around the world are not coming just from folks who look exactly like me — that gives me hope that this time will be different.”
Like so many Americans, Curry is ready to be done with 2020 — a year that made Anthony Fauci and Breonna Taylor household names. This year also saw the tragic deaths of two towering figures in the Black community, sports icon Kobe Bryant and film star Chadwick Boseman, aka “The Black Panther.”
“Kobe shocked me, but Chadwick hurt me,” he says. “Chadwick was the first time I saw someone who looks like me as a superhero in a blockbuster film. To know he was battling cancer, carrying all that while giving us so much — he literally was a real-life hero.”
Curry holds that and other lessons close as he inspires and shares with others. His advice for emerging Black entrepreneurs: “Stay the course. I didn’t realize initially how persistent and tenacious you have to be when you have a company.”
And, he says, “Sometimes being in the same place doesn’t mean you are stagnant, but rather growing something. Sometimes you just have to stay planted wherever you are.” Curry is planted precisely where he wants to be.
Alberta Phillips is an Austin-based independent journalist, who formerly worked for the Austin American-Statesman as a reporter, columnist, and editorial writer.
This article appeared in the winter 2020 issue of McCombs magazine. Click on the link to see the full issue.
