Ina Garten gave up a job at the White House to become an entrepreneur — without business experience. Here’s what that experience taught her.

But Garten also wanted to create a place “where we had fun, where there was energy, laughter, and good times — the kind of place that made you want to come to work in the morning.”

She recalled helping her teenage staff when they were going through a breakup or fighting with their mom. She would walk them to the dock across the street and help them calm down.

And at the end of every summer she threw a huge party to thank her employees for all their hard work.

“I worked with an extraordinary group of people,” Garten wrote. “I think it said a lot that so many of them came back every summer. Some of them ended up going into the food business after college because they fell in love with it at Barefoot.”

You can subtly communicate authority with the way you dress — or accessorize

When Garten took over the Barefoot Contessa store, she realized the customers were treating her the way they treated the rest of her staff. But she wanted to make it clear that she was the owner and wondered if her uniform — “a flouncy white cotton midi skirt paired with a white top” — was missing something.

“I wanted to look like the woman in charge, so I needed something that made me look like the owner,” she wrote.

Garten walked across the street to Joan Boyce Jewelry and bought “the biggest gold necklace I’d ever seen.” When she walked back into Barefoot Contessa, Garten said customers began asking, “Is this your store? It’s wonderful,” and treating her “totally differently.”

“I love when changing your behavior — in this case, how I dressed — changes everything without your saying a word,” Garten wrote. “It’s a lesson that I’ve used many times in my life.”

Think about every interaction with the customer

“Mom and Ina motivated each other,” Sybille van Kempen, Pump’s daughter, previously told Business Insider. “They shared ideas and supported each other’s growth.”

In her memoir, Garten wrote that she chose to work in food because she wanted a “life filled with good times and meaningful connections.”

“Business doesn’t have to be cutthroat and isolating,” she said. “It’s much more fun and productive to exchange ideas, to be genuinely curious about how other people do things, to be generous, and to root for a competitor’s success.”

‘Never dig in your heels on a negotiation, especially if it’s just about money’

In the summer of 1984, Garten got an offer to rent a space in East Hampton for a second Barefoot Contessa location. The tenant at the time was the famed Dean & DeLuca grocery store.

When Garten called Joel Dean to discuss the proposition, he revealed that he didn’t want to leave the space but refused to pay $15 a square foot for the store. Instead, he had offered the landlord $14.50.

“For fifty cents a square foot, he was willing to walk away from a successful business? That was crazy,” Garten wrote.

Garten said she strongly advised Dean to stay in the space, but he refused to change his mind. So she opened the second Barefoot Contessa, and he moved Dean & DeLuca to a new location up the street — for $23 a square foot. A few years later, the struggling business had to close.

“I had tried to talk him out of it because it was the right thing to do,” Garten said. “But in the end, it was a cautionary tale.”

When you’re running on autopilot, it’s time for something new

Barefoot Contessa was a huge hit, but Garten knew she’d had enough after 18 years.

“What I didn’t like about running Barefoot Contessa was overshadowing what I used to love,” she wrote in her memoir. “I felt that I wasn’t doing anything new, and I certainly wasn’t bringing any creativity to my work.”

“In the nineties, it seemed insane to walk away from the success of Barefoot Contessa,” she added. “But I was pretty miserable and couldn’t see another way.”

Garten sold Barefoot Contessa to her chef and manager in 1996 and took over an office above the store. There, she dabbled in the stock market and considered real-estate investing as she tried to figure out her next move. Her husband Jeffrey suggested that Garten think of another way to explore the food business.

And so, in that same office, she finally wrote her first cookbook.