Sell What Is Best For You To Sell

Usually, caterers begin their business with a game plan to cater any type of event a buyer wishes to do. Their theory is that the best way to build a new business is by booking all events that come their way. This may be a reasonable marketing policy for a newly launched business, but it isn’t the wisest way to navigate after the first year. Determining what product lines to offer based on ease of production and maximum profitability is the best strategy when a caterer wants to limit their difficulties caused by mixing their better product lines with those that don’t benefit their profit goals.

Determine which of your product lines are better for your company by a combination of monitoring financial statistics and simple observation of what your customers buy the most. If weddings under 100 guests is one of your biggest selling product lines, but the profits from them are less than desirable, you should eliminate them from your product list by raising guest minimums and/or increasing pricing.

Changing or stopping certain product lines is often difficult to do if you are a caterer who tends to make decisions only with your heart. However, a surgeon does surgery and doesn’t sell services to people that have the flu. This doesn’t mean that a caterer does only a limited kind of catering. It does mean that a caterer needs to make sure they understand the profit footprint of what they sell, whether it’s weddings, picnics, box lunches, dinner parties, corporate galas or whatever.

The larger your annual volume, the more profit you are missing by failing to diagnose and evaluate the types of catering being sold. Notice that I used the word “missing” instead of losing. Often, larger caterers are actually making good profits from their hard work without examining the value of their product lines, but they are missing even more profit by not adjusting or eliminating one or more product lines. This is a practice that you cannot put off till tomorrow.

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