Good Is A Good Way To Go

Caterers have huge hearts. Caterers are wonderfully obsessed with doing good things for their clients and staff. The question is whether having a huge heart and a desire to do good things is a wise business strategy. I think it is.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve had the privilege of interfacing with all types and sizes of caterers. The one thing I know for sure is that, in catering, the nice caterers who also follow correct business practices, finish first. Staff and customers are drawn to caterers who offer kindness, fairness, empathy and a genuine desire to help.

This does not mean that a caterer has to say “yes” to all requests from staff or clients. A catering business still needs to create profit. As business people, caterers need to make wise decisions about things that affect their bottom line. The quality and longevity of the bottom line is directly tied into how clients and staff perceive the actions of a particular caterer.

Recently I’ve spoken with many caterers who realize, now more than ever, that profitability is essential to their being able to do even more good things for others. With profitability, caterers can offer staff the increased earnings that insure them the good things they wish for themselves and their families. Profitability also permits caterers to offer pro bono catering to their community charities.

Caterers who follow the doctrine of doing good things gain the respect of those around them. They set the tone for those they come in contact with to also do good things. When a caterer demonstrates to staff and clients actions that go above and beyond what is required, the end result is fierce loyalty towards that caterer. Doing good things is contagious.

What about caterers who don’t practice doing good things? I’ve known some. The chances are you know a few also. Don’t they make money? Some do. But the ones I’ve known usually have more than the average problems with both staff and clients. The old axiom “what goes around comes around” is usually their downfall.

In life and in business, good is good and bad is bad. It is hard to hide either the good or bad actions that one takes. Staff and clients make conclusions about a caterer based on the consistency of the caterer’s actions.

Practice doing good things. It helps you be a better person and run a better business. And if you don’t do good things, it’s likely to catch up with you sooner or later.

You Have To Want To Sell Before You Can Sell!!

The decision to buy is first made in the mind of the salesperson. If salespeople think that they can’t or shouldn’t make a sale, then they won’t. If they think that the fences are too far away for their talent to hit the ball over, then they won’t. If they think that the shopper isn’t going to buy today then they won’t sell anything until tomorrow. It’s just that simple.

What most salespeople do is size up a shopper as soon as they first meet. The salesperson looks at the way shoppers dress, the cars they drive, the houses they live in, the jewelry they are wearing. This is how they decide if the fences are too far away. In this career-killing trap, salespeople determine too quickly that there is no chance of selling a particular shopper today. Even worse, many salespeople believe that the majority of shoppers are “just looking” and don’t plan on buying today.

A professional, knowledgeable, caring sales talent understands that most shoppers are going to purchase from someone sooner or later. In the sales winner’s eyes, sooner is today and the reason they are going to buy today is the salesperson’s ability to “see” the sale in their own eyes first. The fences are never too far for these winners; they will hit home runs!

The salesperson earns the right to close a shopper with the time and energy that he or she has invested. Shoppers must let salespeople explain their prices and procedures for reserving a date. It’s the price they pay for the energy and education we provide to them.

Closing shouldn’t be a chore for the salesperson. When it’s done by skilled salespeople, it can be a beautiful thing—even a work of art (performance art)—when undertaken by skilled salespeople. The best salespeople are always expert closers—and yet have the most clients who love them!

Caterer's Often Come Last In The Mind Of The Buyer!

Sometimes it takes years for a caterer to realize that for many buyers, planning event food and the caterer are not the first or most important thing they are thinking about. Often, the caterer is last on the list of things to secure. Not always, but most of the time.

For example, in planning a wedding the bride may put the wedding dress, location, band or DJ, florist and photographer far ahead of the caterer. Brides, working with their parents, move very quickly to hire or buy those things that pertain to the romance and wonder of the wedding. The caterer tends to come in last.

This is a result of the public’s overall belief that food is not what will make the event memorable. Food is assumed. For a wedding, the gown and the flowers tend to rank the highest in the list of elements that make up the event. Interesting, isn’t it, that buyers putting on events seldom bargain with the florist, DJ or photographer for lower prices? Yet, there is no hesitation in hitting the caterer for a lower price.

Roman On Downsizing Your Volume?

Why? Why not? Profit stems from a ratio of costs and selling price. More sales can bring more profits, but they can also bring more errors and loss of money and less peace of mind. For most caterers, the need to sell more is simply a case of paying the bills with cash flow created by the extra orders, but profit is more important than volume. Create a proper balance between what you need and what you would have if you booked everything that comes along.

To downsize to gain profitability:

·   Raise your minimum order size in some, or all, of your product lines. This will cause some of the very small orders to fade away, leaving more time to work for bigger ones.

·   Limit the number of events you do on a particular day to insure that too many orders are not booked that would result in overtime or the need for extra culinary staff.

·   Tighten up your payment policies. If they don’t pay on time, maybe you don’t need this type of client. Why carry clients who are dead weight?

·   Close one day a week, which gives everyone the same day off.

·   Close for the slower season, especially if past sales history demonstrates that you suffer financially.

·   Decide to be either a social caterer Thursday through Sunday or a corporate caterer from Monday through Friday.

·   Raise your prices on product lines that create the most work.

·   Institute a concept of extra charges for tent events and events that are a long distance from your location.

·   Eliminate any breakfast orders or third-shift catering business that causes you to come early or stay late.

The concept is not to beat-up on your clients or to get tough. Instead, you are only trying to make your business more manageable and user-friendly. These are just suggestions, but they do lead to simple downsizing of your catering business and more profitable sales. A sale has either proper profit or not. The problem becomes serious when the orders you sold on a given day that did not have a proper profitability begin to soak up the profit from the profitable orders. Simply put, the profit from some orders is being used to neutralize the orders that didn’t have profit in the first place.

Note From Michael: The info above represents priceless consulting info. Please know that the info above is part of the problem and solution for many catering companies!

SALES VS. CULINARY... my opinion.

In the 1960s through the 1980s, when I was an active caterer in Chicago, catering was all about food. Buffet displays and plate-served dinners were done with traditional straightforward food presentation. The chef, who was often the owner of the company, was the leader and power player of the company.

The chef’s words and thoughts became the rules. Kitchens were kingdoms. The chef had the first and last word. Salespeople needed to get the chef’s permission for just about anything a customer wanted to do. Taste and function were the main goals of serving food. It was not much like today’s carefully designed and entertaining food presentations involving texture, action, color, height, exotic tableware and a plethora of buffet serving pieces and vessels. Before 1990, ideas for what to serve usually came from the chef. Today’s menus are influenced by a caterer’s culinary team, the Food Network, hospitality magazines, clients and a never-ending number of how-to entertaining books.

Today, customers usually come with their own vision of what and how they want to offer food and beverage to their guests. This has resulted in a major swing of influence in catering companies: Instead of selling chef-created ideas to clients, the sales team is bringing the clients’ ideas to the culinary team.

Culinary ideas come from both the culinary team and the sales staff, but since the salespeople speak first with shoppers, they are now more of a driving force than the chef. All parts of your company contribute to the overall success of your business, but the salespeople are the single most important element in the success. As the title of one of my books clearly states: If You Don’t Sell It, You Can’t Cook It.

The salesperson listens to the dreams and fears of the shopper, overcomes them with creative solutions and then makes the promises that turn shoppers into deposit-paying clients. There are always exceptions, but overall, today’s catering business needs to be salesdriven rather than culinary-driven.

I am in no way suggesting that the culinary team is unimportant or that the sales team is more important. In fact, the culinary team must have input into all culinary decisions. Culinary staff must have veto power over anything that may damage the company image or cause a sanitation breach.

A Wonderfully Weird Staffing Idea From Roman

One caterer tells potential part-time event staff that there are two levels of pay when working at events. The first one pays $3 more per hour than the second one. For the higher pay, the worker agrees to do the hard stuff–carrying tables, lifting, stacking, etc. The less expensive pay rate is for those who identify themselves ahead of time as wanting the easier jobs of pouring water, scraping dirty dishes, etc. As this caterer explains it, “At events we need both people that go the extra mile and those that do less. In this method of two levels of pay at least the ones I rely on to really work hard get paid for it.” Why should the worker who isn’t going to put out 110 percent get the same pay as one who is only putting out 70 percent?

Roman's Opinion: Discussion Points For Meetings #9

Here a some new discussion points for your next meeting:


1.You need to continually present the shopper with “real” scenarios.


2. Selling catering is not a service industry concept – it is all about negotiations.

3. Doing challenges that are impossible to solve is what makes people greater!

4. A salesperson needs to become more “interesting” as the sale advances.

5. The salesperson needs to connect with the inner self of the shopper.

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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Make Marketing Messages Shorter - IMPORTANT

People have little time to waste. Most get their marketing messages on the fly. Some tune out to all marketing messages that come their way whether they are reading, seeing or hearing them.

Many people look upon the constant marketing barrage they face each day as an invasion of their privacy and time. When creating a marketing piece, make the message short, concise and easy to understand. Some believe a marketing message has four seconds or less to capture enough interest for the target of the marketing to invest 10 additional seconds.

This means large blocks of copy are unwise. Use concise headlines and/or images to seduce the viewer to take more time. No matter how hostile a person is to mass marketing, they will not throw away anything that has a cat on it if they are cat owners! A “foodie” type person will do the same when a message has words or images that appeal to their particular interest.

Use A Coding System For Prospects

When prospects contact you to request information, label them with a code that quickly tells others on your staff how important this particular prospect might be to the business. The first part of the code deals with the projected revenue for the information request, such as a letter from A to D, with A being a prospect with a $10,000-plus potential event and D being one with under $2,000 volume potential. B might be $7,000 to $10,000 and C would be $2,000 to $7,000.

Then create a numbering system that reflects the prospect’s level of urgency from 1 to 4, with 1 being an alarm to your staff that a clients needs to be responded to very quickly while 4 says the prospect doesn’t have a wedding date yet and is just gathering information. With this system, all staff members know that a lead with a A-1 code is much more time critical than one with a D-4, so they need to contact the A-1 prospect before the D-4, even if the D-4 lead came in first. If this makes you feel uncomfortable, please challenge your thinking; most businesses use some kind of method to classify their leads and customers.


REQUEST: I'm looking for guest articles offering opinions, education, or whatever from our blog readers. So, if you want a bunch of people to know what you are thinking just forward your article to mikeroman@cateringguru.com. Articles should be between 300 to 900 words in length.


NOTE: If you didn’t receive this blog post directly to your computer via your email without needing to login to my blog site, then you should take a moment and register to get my posts automatically without going directly to the website. Simply input your email address in the field directly under my photo in the top right margin of my blog site.  You will receive an email to reconfirm and you are done

Worry About Everything Before It Leaves The Kitchen

Never assume anything in a kitchen. For off-premise caterers, never assume anything, period. Just because you think or were told that the pesto sauce is in one of the boxes on the delivery truck doesn’t mean that it’s there! It’s a long trip back to your facility and then the event with forgotten stuff. Check and double-check it. When a catering kitchen gets in full swing, errors often happen. Things go into the wrong packages and then on the wrong trucks and maybe even to the wrong event.

Use a yellow highlighter to check an item off on a packing list. The person responsible for double-checking the list uses the same paper as the first checker. Everything should be marked in yellow. The second checker uses a blue highlighter and runs the blue highlighter right over the yellow, which then turns green as the blue mixes with the yellow.

It’s not a matter of not trusting your kitchen staff; someone just needs to make sure that the correct amount of food was prepared for the event as requested by the executive chef or kitchen manager. Catering kitchens move at a very fast pace and often are just one small step away from chaos. Take a pan of food from an order ready to go and see if the food sent is the same amount as requested on the order or packing list. If the order calls for 42 chicken breasts, how many are really going? You should be just as concerned about sending too much as about sending too little.

Kitchen labor is one of the larger cost centers in a catering business. One way to cut these costs is to hire retired individuals who are looking for part-time work to pick up a few dollars and beat boredom. They are great for doing some of the tasks that regular staff don’t enjoy, like checking in deliveries, shaping up the walk-in cooler, counting out all the things that need to be counted and more.