Discussion Points For Salespeople

Sit with yourself or other salespeople and try to decide what I mean about these statements below:

1. Selling is a bunch of words and emotions all set between parentheses.

 
2. Not hearing what you are about to say is the enemy of successful selling.


3. Selling is teaching.


4. There is room for “whacky” in selling.


5. The salesperson’s performance is their instrument. Learn to play it.

Another View On Kitchen Staffing

A chef earning $15 per hour shouldn’t be making box lunches that sell for $7 each; a kitchen staffer that earns $8 per hour should be making the box lunches. The $15 an hour, higher skilled chef should not work at all on the box lunches, but rather concentrate on the more costly menu items being prepared for the day. This is at the core of the manufacturing process: Labor costs need to be correctly applied by skill and cost to functions.

To go one step further: The $8 per hour lower-skilled person should start their day at 6 a.m. and leave by 2 p.m. The $15 per hour chef, unless needed early for some special reason, should start later in the day. Staff should be brought into the kitchen on an as-needed basis by level of skills and orders. Your first reaction might be that is not possible in the real world. The answer lies in the numbers associated with the dollars spent for producing your menu items in relation to your profit picture.

A manufacturer hires more staff when it has more business and doesn’t hesitate to let staff go when business is down. Caterers tend to maintain constant staff levels most of the year, even when business is slow, because they believe that if they don’t keep their staff busy and paid on a regular basis, the staff will leave and go elsewhere. In essence, many caterers are subsidizing the welfare of their staff with profitability from the company. The answer to what is right or wrong in this matter is up to you.

Caterers, like manufacturers, create events that were sold weeks or months earlier. They know what they need to buy for these events and how many kitchen staff they will need for any given day in the future. This is a huge advantage over restaurateurs, who can never be sure of what they will sell on a given day. Caterers should be able to increase profits by minimizing wasted purchases and staffing based on need.

Whenever possible, eliminate kitchen overtime. By forecasting staff requirements, you can budget your costs and monitor sales to insure that overtime is eliminated. If you have a wonderful future day filled with properly sold events with correct profit margins, why should a salesperson be permitted to take another event that now requires the culinary team to stay past eight hours and incur additional costs that can only be covered by taking profit away form the other properly priced events? From a business point of view this makes no sense.

Close dates that already have reached the point of maximum profitability within an eight-hour period. Once the event booking calendar closes a date, it can only be opened again if additional sales for that date are sold at higher than normal prices to cover any overtime costs. Another way to avoid paying overtime is to stagger scheduled shifts, so as one eight-hour shift is ending, another one is beginning or overlapping.

Have you checked out my new website?
Don't forget about my new sales clinics coming to
Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco!
http://cateringguru.com/upcoming-education/

Discussion Points For Meetings & Personal Thought!

Just read them - think about them - and establish your thoughts on what they mean or might mean!


1. Double check all bids or proposals for accuracy before you mail or email them.


2. Just because you needed the smaller orders to launch and build up your first customers doesn’t mean you need to keep taking them.


3. Before you seek new staff from outside sources to fill new positions, take time to ask if any of your existing staff wishes to interview for the new job.


4. For kitchen meals, let all the culinary and kitchen staff from the chefs to the pot washer take turns planning and making recipes that they use at home for family meals.


5. Most caterers thrive on the excitement that a crisis brings.


6. Check the truck twice before it leaves! It helps if the person checking the second time is not the same person that checked it the first time.

Have you checked out my new website?
Don't forget about my new sales clinics coming to
Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco!
http://cateringguru.com/upcoming-education/

Analyze And Understand Product Lines

Catering is not a product line. Catering is your business. What your catering business sells are products. Your product lines are these products grouped by similarities. General Motors sells cars, but Chevy and Buick are examples of their product lines. When someone asks you what you sell, resist answering, “catering” and answer, “weddings, corporate galas, dinner parties,” because these are examples of the product lines you offer.

Many caterers consider weddings of more than 300 guests a different product line than weddings with fewer than 100 guests because they have different production costs and impact on the business. The same would be true for box lunches that sell at $7 per person versus those that sell for more or less.

Caterers need to evaluate their product lines and decide which are most profitable. Track them to make sure you know which ones are good for your business and which ones are not. Stop selling those that have the lowest return and expand those that add the most to the bottom line.

A product line is evaluated by monitoring orders by type, number of guests, price and overall costs. First, organize all your past orders by type, size and revenue and see what you get. What you find will amaze you. For example, a box lunch order for 200 may have more profit in it than a wedding for 50 when you run the numbers. The decision, based on what you just learned, would be to promote box lunches for larger groups while raising the minimums for weddings to 100 or more.

Have you checked out my new website?
Don't forget about my new sales clinics coming to
Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco!
http://cateringguru.com/upcoming-education/

Discussion Points That Will Make You Think!

Think about these "points" either with yourself alone or in a group at a meeting!


1. The amount of deposit required isn't as important as the fact that the deposit is actually paid.   
2. The essence of leadership is trust!
3. Make your buyer understand that you are more concerned with the success of their event than just making the sale!
4. Great caterers know when not to take an event.  
5. The best salespeople understand when to turn a particular shopper over to another salesperson when they are striking out or have a personality conflict.
6. Which would be better... an annual sales volume of $800,000 resulting from the sale of 450 events or $800,000 of annual sales from 350 orders? Working less for the same volume is a good thing!
   

Thoughts On Pricing

Proper price is achieved when buyers feel they are getting a fair price and the caterer is getting a correct amount of profit. The price of the catering is not as crucial as the profit received. Few caterers overcharge clients, but many worry far too much about losing bookings because they have higher prices than their competitors.

Most business people in other industries have no problem with charging what the market will bear. Caterers, on the other hand, seem always to want to be fair with their prices. What they sometimes forget is that fair should mean a win-win situation. A caterer can’t win just by making a sale, especially if the price for that sale is lower than it could be—or should be. Fair pricing means the client has an outstanding event, the guests become future clients of the caterer, and the caterer prospers!

If caterers use only what is taught in the foodservice schools, such as cost times three, as their main mark-up guide for every event, they will never prosper and may even end up in debt. Caterers need to use a mark-up beginning at four times cost and hopefully five and six times for certain difficult catering situations. There are always exceptions to this concept.

Caterers cannot establish a proper pricing policy if they charge every buyer the same price for the same things. No two events are the same, even if the menus are the same. Some events are just harder. Some clients are more demanding than others. When an event is going to be harder and the host more demanding, the price needs to increase to cover the additional costs that will be associated with it.

A True Fish Story From A Great Caterer!

NOTE FROM MICHAEL ROMAN:

OK.... let''s start the week off with a FUN and TRUE story from my dear friend Cade Nagy of Catering By Design in Denver. You need to know that Cade is one of the funniest people I know. He has a charming boldness balanced by a genuine kindness for all things and people. Ingrid is his lovely and amazing wife who is his partner in their successful catering business. Those who already know Cade will get instant "joy" from his email and photo below. Everyone else should go out of their way to meet both Cade and Ingrid!

Here is the unedited email and photo I received from Cade:

Speaking of fishing. This is a true story. NO BS!!!!

Last week, I was on vacation with the sexy, Ingrid, (in a two piece mind you). Sitting on the beach in Destin Florida with its crystal clear, emerald green waters and snow white sandy beaches, minding my business checking out some local hotties down a few umbrellas, when, out of nowhere appears a fish swimming in circles 100 yards out to sea. It drew quite a crowd of walkers by wondering just what it was. So what do I do being the fisherman I am, I swim out to the beast to get a closer look. It appeared to have been hooked by a previous fisherman and was injured.

  So using my quick ninja skills, I grab him by the tail, and proceed to try and help him swim away by slowly rocking him forward and backward to get water moving in his gills. I then check his gills to see if they are clear from plastic bags and other debris. They were. After ten minutes of trying, I see that I’ve drawn a crowd of passers by on the beach. So I swim the little fella to shore. Pose for a few a photos. Answer some questions. Show of my buff tan. Then give him to some guy from Alabama who says he’d love to eat him. So I tell him I’m a chef, go to his room to clean it up for him and became his hero.

  It was a 38” 19lb Red Fish caught with my bare hands BABY!! I TAMED THE BEAST!!!!

Cade With His Fish!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Have you checked out my new website?
Don't forget about my new sales clinics coming to
Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco!
http://cateringguru.com/upcoming-education/

Guest Article: How to Succeed in Business Like Ozzy Osbourne by Jon Wool, Finesse Catering & Events

Lollapalooza recently announced Black Sabbath as a headliner at this summer’s music festival. A news program covering the story cut to concert footage of the band playing “Iron Man.” The hard rock and wild electric guitar riffs brought me right back to my early teen years when I tested the patience of my parents and neighbors by turning the speakers of my record player out the windows and blasting Sabbath’s songs. I began to reflect on the longevity of the careers of the band and its founder. Say what you will about the crazed and dazed Ozzy Osbourne but, over 40 years after the inception of Black Sabbath, they are going stronger than ever. In fact they have sold millions of albums and have won just about every music award possible. It stands to reason that such durability is no accident.

It’s the kind of durability that we in the catering and hospitality industry crave. Osbourne and mates are shining examples of building a business around established systems. One of the most important tasks in business is creating internal systems that generate predictable results. Once you have solid systems in place, you can weather any change-over in personnel. Sabbath has had over 20 musicians join, quit, and return over the years. Regardless of this “revolving door” model of employee retention, the band’s concept, format, and methods have stayed the same.

If rowdy and outlandish hard rockers can instinctively follow these business principles, why do we struggle to do so in hospitality? Our chefs want to cook “their” food rather than menus requested by the client. Or, a cook wants to riff rather than follow recipes. Sales people hunger for big-name galas at the expense of profitable margins. Or they burden the kitchen with impossible demands like scheduling tastings on the busiest weekends. When pressed for time and under pressure, ops people are tempted to cut a corner or two. Worst of all is when owners are afraid to ruffle employees’ feathers by drawing clear lines. Employers justify their failure to formulate protocol by saying “it is a lot of work” or “there’s never enough time” or “the staff won’t buy into a new process.” These are all excuses that hold companies back from reaching and maintaining excellence over the years.

If we catering and hospitality professionals cannot step back and create reliable systems at every level of our companies, we are not likely to experience the sustained success enjoyed by Black Sabbath. Where will your company be in 40 years?

Rock on!

Jon Wool