If you run a catering business, you must know how to manage it effectively. Although this is true of all types of enterprises, the catering industry is particularly volatile, which rewards clear organisation and seamlessly trained teams.
After all, you will be working in small teams, making it difficult to manage your staff’s productivity and crucial details about your service. These may include customer service, presentation, food quality, how much your guests enjoyed your service, and whether you arrived on time.
Feedback may be available from the client, but this is a poor feedback loop in comparison to you being there yourself. As a result, if you do not hire, train and organise your team well enough, your business can rapidly spiral out of control, with little you can do to stop it. This is why you have to learn how to improve your catering business management skills to ensure your company is successful in the long run.
Here’s what you need to know:
Table of Contents
Make sure you are fully covered
The catering industry is difficult to operate in for a litany of reasons, but one of the most dreaded problems is an issue with your service (particularly the food itself). Not only can it leave your reputation dented, but it can leave you vulnerable to legal proceedings. For example, if someone accidentally choked on your food, then you could be liable for a lawsuit, even if it was nothing to do with you. You need protection to ensure this doesn’t negatively impact your business or its bottom line.
This is when having specialist catering insurance can help massively. It helps protect you from instances like those mentioned above and also helps with unexpected staff wage payoffs and other incidents that can threaten your company’s health. If you want to learn more about catering insurance, click here.
Make sure you train your teams properly
A common problem experienced by many different types of businesses is a lack of effective training. This is especially true of small, hands-on companies like catering firms. Why? Because you will likely be the person who built the business from the ground up, you will have your own techniques and methods for completing tasks, but you may not have passed this on to your team, instead presuming they understand what to do.
This can lead to mistakes, which in turn compels you to take over an employee’s role and fail to delegate it properly. In the long term, this can have a catastrophic effect. You will be unable to grow or move into a management role, and quality control will be minimal.
You should therefore put a rigid training regimen in place to ensure everyone is on the same page. It will help you to delegate important tasks to individuals with full trust that they can complete them as well as you can.
Setting Up an Efficient Kitchen
Having an efficient kitchen set up is essential if you want your catering business to run efficiently and cost-effectively. You will need a space that you can use exclusively for all your catering and food preparation tasks, or invest in equipment that can be taken apart for storage after every event.
Aside from the physical space, consider the safety and health aspects of your business. Make sure you’ve read relevant government regulations about food safety and kitchen design requirements for commercial use. Make sure that your kitchen layout allows for adequate storage, workflows, safe disposing of garbage and cleaning.
Find a niche and stick to it
Although you might think that catering is a niche, this isn’t true. It’s an industry with a wide variety of sub-niches, each with its own audience. To help set your business apart, you should specialise in one of these niches. Not only will it help you train your staff and position your marketing, but you will also have less competition and an increased market share.
Finding Suppliers
Finding suppliers with quality ingredients, competitive prices and reliable delivery services are essential for running a successful catering business. It’s important to build relationships with vendors you can trust to provide consistently high-quality ingredients for all of your clients’ events.
When selecting suppliers, keep an eye out for those that have comprehensive product lists with diverse options, so you can meet the needs of various types of events. In addition, do research and look for suppliers who use sustainable practices whenever possible.
Finally, establish payment terms that are agreeable to both parties involved — from invoicing processes and due dates to format preferences (cash/check/credit). Working out every detail in advance can help ensure smooth transactions in the future!
Evaluating and Improving Performance
For any business, evaluating and improving performance is key to ensuring success. This is especially true in the catering industry, where customer satisfaction is paramount. Regular assessment of the quality of your catering services will help you identify areas for improvement, while tracking key metrics can provide actionable insights.
Analyzing customer feedback can also offer valuable information on what you’re doing well and where there might be room for improvement. Survey responses can provide insight into both customer satisfaction and preferences, helping you create or modify menus to suit their needs. Additionally, evaluating staffing performance can ensure that the team remains organized and capable of efficiently delivering your services.
It’s important for the success of your business to make changes as needed in order to stay competitive. To do this efficiently and effectively, take regular stock of your operations, track key measures over time to identify incremental improvements, monitor employee performance and solicit feedback from clients on a regular basis. Through consistent evaluation and feedback from customers as well as employees, you will be able to better understand how to run your catering business more effectively.
By consistently evaluating performance across all facets of your catering business, spotting potential problems before they become serious issues, as well as identifying opportunities for improvement, you can make sure that yours is running effectively each day, every day.
