A catering company can be busy every day and still know surprisingly little about where its money actually comes from. The sales team remembers several large corporate accounts, the owner has a feeling that medical offices order frequently, and somebody in marketing insists that law firms are the best customers. Meanwhile, the kitchen only knows
A restaurant usually does not hire an entire catering department on day one. It starts with somebody taking a few larger orders between normal restaurant duties. Then one employee becomes particularly good at handling office managers and event planners. That person starts bringing in repeat business. Another employee begins coordinating deliveries. Accounting notices that corporate
A catering department can look surprisingly small from the outside while moving a serious amount of money. Two salespeople, one manager and a handful of drivers may be responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual corporate orders. The kitchen sees food leaving the building. Management sees revenue. Accounting sees invoices and customer balances
The person who sells a catering order may never cook a single tray of food. The employee who cooks it may never know whether the customer paid. The driver who finally meets the client might be the only person from the company the customer ever sees face to face. Then, days later, somebody in accounting
A busy catering company can have $40,000 worth of food going out in a week without most customers ever realizing how many people touched those orders. Somebody sold the event, another employee checked the menu, cooks prepared the food, another team packed it, drivers took it across town and accounting eventually had to make sure
A restaurant can reach $500,000 or $1 million in annual catering sales without looking anything like a traditional catering company from the street. Customers still walk through the front door for lunch, cooks still work the line, and the dining room may remain the most visible part of the business. Behind the scenes, however, a
The catering manager at a busy restaurant usually knows which days are going to hurt before the kitchen even turns the ovens on. Thursday might have three office lunches, a school event and a 200-person rehearsal dinner. Friday already has another dozen deliveries scheduled. Meanwhile, sales is booking events for next month and accounting is
There is usually no formal moment when a restaurant becomes a serious catering company. Nobody walks into the kitchen one morning and announces that the business has crossed some invisible line. It happens more quietly. A few office lunches turn into recurring corporate accounts. One employee starts spending most of the day on catering calls.
A restaurant can build a surprisingly large catering business before realizing it is no longer running “a little catering on the side.” At first, somebody answers the phone, writes down a large order and tells the kitchen what to make. A few years later, there may be corporate accounts ordering every week, invoices sitting unpaid
A restaurant doing serious catering eventually realizes that the food is only half the business. The other half is knowing which company ordered last month, who still owes money, which buyer always needs delivery at a side entrance and whether an upcoming event is actually confirmed or merely sitting as a quote. That is where