5 Tips for Catering Start Ups

Catering is a gateway to a thriving restaurant business. If you are already a restauranteur, getting into the catering business can increase your revenue and improve your reputation. However, a catering business can be tricky to operate, and proper planning is essential to improve your chances of success. 

Here are some tips for catering start-ups.

1. Encourage Reviews 

Reviews are essential. They can make or break your catering business. So, encourage your customers to write reviews. It can improve your reputation and attract new customers to your business. Good reviews allow you to stand out from your competitors. 

Don't be afraid to receive complaints and negative comments. Use these as an opportunity to improve your business. Instead of reacting defensively against customer complaints, utilize the feedback constructively. Customers will appreciate you even more and continue to patronize your catering business.

Reviews allow your customers to choose you over other restaurants. Most customers rely heavily on online reviews when deciding where to eat since there are too many options. If they find that many customers are pleased with your catering business, they will most likely choose you over others. 

While there are now various means customers can leave reviews online, you can also encourage them to leave comments on your website. Highlight positive reviews and write them on comment cards, which you can display at the front desk. More importantly, try to respond to feedback and thank those who left a review, including those with complaints. If the customers feel you listen and value their complaints, they will eagerly be back for more.

1. Get the Right Equipment 

One of the most important investments you'll make when opening up a catering business is the equipment, which includes cutlery, glassware, crockery, linen, etc. There is such a wide variety of catering equipment available that it can be daunting to decide on the most suitable one. But you must understand that the equipment is the soul of the business. It's a massive investment, so you must make the best decisions. 

First, ensure you have enough budget to purchase the equipment needed to operate your catering business. Remember, you need commercial-grade equipment and not just any standard equipment. Therefore, expect to spend a lot of money. You cannot operate a catering business with standard kitchen equipment since they cannot handle busy days in a commercial kitchen. 

Conduct thorough research on the type and level of equipment you need for your catering business. Find out the most reliable brands to get the most out of your investment. You should spend money on the right brands, allowing your business to operate uninterrupted. The last thing you want is for the equipment to be dysfunctional and interrupt your business operations.

1. Prioritise Food Hygiene / Allergy Awareness

In the catering industry, taste plays a crucial role in deciding the customer's preferences. However, it's unfortunate that some caterers do not prioritize hygiene. Hygiene should be a priority right from the kitchen until they serve the food to the customer. There are many reasons they tend to neglect hygiene. Among these are low budgets and the lack of proper training. 

Thus, one of the things you need to do when opening a catering business is to invest in food hygiene courses. You and your employees should undergo training on food hygiene, as it teaches you what is required to run a catering business and the hygiene standards you must follow.

Ensuring food safety and hygiene can be a challenge for many caterers. Many of those starting a catering business operate with thin profit margins, leading them to cut costs to increase profitability. As a result, they ended up cutting down activities essential for food safety, such as hygiene training, regular health check on employees, sanitization, and implementation of proper storage and cleaning practices. 

But doing so will only cause more harm than good. Please implement proper hygiene practices to avoid creating the opportunity to contaminate your food products and transmit foodborne illnesses, which could significantly ruin your business reputation.

1. Do Competitor Research 

Catering requires a lot of planning and research before opening your business. There's a lot of information to learn, such as knowing who your competitors are. Conducting competitor research is essential because it lets you know who your fierce competitors are and the strategies they implement to be successful in the industry.

The purpose of competitor research is to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and compare their strategies to your own. Doing so will allow you to find a gap in the market, which you can then address to stand out from the rest. In addition, a competitor analysis can help you enhance your business strategy and tells you how you can outdo your competitors to gain the attention of your target customers. 

So, how do you know who your competitors are? The best way to determine if another business is your key competitor is to ask yourself the following questions - What services do they provide? Are you targeting similar target audiences? Do they operate close to you? Aside from your local competitors, you also need to consider those businesses with the same search terms as you.

1. Find the Right Location 

Location is vital to the overall success of your catering business. Even if you're setting up a mobile catering business, you should know the right place to pitch your business. Get your positioning right for visibility, viability, and easy reaching out to your target customers. Conduct thorough research on the area you plan to set up, look for commercial agents, and discuss footfall patterns and rents.

Finding the right location also requires knowing the right qualities to look for in a potential space. Analyze your area, read about customer demographics, and consider where your competitors are. These are some of the most important aspects to consider when choosing the location for your business. Choose an area that's inviting and welcoming to customers. It should create a positive association with clients, allowing them to think highly of your business.

Build Trust to Build a Successful Business

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It’s arguable that trust is the single biggest factor in whether your business is successful. Think about it, would you trust a business that you knew virtually nothing about, whose reputation was shady and who kept the important stuff secret with your money? Probably not, right? So you can’t expect customers to come flocking to your new business if you don’t do anything to build up trust.

The good news is there are lots of relatively simple things any entrepreneur business owner can build a trusting relationship with prospective customers. Here are a few of the simplest and most important:

Register Your Company

It should be a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many entrepreneurs launch their business before they’ve dotted the I’s and crossed the T’s. Sure, you might be raring to get started with your latest money-making idea, but you do need to get all of the legalities in place and using a company like Your Company Formations to officially register your business is a good place to start. That way, prospects who are looking for assurance that you are legit can easily find it by looking at your company up at an official source. You’ll have to do it eventually anyway, so do it at the beginning.

Be Honest

It would be near impossible for you to build trust with customers and clients if you lied to them. Honesty is the foundation of trust and that is why you need to build honesty into everything you do. If, for example, you know that you can’t realistically offer 1-day shipping, be upfront about that or if you know that it’ll take 2 weeks to turnaround a project. Don’t be tempted to say you can do it in one just to persuade a client to buy.

Sure, you might get a few more customers upfront, but when you can't deliver, they won’t come back and they’ll tell other people about your unreliability/lies and word will spread that you can’t be trusted. Obviously, things do go wrong sometimes and you may occasionally be unable to deliver, but as long as you’re honest from the start, upfront about any issues and able to compensate appropriately, you should be fine. In business, honesty really is the best policy. 

Leverage Social Proof

Social proof in the form of reviews and testimonials is an excellent way to build trust in your niche. People like to feel confident in their buying choices, and if they can see that lots of other people have used your products/services and had a decent experience, they will be far more likely to become a customer themselves. That’s why you should offer any incentives you can to get customers to leave you a review. 

However, you should bear in mind the above point about honesty and avoid buying fake reviews because not only is it dishonest, but it’s far easier to spot than you might think. Not only that, but you should also let unflattering reviews stand -you can add your piece rebutting any remarks you think are unfair but don’t delete them. When all customers can see is row after row of 5-star reviews, they are going to trust your business less, not more.

Create a Solid ‘About Us’ Page

One of the things customers initially do to scope out a new business is to check out the ‘About Us’ page on its website. If it’s a well-written page filled with lots of solid facts and information about you, your business and what you do, including any incorporation details, an address and telephone number, they are far more likely to trust in you. Sadly, many businesses use this page as another ad for them, filled with lots of sales copy, and this can be very off-putting. Build trust by really putting yourself out there.

Be Visible

Not only to build trust but to build interest in your brand is to be visible. Post content about yourself and your efforts to launch the business day to day, including lots of videos and pictures, on social media and people will be able to see for themselves that you’re genuine with everything that you do.

Make trust the foundation upon which you build your business from day one and you will not have to struggle nearly as hard as others in your niche to build up a strong, loyal and happy customer base. It really is that simple.