To manage a catering business is a serious decision. Having a catering company means serious business, and it is not for everyone. This is because managing a catering business involves solving problems at every hour of the day. Any event can be full of unforeseen circumstances, and a good catering business should be able to solve most of them.
The rewarding experience of adapting to circumstances and pleasing your clients is something everyone can relate to. Accomplishing a goal that seemed impossible and was reached within the expectations of the client is always something to be proud of. Then the clients tell their friends and word-of-mouth will make your business popular.
The crucial considerations to manage a catering business are not just a few. There are many things you should do to have success. To gain the trust of your clientele and being considered as a good option for a catering service, you should embrace the following notions:
You should know how to work under pressure
Managing a catering business is not an easy task. Circumstances that test your adaptability arise at every moment. Know that an unforeseen challenge is an everyday thing and that you should be prepared.
- Don’t immediately back off:
When something that you didn’t expect happens, contemplate what are the alternatives and ponder on them. Wrap up with what you think best suits the situation and always, always keep your promises after that. Learn from your mistakes and don’t do it again.
- Protect your reputation:
When under pressure, you should always do the best you can, and at the same time, you should decide what it is while considering your reputation. You should never tell a client that you “didn’t expect that change” or that you “didn’t count on that” this may make your business look bad.
Prevention is the antidote to unexpected challenges
To avoid having to lose too much time solving unexpected problems, prevention is your friend. If you have some back-up or contingency maneuvers for said situations, you will succeed more easily.
Have some backup plan for the more common situations. You will need these backup plans to be reachable and available at all times, and they are your lifesavers after all.
Embrace upcoming challenges
Sometimes backup plans are not enough. Sometimes you don’t have a backup plan when something new and hard to prevent happens. What you should do in these cases is embrace the situation and act fast. You will never solve a problem if you don’t start first. And once again learn the lesson, absorb the experience and don’t make the same mistake again.
Manage your time correctly
To prevent any inconvenience, planning is the only way to go. In fact, in the catering business, this is so essential that you will need to plan it even before you have your first clients. For this, you will need a good and established event management software that you can count on for the correct information.
Know that people can change their minds
Even if you like the feeling of control that managing a business brings to you, sometimes you will not have it at all. Your clients satisfaction are the ultimate goal, and what they decide is what you will ultimately do.
You can’t control what a client will tell you at the last moment. What you can control is what you will tell them in response. Be sure to be polite when facing this and always try to come to a solution that pleases them the most, considering what is possible.
To accomplish this, you should:
- Have a wide array of alternatives:
You should always have more than one option. To prevent not having an alternative when clients change their minds, think ahead.
- List these alternatives:
You can list the alternatives to various situations to make them easy to remember when you have to turn to them.
- Be polite about it:
You cannot directly tell a client that they made a mistake, even if they do. All you can do is offer them options and try to convince them of what is easier for you to make. You can give them options that are possible for you to reach. Try not to say “we don’t do that.” Instead, you can say “we can also do this…”
