Home based catering business can be exciting and full of drama sometimes but if you are passionate about seeing people eat your food with a satisfaction written over their face, it can be your thing. All you need some real guidance on how to get initiated to the business and then running it successfully, slowly accruing good word of mouth and eventually great clients.
Are you ready for the dive to know what it takes to be in to the business? Read on.
First thing first, consider the pros and cons of the business:
While you would be at a liberty to start you business anytime you want, you need to be very careful of the people helping you out on the services front. You can easily go over-budget and under-paid in starting because of the inexperience. Bad word of mouth can seriously damage your business much before propagating, so watch out for all the possible loopholes that also includes assenting to every demand of the prospective client, even the unreasonable ones (which you didn’t know before saying yes). Planning and organizational skills are of utmost importance and cannot be separated from your cooking skills if business is on your mind. So, work out the details accordingly.
Know your target audience:
You need to understand what kind of cuisine you are expert at and the kind of events your dishes would be a hit. Once you get this sorted, everything else would seem fairly easy. Knowing your target audience would also make it easy for you to reach them as you would distinctly know the mediums to reach them. A Christmas feast can be extremely different from a local book launch party, in terms of food and beverage to serve to the publications to be advertised into.
Minimum investment money:
Serving a niche saves a lot of cost as compared to going full-fledged; still, you need to know the minimum basic investment you need to get started. The cost will include catering equipment, helping hands, utensils to serve the size you opted to cater, transportation and publicity. Licenses are another thing you need to pay special attention to. If you are planning to grow after some time, don’t forget to include space considerations which would also cost you money.
Business and Marketing plan:
You are going need the first one quite early in the planning for starting the home-based catering business and the other to reach a wider audience (essentially from just word-of-mouth publicity to actual wide-reaching marketing). This would also act as a guide to stick to your budget, especially in the initial phase of the business.
Important things to think of:
Name of the business, starting off as a limited liability company or a partnership firm, liability insurance, and investments (covered earlier), vendors and suppliers and a system to collect client feedback plus referrals are some of the key things to start.
Menu deciding:
Even in a particular cuisine, the list of recipes can go endless. Sort out at the initial stages of planning on what should be the menu you are willing to work on comfortably. This would be a help to client as well to make a selection and sketching up his costs to hire you.
Time is of essence:
Since it’s a service industry, you need to make a checklist of things a client would expect from you. And to deliver on his expectations you need to make a good impression every time punctuality is needed, be it showing up for the initial talks followed by food tasting sessions, to the actual delivery of the prepared food to the plates of the guests. Don’t allow prospective clients to give you unrealistic time frames and then be disappointed with your services.
So, we hope the blog will boost your enthusiasm a notch up to start from home and give wings to your dreams.
Mike Coulson is blogger by profession in the field of online marketing. With the help of supreme writing skills he has helped many companies to gain leads, engagement and conversions for well known companies. His blogs are really a inspiration for the upcoming generation who are looking to make career in the same field.