When Catering and Restaurant compete for resources

- from the MonkeyMedia Brown Bag seminar series.

If your restaurant spawned this new business, you have to make choices about resource use once Catering & Delivery begins to flourish.

As someone whose Catering & Delivery arm would go on to account for 70% of the company’s business, I know that it’s just as important that the restaurant’s means to success aren’t cannibalized by the Catering & Delivery operation, as vice versa. 

In a recent Brown Bag Session, we outlined the following five point plan to safeguard and encourage your revenue streams.

1. Recognize the problem

All aspects of Catering & Delivery, from menu to ordering to payment, deviate in some way from your restaurant operations. These differences, big and the small, have to be addressed.

2. Hire the right people

Everybody benefits when the right person is in the right job.
Catering & delivery is different; it follows that people who excel at Catering & Delivery execution will not be the same as your high performing restaurant staff.

3. Establish procedures
You took time to establish successful, ritualized codes of conduct for the restaurant. Take time to establish procedures for your Catering & Delivery operation as well.

4. Consider a hub system
Consider establishing a dedicated store to handle Catering & Delivery.
Ordering is best handled by an experienced CSR. Similarly, at some point it can be counter-productive running two different operations under the same roof.

5. Put together a business plan
You have an entirely new business line, worthy its own business plan. Writing out your Catering & Delivery business plan will help clarify your purpose, and will help trace out your path to success.

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(0) Comments • Permalink • 12 10 2008

• Erle Dardick

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