Starting a Catering Business
If you thrive in the crowd and love everything about food, your ideal entrepreneurial niche could be a catering business. The challenges in a catering business include back-breaking hours at the stove and lots of physically laborious activities, but the ultimate rewards are definitely worth all the hard work.
It’s not compulsory to have a culinary degree to start your own catering business. However, familiarity with food safety measures, preparation techniques, presentation and of course, governmental procedures for setting up and maintaining the business will come in handy. Also, as common sense tells you, prepared food must be eye-appealing and delicious at the same time.
If you are seriously contemplating catering as a career, you can start by collecting information. You can read stuff related to catering and nothing beats all the resources that the internet provides. Important information to look for is regarding licensing and approvals, as per the law in your region.
The first thing you will want to do after conducting research is to organize your information and create a business and marketing plan. If you aren’t familiar with these documents, type in “business plan” or “marketing plan” at your favorite search engine. You can find everything you need online or at the library. The Small Business Association (SBA) offers a wide variety of publications and classes for budding entrepreneurs. The website is located at www.sba.org.
The next step is finance. Having your hands on a good business plan and marketing strategy will give you a fairly accurate idea of the kind of credit you will require, as well as increase your chances of quick loan approval. You can get this done through banks and finance companies. Obviously, you will have to invest a small fraction of the total budget upfront. Even as you do this, take care that you do not end up investing more than you can afford losing.
It’ll be a joyous experience when you first establish your catering business, but it’s essential to keep in mind that you’ll be multitasking during the first few months. Besides food preparation and event catering, you’ll need quite a good knowledge about advertising and marketing to find new sales opportunities. Furthermore, there are the daily operations necessary for your business, such as telephone answering, follow-ups, price quotations, ordering supplies, accounts managements and more.
Catering businesses are profitable, but initially you will have to work hard to make your business stand on its own, and have it well established, before you can relax.
Running a catering business on your own will require hard work, perseverance and patience. There are so many jobs like serving food, taking orders, billings, mundane chores, cleaning, etc. that can tire you out.
Chances are you will spend most of the day on your feet. Many caterers work 12 to 15 hours per day, seven days a week. Oftentimes catered events are hosted outdoors, so you must be able to deal with the heat of long summer days and maintain a positive and friendly attitude.
Work is never really “work” when you enjoy what you do, no matter how challenging it is. While it can be stressful and rarely give you any personal time, your investments from every category, be it money, time or energy, will be highly rewarded with great profits and satisfaction.
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November 19 2008 | Gourmet | No Comments »