What You Need to Launch a Catering Service from Your Restaurant
Expanding into catering is a logical thing for a restaurant to do. You already have the facilities needed to prepare the food, and you have the ability to come up with menus to offer people. Whether you're thinking of catering for private dinners or for huge events like festivals, getting off on the right foot is important. Catering might involve some of the same skills as running a restaurant, but it's not exactly the same thing. You're going to have to think about the necessary elements of offering a catering service from your restaurant or perhaps even from another location.
A Plan
To begin with, you're going to need a solid plan for your catering service. You can't go into it without knowing why you're doing it and what it's going to look like. You should create a plan that outlines some of the key aspects of your catering service, from who your customers will be to your capacity to provide the service and what sort of food you're going to offer. It's also a good time to set some goals and decide how you're going to measure your success. And, of course, you'll need to think about pricing and budgeting.
Staff
If you're expanding your business to offer another service, you need to have a workforce who can carry out the extra work for you. You can't necessarily expect that your existing staff will be able to contribute or even that you will have a lot of time to put into this new service. If you do dedicate yourself to growing your catering service, you might need someone else to take over the things that you're not doing. Another thing to consider is whether you're only going to provide food or if your catering service will include staff for serving and more.
Adequate Equipment and Transport
You might have the facilities to prepare the food for your catering service but you might need some more equipment to be able to run the service properly. One major thing to consider that you might not have to think about with a standard restaurant is that you need to transport the food that you make. If you need a van, you can benefit from the Vauxhall Vans 0% offer to help you with financing it. Being able to transport the food you make or the ingredients you use safely and retaining their quality is essential.
Marketing for Your Catering Service
You will need to think about how you're going to market your new catering service to find the right customers. You might have existing marketing channels that will help you to promote it, including your website, social media and even space in your restaurant where you could put a poster or some brochures or flyers. However, it can be a good idea to treat your catering service as a separate entity and give it a separate website, social media pages and other marketing outlets.
If you decide to start a catering service from your restaurant, don't rush into it. It's important to get everything in place before you launch.