Do you have a passion for cooking? How about customer service? For some people, starting a catering business is the ultimate way to escape a 9-5 office job and start building something that not only makes money, but is a welcome pursuit full of excitement, challenges and many delicious meals.

While work can be sporadic, and often focused on certain periods of the year, such as summer wedding season, starting a catering business can be relatively straightforward and profitable if you know what you’re doing.

Build a vision of success

Before you start, build a tangible idea about what your business will look like and how you will define success. Also, consider the major challenges, barriers and requirements involved in making the plunge. If you encounter any real issues during planning, it is better to rethink your approach early on than waste valuable resources going down a path that won’t benefit you in the long run.

We recommend asking yourself the following questions while building your vision of your business, which can later be expanded into your business plan.

• Which market will you target? (niche, weddings, corporate?)

• What kind of food will you offer?

• Who will make the food? (you? professional chefs?)

• How much is a catering license?

• How much is catering insurance?

• What kind of equipment will you need?

• How will you market your business?

• Will you hire multiple employees? How will you manage them?

• Can you get your hands on the right equipment? (how much are euro boxes for sale from your suppliers?)

Do you have what it takes?

Cooking dinner for yourself and your extended family of 40 people for an annual occasion is different to preparing meals quickly for groups of 200 or more people. Especially when you need to make sure they are all delicious and healthy. Many who try to start their own catering businesses fail because they are not aware of what is truly required of them.

Make sure this isn’t you by being realistic about the role and the kind of experience you need to pull it off. Obviously, cooking experience helps, but so does management of people and the ability to handle client relations, which will be crucial to you securing long-term business.

If you lack the necessary experience, why not consider taking some courses designed to prepare people for starting a small business, including bookkeeping and practical tutorials on how the catering business works.

Choose a niche

It’s important to carve out a niche to give your business a better chance of success. Whether it’s a cuisine you have an interest in or a gap in the market you’ve identified, you need to have an idea of what exactly you can offer that differs from your competitors. If you simply advertise yourself as a caterer for hire, potential clients won’t know whether you are particularly suited to weddings, funerals or celebrations for specific ethnic communities, for example.  

This is the time to shout about your strengths, if you have one. And if you still don’t know, one great piece of advice is: let the type of food you know how to cook dictate the type of events cater for, which will then feed nicely into your catering brand and marketing activities. For example, if you are rubbish at fine dining and cooking meat, then don’t offer this. Instead, you could promote yourself as a healthy food or vegetarian catering company and tap into this growing market, or why not specialise in Indian or Indonesian food if this is what you know how to do best?

Example event types include:

• Birthdays

• Weddings

• Anniversaries

• Funerals

• Meetings

• Corporate events

• Office parties

• Awards

• Networking events

• Charity events

Corporate Vs. Private

Concentrating on the corporate market can be a fast way of growing your catering business if you can make the right contacts. Alternatively, you could aim your catering service at the private sector. This doesn’t just mean weddings! You can find plenty of niches through specialising in a certain type of cuisine and promoting your services effectively among a select demographic.

Don’t forget, being a caterer involves a lot more than cooking multiple dishes for groups of people or knowing how to find the cheapest euro boxes for sale – it’s a full time job!