I have been catering small tea parties in my hometown for ten years. My husband and I bought a nice cottage after we retired and it has several nice features, the best of which is a gourmet kitchen. I have always loved cooking and entertaining for others and decided to try to make a little money doing it after retirement.
It seems like every weekend a different catering service is setting up in our clubhouse. I work at an apartment complex in Dallas and we have an excellently landscaped property. People rent out our clubhouse for wedding receptions because of how lovely it looks around the pool area and throughout the loft style clubhouse. We can accommodate up to seventy people on the premises.
I have a catering menu for dinner buffets that really works out well for my business. My clients are all really happy with the amount of choice they have in the overall menu. We are pretty flexible, but we do have some guidelines. Extras can always be added. We highly recommend adding to the standard dinner buffet catering menu with a fabulous catered dessert.
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There are these two wedding caterers in my town that I just love. I see them at about three quarters of the weddings I attend. I think I’ve seen them at every bridal shower as well. They have a varied menu and are really great cooks.
I have been purchasing new catering supplies for a long time. I started my business with just myself and my sister. We put our own money into it at first and now it is paying for itself. We work really well together and we have agreed to reinvest our money into catering supplies each time we seem to reach a new level.
Running a catering business is a lot harder than just cooking for people. There is definitely an art to this profession. There are a lot of considerations when you start a catering business. If you are unable to coordinate Thanksgiving dinner for your family, this is not the job for you.
Good catering jobs are easy to come by after you’ve been in the business successfully for a couple of years. It is harder to find catering jobs if you screw one up. I have heard that if you make someone happy they might tell a friend, but if you make them unhappy, they will tell ten friends. I have found this to be very true.
I became interested in being an event caterer several years ago when my brother asked me to help plan something for his company. It was his responsibility to impress his boss and some prospective clients. I worked really hard to pull off something professional. It took a lot of effort and I believed that I could help people that didn’t have enough time to plan their own events.
As a three-man operation, corporate caterers drive me a little bit crazy. Most of the time they bid on jobs that are way out of my capabilities, but occasionally we butt heads over smaller weddings. I feel like they have enough business and should leave my small piece of the pie alone.
I wanted to buy a catering business from a local woman that was retiring. I inspected her facility and decided that her catering kitchen equipment was woefully inadequate for my needs. She told me that she had just never kept up with kitchen advancements over the years and she supposed that maybe she should have.