You’re the Director of Sales & Catering at Perfect Setting Golf & Country Club. It’s a beautiful early-summer Sunday evening, perfect for a cookout and a cold one with your family and neighbors—but you’re in the club’s offices, and you’re the only one here.
You’ve pretty much been in and out of here all weekend, which started when you came in early Saturday morning, logged onto the Internet and typed “sales and catering software” into Google. Then 26 pages of entries came up and you’ve been painstakingly trying to go through each one—and all the vendor sites they lead you to—for the past two days.
At the staff meeting tomorrow morning, you’re supposed to make a proposal about how Perfect Setting will finally start to make the leap to automate at least part of the functions you oversee for the club’s wedding, banquet and event business: logging and tracking inquiries and prospects, preparing quotes, scheduling events and the associated requirements for staff and supplies, planning menus and room set-ups, billing, etc.
This all started because at last week’s staff meeting, your GM and F&B Director pointed out that this was going to be the third straight weekend, during peak season, when you didn’t have a wedding or event booked for the club. Then the Executive Chef told a story about running into his counterpart chef from New Wave Country Club across town, and how that chef bragged about her club getting a huge wedding because they were able to provide an instant quote with their new software system, and then planned it all out with the catering part, and everything went so well that two other people at the wedding went right up to the office and booked events of their own on the spot.
All that was bad enough—but then your chef went on to ask you, right in front of everybody, “Why didn’t we get that wedding? Because I know the bridegroom was one of our members’ sons.” And you had to admit that the father had talked to you about providing a quote, but then you lost the piece of paper where you’d written all of the details down, and by the time you saw him again, he said they’d decided to hold it at New Wave, where the bride’s family belongs.
You wince when this reminds you how that member didn’t seem all too happy about the whole thing. Then you wince again, harder, remembering how your GM blew up in the meeting after hearing all of this—and that’s why you’re sitting here in the office right now. You thought it would be easy to just come in and do some quick research on the ‘Net and be ready to suggest a few systems the club could look at. You had no idea how many vendors and packages and features were out there, and how a lot of them really didn’t seem to be geared to your type of club operation.
Your head is pounding but you don’t know what else you can do at this point, except keep plodding through the Google findings—there’s got to be something in all of these lists that will help bail you out. You look at the next entry: Club Catering Crisis Tech Help Line, call us 24/7, 1-800-HELP-A-MGR.
You’re dialing…
“Club Catering Crisis Tech Help Line”
Yeah, hi…I need to give my boss a proposal first thing tomorrow morning for how we should automate our sales and catering operation, and I’ve been looking at all these Web sites, and I still don’t really know what I’m looking at, or for what….
“Stand-alone or integrated?”
Excuse me?
Do you want a system that will work separately from what your club uses for other purposes, or do you want to build on what’s already in place?
Gee, I really don’t know what would be best….
Well, here’s how you start your presentation. Tell everybody you did a lot of research and found out there are a lot of feature-rich, low-cost catering systems available, and you plan to check some of them out to see if they’d be worth getting. But at the same time, you want to meet with your club’s IT person and someone from your primary system vendor, to see if there’s a sales and catering module that’s part of their overall club management package that you could start to use. If not, or if there is but it doesn’t look like it would have everything you’d need, tell them you’ll see what your primary vendor might want to recommend.
Recommend about what?
Whether something could easily be adapted from the primary system to do the things you need to do with sales and catering, or if the primary vendor thinks his system would interface OK with a stand-alone catering package. Make sure you say interface more than a couple of times, that’s always good for showing that you’re thinking about the bigger picture and how you’ll link in with the things your General Manager and Food and Beverage Manager will care about—especially how your club does its billing.
Yeah, well they both already mentioned they didn’t understand why I couldn’t just learn to use some of the basic contact management and scheduling and ordering/billing features that our main club system has, to handle our weddings and banquets and catering.
Come on, that’s like saying that making yourself a peanut-butter sandwich is the same as preparing a formal dinner for 12. Tell them your research has really made you realize just how much of a different animal banquets and catered affairs really are from everyday dining. They’re not just big meals, they’re events. They have to be scripted, organized, presented, sliced and diced in a million different ways; and software’s the best way—the only way—to try out, and keep track of, all the options. Why do you want to be confined by software that doesn’t let you be as creative or customized as possible, and ends up forcing you to do a lot of the same things with each event?
Look, the key to a profitable wedding and banquet and catering business is how much you can enhance revenue by adding special touches. That’s also the best way to earn repeat business, through word-of-mouth recommendations or by impressing others who attend your events and might be getting ready to hold one of their own. Some club people even say they’ve booked future events on the spot from people who first come to their club as guests.
Yeah, I heard how that can actually happen…
And if you have a manual system or limited software that forces you into a cookie-cutter approach, you’re just choking your business. You need a system that lets you look at all the ways to change room layouts, add menu choices, be flexible with the number and makeup of your staff, and do all the other things that can help you create one-of-a-kind happenings and add extra dollars to the bottom line.
Yeah, I know, and that all sounds great…but that’s where my head really starts to spin when I look at all of the things that a lot of these systems can do. I don’t know how you can possibly keep track of everything, and provide quotes, when you’re going through so many options.
That’s where you have to look for systems and packages that do the best job of marrying the creative part with the boring but necessary cost details. Just like with people, you usually don’t find those interests and abilities in the same place—do you think your accountant could prepare a more interesting meal than your chef? So an add-on to your regular club F&B package may not be enough to give you all the flexibility you need to create and look at “what if” scenarios and still fit them into your club’s costing structure. That’s where you may also have to think about custom software.
Oh, no, uh-uh…I know what they’ll say about that, it’s just too expensive.
Customizing doesn’t mean you have to start from scratch. And anyone who thinks that off-the-shelf, out-of-the-box software is going to work perfectly for every club, without any need to ever adjust its menus or functions or formats, is dreaming, too. We’re just talking about making sure you take the steps to properly match the features and complexity of your system to the specific environment of your club and the specific nature of your event sales and catering business. Sometimes that’s just a matter of changing how screens look or choices are worded. It doesn’t have to be that big a deal, and most good vendors will even set it up so you can learn to make any more changes yourself that you may decide you want as you gain experience using the system.
Well, thanks, this has sure been a huge help to talk it all through like this, and there’s certainly a lot to think about and understand…I just wish your help-line entry had shown up about 25 pages earlier in my Google search.
I can help you there, too. We’ve gone through all the “hits” ourselves and come up with what we think are some of the best links for sorting out all that’s available…can I give them to you?
Sure, just a minute, let me find a pencil…
Uh, no, I’m going to e-mail them to you…we’ve heard about you and what happens to stuff you write down…stand by, here they come:
http://www.capterra.com/catering-software
http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/ Business_to_Business/Food_and_Beverage/ Catering/Software/
http://foodservice.chef2chef.net/ directory/Business/Technology/ Catering_and_Food_Inventory_Software/
http://www.business.com/directory/ food_and_beverage/restaurants_and_foodservice/ catering/software/
Summing It Up
• Quoting and planning for weddings, banquets and other catered events requires much more detail and flexibility than standard F&B software will provide.
• Stand-alone catering packages will be more feature-rich, but may create compatibility or interface issues in conjunction with broader club management systems; check with primary vendors, too, to see if modules to their system are available that could do the trick.
• The more your catering software allows you and your chefs to test and cost “what if” scenarios, the more you can make your affairs truly one-of-a-kind and justify the markups that go with special touches. This kind of specialization is also the best way to earn word-of-mouth recommendations
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