Читать книгу Start & Run a Catering Business - George Erdosh - Страница 32

One ingredient of a successfully executed event — besides your excellent food, good planning, and timing — is the gracious and superb service your staff provides. How your people present themselves, how they interact with the guests, how much they are interested in serving the food and not just receiving their weekly checks, is what the client perceives as service. Good food with mediocre service will not bring you repeat clients. Good food with poor service gives rise to complaints.

There are two common problems with serving staff. One is accepting that being a server puts them in a subservient position. This is often a problem with better-educated staff from middle-class backgrounds who take catering jobs to earn extra income. They resent being treated like servants. A second problem occurs with serving staff being overly friendly with the guests, talking with them and treating them as equals, even engaging them in lengthy discussions while the food is getting cool on the serving trays they are supposed to be passing around.

When hiring your staff, make it clear to them that you are in a service business and their role is to serve the invited guests, not just to dispense food as a host or hostess would. (See Chapter 7 for further discussion on staffing.)

Determine how to give good service. Choosing and motivating your staff are two essential parts of this. These two items also apply to your kitchen staff. In the kitchen you are dealing with a staff whose duties include work that is often monotonous and unpleasant, such as cleaning a small mountain of shrimp. Rotating your staff from monotonous to creative work is helpful. Doing the routine work in teams is also a good way of easing the burden.

Your relationship with your sales and marketing staff will probably also be reflected in their performance, unless you are lucky enough to find someone who works well without supervision.