Do you find great joy in cooking for yourself, your family, or other people? Do people consider you as their cook during family holidays and events? If so, you can be sitting on untapped business potential. You don’t have to keep your cooking skills a secret anymore. You can share it with other people and earn money at the same time.
How can you do it?
Not everyone has the time to prepare carefully curated dishes for family and non-family events. They might be busy preparing other aspects of the upcoming event, or they don’t trust their skills in the kitchen enough to cook big portions.
Luckily, people who have honed their cooking skills enough to be a trusted family cook exist. If you’re that person, you can start a catering business. Guess what? You can even start within the comfort of your favorite place to cook—your home.
What’s a catering business?
A business in catering would take a sizzle of culinary skills, an ounce of determination, and the ability to work excellently even when put under pressure. These things combined can take a catering business a long way, and one doesn’t even have to rent a store or purchase numerous equipment, which can be expensive.
Venturing into this type of business can be done full-time or part-time. You can also take home between $30,000 and $80,000 every year, or even more, depending on the clients you’ll work with and the price range of the things you need.
Starting a catering business doesn’t have to go big. You can start by managing business aspects on your own by taking small contracts. Once you get the hang of it, you can hire a few helpers to take some work off your back.
The costs would depend on how big you want the business to start. If you’re on a budget, you can still go with the plan and start small. With a few gradual upgrades to equipment, manpower, and marketing as you progress.
You should expect to spend between $10,000 to $50,000 during your catering business humble beginnings. That’s a big amount, but you can go for much lower if you start with smaller events to cater to.
What’s the trend among catering service providers?
A known way for start-up catering businesses to succeed is to perfect a specific catering aspect. It can be mastering a particular food, certain types of events, or certain types of crowds. This helps them spend less on marketing because they already have an established client base within the niche.
You can focus on certain cuisine to get your business’ name associated with the cuisine or focus on certain types of events, such as family reunions or business parties. Doing that will significantly boost your visibility, opening doors for potential clients to come streaming in.
Of course, conquering a niche requires a lot of practice and dedication. You’ll need to put the quality of service above everything. Why? One bad catering service might ruin everything for you, even if it’s just one meal that didn’t turn out good.
What’s good about a catering service business?
1. A fun job
A business in catering services is an excellent job for people with a heart for cooking. You won’t need a culinary degree to start your own. Even if online marketing is essential, you can also market your services on the job while your clients are consuming your products.
You can also work with people who are cooks by profession and are licensed. By doing so, you can add a professional touch to your order of business.
2. You don’t have to start big.
One of the factors holding entrepreneurs back is the amount of money they need to spend to start earning money. It can be difficult to let money out without knowing if and when you’ll get it back, but that’s a part of running a business.
Catering still needs you to spend in the beginning and throughout the ordeal, but that’s completely ordinary. At least with this type of business, you don’t have to look for investors with big bank accounts to help you start.
3. You don’t have to commit all of your time.
A catering business can be started without taking all of your time. You can start one and still get to keep your office job. You can do so by taking in smaller projects and hiring a few people to lighten the workload.
