Begin Your Own At Home Catering Business
Cooking can be a hobby, a passion and a pure joy for some of us. If this sounds familiar you may be interested in beginning your own home run catering service. Catering is a huge home business opportunity. With requests for catering services for a wedding reception, birthday, reunion or even business dinners, there are clients available from the start. Beginning a catering business is really all about planning. Create a name, business plan, get your business license and get your equipment. Once you have these four areas under raps all that will be left is to advertise your service. Below each of these areas is discussed in more detail for a better understanding of each area.
Business Name
Your business name can be playful and fun or serious and sophisticated. Your business name says what you want it to about your business. A business name is similar to your attire. If you want to be thought of as a business professional you might wear a button up blouse with slacks or a suit. If you are more casual and fun loving you may dress in jeans or brightly colored t-shirts. Your business name is the same. An example of a sophisticated name would be Roberto’s Fine Catering Service. It gives a sense of seriousness and expertise. An example of a fun business name would be Aunt Fannie’s Fabulous Food Service. Fun and bubbling with personality, this caterer may be very appealing to a younger crowd. So depending on what you want your business name to reveal about your business is up to you.
Business Plan 101
Business plans do not have o have a hundred pages and be printed on fancy paper. A business plan needs to include your goals, your budget and information about who is evolved in your company. This document can be printed up in your home using software that can be purchased from your local office supply store.
Business License
By visiting your local licensing office or your local courthouse, you can pay a small annual fee that will allow you to run your home business,
Business Equipment
To rent or not to rent that is the question? You can begin your business by renting used restaurant equipment or spend a small fortune on new equipment. This is generally a choice based upon ones business budget. Either method will allow you to begin your home business. You can always choose to purchase each new piece throughout a period of time instead of all at once.
Once you have all of these areas in order you can focus on advertising. Get the word out about your business through flyers, brochures or business cards that can all be printed in your home office. When you are beginning your business you have to be cautious about where you spend your money. Saving here and there is a helpful key to success. Once you are up and running you will thanking your lucky stars that you jumped on the job opportunity of running your own home based catering business.
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Automating Your Business Using A CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) is crucial to any business that has customers. There are a number of excellent software application, such as GoldMine® software and ACT!® software, dedicated to simplifying this complicated task. But wherever human intervention is required in any software program, errors can creep in. This can be especially worrying if depending on a human response is critical to the outcome. The solution to this problem? Automation!
Automated processes through CRM allow predefined business rules to be fully automated. You can monitor them and determine their accuracy when they generate automated actions and notifications every time the rule is hit.
If a new lead fails to be acted on for several days, it can be re-assigned through a preset rule automatically. Or, if a lead remains static in the sales process for a time period that is considered to be too long, an email can be sent to the sales manager warning him of the situation. In a marketing campaign, rules can be set to bring everything to a stop at a predetermined time, or when expected results are met. It can all happen automatically with a little beforehand planning.
Contact management can get very complicated, which is why we use a database and sophisticated CRM software such as GoldMine®. The human memory can be amazing, but all too often, especially at critical moments, it is not. Suppose an important customer has his contract due to expire. Would you rather leave it to an employee with a “good memory” and hope he remembers in time? Or would you prefer to set up a rule that sends the customer a series of reminder emails in ample time for him to renew?
Consider also a situation where members of your sales team are expected to send out a “welcome” email message to each new prospect that is entered into the database. This should be an automatic response, but people are human, they may be busy, and can forget. Software such as GoldMine® will never forget if set up properly. The built-in autoresponder can be triggered as soon as a new prospect’s details are entered, and a “welcome” email message will wing its way to the prospect without the need for anyone to remember. That’s the power of automation.
Not all customer relationship management software can be preset with business rules. As good as the ACT!® software is in terms of contact management, it does not allow for the ability to trigger tasks in a fully automated way. The GoldMine® software, on the other hand, does allow this level of automation. Suppose a customer already in the database makes a purchase, GoldMine®, if set up properly beforehand, will send out a “thank you” email immediately without anyone needing to do a thing.
The power of a built-in autoresponder in a good CRM application should not be minimized. No longer need you worry about customers you have not contacted for a while. Set up the right automated processes and after a predetermined number of days without contact, they will receive a message from you without you having to do a thing. That’s the power of CRM automation.
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