Catering Ideas for Restaurants to Survive COVID with Sandy Korem
Let’s talk catering ideas for restaurants to survive COVID in episode three of The Restaurant Prosperity Formula podcast. This week’s episode is a helpful one if you’re a restaurant owner or caterer and want to learn an important lesson about diversifying your revenue, especially after COVID-19 has taken its toll on restaurants and caterers.
For this episode, I interview Sandy Korem, the CEO and founder of The Festive Kitchen, a one-of-a-kind catering company based in Dallas. No other catering company in America has established such a diverse and profitable take home catering division. In 2008, Sandy was awarded the White House Food Service Medallion for outstanding service to President George W. Bush. Her second company, The Catering Coach, Sandy uses her 25 years of catering experience to teach independent restaurant owners and caterers how to not give away their catering profits. Her teaching focuses on increasing sales and profits with little or no investment and maximize earning potential by adding multiple catering revenue streams to their existing business.
I’ve known Sandy for about 18 years. First, I worked with her as a coach and taught her how to use systems to improve her catering business. She was making money, but she didn’t have profits. Systems changed her business. After the experience she had with systems, Sandy saw a huge need in the catering industry to teach these same systems to caterers, so she launched a new business to coach, which became The Catering Coach. Her coaching led to speaking, and she and I have been traveling all over the country for about 10 years, speaking together from trade show after trade show after trade show. Our last appearance together was New York in March 2020. Saying things have changed since then is an understatement.
That’s why this discussion is important. Sandy owns a catering company, a segment of the hospitality business that was hit especially hard. Yet, her story isn’t one you’re seeing covered. She’s not in a hole. She’s not closing her doors. She’s thriving.
She is the authority on making sure that you can sell catering, execute catering, make money on catering, to go and other revenue streams. She started her catering business selling brownies she made in her home kitchen to a restaurant. She built her business from the ground up into a multi-million-dollar operation with two store-front locations and merchandise in grocery stores, plus so much more she’ll talk about in this discussion.
During our discussion, Sandy talks about:
- How systems are critical to making profits in catering (and restaurants).
- Some of the key systems you need to have in place when running a catering business, even when it's an additional part of your restaurant.
- How to add revenue streams to your catering or restaurant business now, even with COVID-19.
- How to manage the catering that does come back in the coming months.
- Why you can still be hopeful.
Plus she explains how, in the midst of COVID-19 and the loss of almost 100 percent of her booked catering events, her sales are even with last year. Plus how this extends to her catering coach members, none of which are out of business because they followed her lead.
If you would like to learn more about Sandy and how she can help you improve and increase your catering revenue, visit www.thecateringcoach.com/dsp.
If you want to know how systems can help you, complete a free restaurant evaluation. It's a great way to identify immediate opportunities where you can make things better in your restaurant. Take 15 minutes and download your 25-page custom report and it will show you every gap and what you need to do to make the money you deserve.
