Catering Information Uploaded

It's been a long time coming, but I've finally completed (and posted) the catering menu/application form on the website. Catering Page.

To give you an idea of what catering jobs used to involved, let me give you a bit of back story. I started here in 2007. My first major project was to see to a catering job. It was long, drawn out, and painful. It took weeks just to get all the logistics together, and return with the bare bones of a pricing schedule. Not to mention, they asked for a whole heck of a lot more than any catering company should ever provide, like flowers, and decorations, and waiter service and the whole nine. It was a stupendous headache, and I still shudder to think of it to this day.

That being said, I learned a whole lot. One of them is that if you want to expedite things, it's best to have a list, and to refer to said list repeatedly. In fact, the more you leave to "let's figure it out when we cross the bridge," the more nuts you make yourself in the long run. What I should have done at that point was to make up a large list, and keep it stored on a computer, in a notebook, in a something. Then, the next time someone said, "Hey, I'd like catering," I'd have to spend all of five seconds to send an email with the list on it! Easy, right?

Apparently, not.

We have a regular menu for people who like to dine in. We have a takeaway menu for people ordering takeaway. We even have a wine menu for the wine bar we've got going. So why was it such a leap for me to think that it would be sensible to have a list of prices and terms for catering? Well, sometimes it takes a lesson being driven into your skull multiple times before it really sinks in. It took organising a few more events before I really began to see the need for such a master list.

Finally, I pinned myself down, and began to compile the list, a bit at a time. It took a while, but was well worth the effort. I've got a complete list going now, and it's fairly straight forward. Of course, over time, I'll tweak it as needed, and add, remove, or clarify information as needed. But it's here! It's rather exciting, I think. And, as I learned earlier this week, making it into a form that can be filled out on the computer was a lot easier this time. It took a matter of minutes, rather than close to an hour of wrangling with Adobe.

Today, I'm thankful for having the freedom to guide myself on projects that I know will work well for both the business and our customers at the same time. It's bound to make things more streamlined, when people come to me, and will certainly give our customers many more options as to the directions that we can go with our food.