The Luxury Catering Business Operating System

At the top of the market the food is assumed. What a client remembers is whether the toasts landed when they should have, whether their mother was greeted by name, and whether the coffee came before the speeches or during them. None of that is luck. It is standards, and standards that are not written down and checked drift.

This workbook starts with thirty-four of them in eight areas: arrival and welcome, presentation, service choreography, timing and pacing, beverage, guest care, cleanliness and breakdown, and communication. Each says how to check it and what it weighs. Audit an evening against them and the workbook scores the night, finds the standard that keeps slipping and keeps the evidence. In the worked example it is the toasts: a fail at a summer gala, where they ran twenty minutes over and pushed dessert, and still only a partial at a wedding three months later.

What it adds

• Luxury standards. Thirty-four written standards, weighted, each with how to check it. They are yours to rewrite, reweight and add to.
• Quality audits. Pass, partial, fail or not applicable for each standard at each event, with what was seen. Standards met, by area and overall, against your target.
• Guest experience. The client’s scores out of ten for the whole, the food, the service, the presentation, the communication and the value; the net promoter score; and what they said, with whether you may quote them.
• Tasting evaluation. Every dish tasted with the client, scored on flavor, seasoning, temperature, texture, presentation and portion by weights you set, with a suggestion to approve or adjust. The decision stays yours.
• VIP guests. Who matters at each event, where they sit, what they cannot eat, what they prefer, the service cue and the server who owns it, ticked off on the night.
• Debriefs. The morning after: the scores, the margin and the waste beside what went well, what changes, the root cause, the fix, who owns it and by when.
• The Experience Dashboard. Guest experience, would-recommend, standards met, tasting approvals and open fixes; the standards most often missed; standards met by area; and the client’s own words.

It includes everything in The Catering Operations System and The Private Chef Business Command Center, in one workbook, sharing one kitchen and one set of recipes: the pipeline and proposals, procurement, labor, production, event sheets and P&L; households, visits, the allergy check and the real hourly rate; and the whole of The Culinary Cost Control Center underneath. Bought separately, those two editions are $398.

You can check every number

The Method sheet explains each formula in words and names the source behind each default, from the net promoter score (Reichheld, Harvard Business Review, 2003) to the IRS ruling on service charges. Where no reliable benchmark exists, it says so and calls the number a goal. The worked example, a year at a fictional caterer called Linden & Rye, was recalculated independently of the workbook and matched to the cent before release.

What it is not

It is not accounting software, a payment system, a booking website or a guest-list app, and it does not send anything to anyone. The notes you keep about guests stay on your own computer; they are yours to protect and to keep only as long as the work needs them.

What you need

Microsoft Excel 2019 or later, or Microsoft 365. It was tested in Excel for Windows. No macros, no add-ins and no internet connection. It does not run in Google Sheets or Numbers yet.