Sunday, July 14, 2013

How to Start an Outdoor Catering Services

Like I always say, starting a business in Nigeria, Africa and the world does not require you to be a rocket scientist or to have a fat smiling account. You just need the right idea coupled with your passion and determination to succeed.


Starting an outdoor catering service is one of the business you can start on a small scale and catapult into a big business empire within the shortest period you can ever imagine. making money from outdoor catering is about getting more and more professional. The catering industry has become a multi-million naira industry popping-up with riches especially during the seasonal period. This industry is so big that the few people rolling out cash from it can hardly cope due to the high patronage.

What You Need To Start
The Outdoor Catering Service is an industry of its own. It a big industry when you want to know the clients you are doing business with. Bringing the wedding industry into the show especially during festive period, where lots of cash is flows around,this business creates  massive wealth for those who can catch the opportunity coupled with the fact that anyone can do it does whether male or female, the employed or unemployed.

Start small: As a starter you don't need much but you are advised to enroll for a catering school if you want to be successful. you can start with snacks production and supplies and gradually go into the foods.

Start without capital: You don't really need much funds because if you want to wait till when you have all the capital before you start the business then you will never start. You have to make up your mind on what you want to do and how far you want to grow.

Varied Opportunities in Outdoor Catering Business

The foods you will be asked to produce includes regular foods  like jollof rice, fried rice, coconut rice, the continental dishes like Chinese rice, soups, spaghetti, local soup and dishes such as egusi, edika-ikong, amala and the rest of the special foods. You have the barbecue series - roasted chicken, beef, goat, fish and even bush meat barbecue. You also have the angle of small chops, like samosa, sprinkles, puff-puff, steak meat, snail source, mosa, shawama, cakes, etc. You also have the drinks like chapman, cocktail drinks, lemon drinks and shrouds. And then slightly, we have interior and outdoor decorations depending on the clients.

Barbecue services
 Barbecue is a very big business. You can generate funds operating barbecue parties for thanksgiving, naming ceremonies, executive briefs, end of year parties, annual general meetings, children parties, beach parties, night joints, even evening wedding parties and bachelors' evenings. The money you make from one night can keep cash in your pocket for one month. Your clients provide virtually all you need and you make the money, but first you must know the requirements of a successful barbecue business.
Operating a Barbeque Business
You will an equipment in form of oven with charcoal underneath to roast the barbeque with a show glass at the top to make your barbeque looks attractive.

Forms of Barbeque

Chicken or turkey barbecue: In preparing chicken barbecue, you consider the ingredients for roasting the chicken based on your clients.
The chicken preparation is also very important. First you open chicken from the under; that is from the anus remove all the intestines and everything that are not needed, hence there is a need to wear a glove in order to do a good job.
Saucing the chicken: After the external and internal chicken preparation, you move to the saucing process you sauce inside to make it taste good by adding salt, pepper and curry. Don't forget you must know the proportion in details so as not to over sauce and make it lose taste.
Still in saucing process, you need to add sliced tomato, pepper and onions and  to the chicken, but this will depend on what you actually want to achieve at the end of the day, which you may see need some other special sauce. When this is done, you close up the chicken for grilling.

Fish Barbecue: The process of preparing the fish barbecue is the same method as the chicken, just that you open the fish through the throat and remove all the intestines, bones, scalps and sauce. It is also done the same way you sauce the chicken; then you grill by placing it on the fire gauze and monitoring it so it won't get burnt.
Meat barbecue: This is the one we normally know as suya, the one mallams sell everywhere. But barbecue meat is richer and healthier because it is going to be well sauced and treated too. For the laps, you break them and do it the same way others have been done.
Grilling and serving: You know that barbecue is a live event where the preparation takes place as the party is on. For the chicken, you roast it in full but you can't serve it full except for some people who use it for thanksgiving. When they have a family thanksgiving, they roast a very big turkey and put in a tray and after they have finished preparing it, the head of the family cuts his own and shares to the other people.

 Snail sauce: This is where you have already fried snail with sauce; this might be pepper, onions and tomato.

Barbecue packaging and supplies
If your clients want a barbecue delivered to their event or door steps, you have to charge per carton supplied, hence you need to know how to package the barbecue and cost them in the mini cartons.
You can decide to charge per plate, it only depends on the client and the amount he has as well you consider the client and the number or capacity of his guests.

Other Services That can be Added

The Interior decoration: You can have people that do interior decoration for you and make it a part of the package you are offering your clients. Whether the event is a wedding or naming ceremony, you will make more money with this. The interior decoration depends on what the couple wants; it could be with the cakes or drops.

Queen cakes and chops service:
These are those little cakes that go from N50 to N100 and added to chops on the serving table. They can make a mini party or office meeting sumptuous and a lot of folks can make money from this. Chops are those little things they serve either at the beginning of the programme or in between the programme and at times when people don't have a lot of food, they serve it in the beginning of the programme because it fills the stomach such that people will later not eat much.

Getting Corporate Organization as Clients
 Apart from weddings, during the ember period, there are banks and corporate organisations that organize seminars and end of year programmes or retreats; this could be an area of big profit exploits for catering services because these top class clients hardly know the cost of so many things, but they are after quality and how you package your products.In the negotiating scene,  you will ask them what they want and the kind of setting they are looking at, because the setting is part of the cost. The way you manage a canopy setting is different from the way you manage a table with four chairs because in the case of a table with four chairs, you have to get the table, and the cover; that is, you need to do a small interior decoration. You need plates and cutleries. This is different from canopy service where you just serve everybody the way they are seated.
For bankers and oil service clients,they want something they rarely eat like chicken pepper soup, snail pepper soup or goat meat pepper soup and sometimes white rice and sauce or coconut rice garnished with goat meat.
You will need to take this market very seriously because once you can do a good job it will also increase your own product-base and give you referrals. They are very wonderful referrals for your corporate catering service.
The cash to be made: “Thirdly, you ask them the amount that they are willing to spend because caterers are also planners and managers. If you have a caterer that is not honest with you, that means the caterer wants to eat you up, but if he or she can tell you that with two hundred thousand naira you can feed a hundred plus, that means you can also save some money for yourself too and not just spending elaborately. This is one of the ways to win some of your clients; do a good cost analysis for them and charge them for your service.

The opportunity depends on your negotiations with them. Don't take any client for granted and think they don't know much. They know so much just that they don't have that time. You have to package your product well and to be well exposed to so many places to source your materials cheaply.

You must package yourself and your product:   Your success in business is in the way you package yourself and your product and then your attitude because, it is not a product that we see when you came to negotiate. Your clients will not see the product until the day of the occasion; that is when you qualify as to whether the product is the best or it's just average or is nothing, So you have to really package yourself first and then your product.

Negotiating for profit: When you meet a client working in an oil firm or a banker for a catering job, try to be honest and don't be over conscious of the money you are going to make.
If your product is clean and you are clean, honest and truthful, you will definitely get customers. But if you are not straightforward, you may not get contracts on a frequent basis.

In catering business,research is of importance as you need to the latest dishes so you can be confident  learn from  experienced caterers. 
Money That Can be Made from this Business
You can make anywhere from #80,000-#250,000 per service delivery, the fact here is that once you are good, you can even be overloaded with jobs that you will not be able to meet up. The jobs can become too much to handle, that is why the opportunity is really untapped.

 Though the job could be tedious, but with good management skills, competent and well trained staff, you are in for a real deal and don't forget, you really don't need an office for this business whether you are male or female. The few male that are into this business seem to doing quite well; you can really be scared of them because they are good.

You can operate from home most of the time. You need a large cooking environment or good cooking equipment like large burner gas/stone or good firewood environment. You can use gas or mini outdoor electric cookers, especially for seminars and bankers' parties if you are serving chops, etc.

Where to Source Materials: Caterers have to go to large markets to buy and save cost and make more profit.


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30 comments:

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