How to Make an Action Plan for Catering?
Running a successful catering business takes a lot of skill in the culinary arts, and an uncanny eye for event planning and management. While we can’t really teach you how to cook, we can provide you with a few tips on making catering action plans to improve the quality of your services further
What is a Catering Action Plan?
Here’s the thing about a catering action plan; it isn’t just a single plan with only one agenda. Preferably, an excellent catering action plan is comprised of multiple projects for multiple things wrapped up in a neat and organized manner — think of it as ingredients converging into one beautiful dish. Now, the “types” of plan you can make depend on how you want to run your business, but they do have the same structure.
How to Make a Culinary Action Plan?
1. Cook Up Realistic Goals
You want to set realistic and practical goals for your catering action plan. Think of how successful your plan would be if you wanted to make a recipe out of some of the most endangered animals on the planet? Sounds silly and illegal, right? Keep your eyes high on the prize, but your mind leveled to the ground when establishing your course of action.
2. Be a Team Planner
Indian industrialist, investor, and philanthropist Ratan Tata once said, “If you want to walk fast, walk alone. But if you want to walk far, walk together.” Don’t leave your catering team out of the planning like dried fish in the sun. Not only will being part of the joint effort give them a better idea on what the plan is in actuality but letting them brainstorm their own ideas as well allows for a better overall strategy.
3. Stick to Your Schedule
When making an action plan, there will be mini-projects that need to have set dates of completion (better known as deadlines). Once you have your periods, commit to them, and take zero invalid excuses for delays. Understandably, not everything will go according to plan, but missing the deadline by three days because of something like “I didn’t have enough money to get a ride to the office” when you know they actually do isn’t an understandable reason.
4. Conceptualize, Not Fantasize
The difference between the two is that when you fantasize, you simply think about the pay you get fro the event, how you’ll spend it, maybe even on other things. When you conceptualize, you try to think about anything and everything that could go wrong and think of ways to prevent or cope with them, before putting them into action. If step one is about setting practical goals, then this step is about turning those plans into reality.
5. Make the Plan Ahead of Time
This is obvious, but some people don’t do this often enough. Think about it, could you really make an action plan in the middle of preparing for a catering event? Getting fresh ingredients? Working out the recipes? Decorating the venue? You cant, right? Months ahead of the event, you should have already set the deadlines, prepare the plan, the materials, the decorations, pre-order the ingredients to make sure they are all available, and to iron out everything so that you’re catering service can run smoothly through.
To give you an idea of what you need, here are a few catering action plan examples and templates.
Catering Action Plan Examples & Templates
As stated before, a catering action plan is a cluster of multiple plans with multiple purposes that come together harmoniously if they’re done right. From the general and cookie-cutter basic action plan to the detailed event management action plan to even the life-saving emergency action plan, these are some sample action plan templates you can incorporate into your business ventures to ensure a smooth flow with your catering services.
1. Generic Action Plan
This action plan template gives you a full idea of what an action plan generally looks like. It is 100% customizable, which means you can edit this to fit any catering action plan you need. Sometimes the basic, yet highly-adaptable action plan template that can fit any criteria helps. Download now to use it whenever and wherever you need it.
2. Team Action Plan
This team action plan template lets you keep track of the assigned tasks for your teams, the deadlines they have to meet, the materials that they will need, and instructions and guidelines on their respective projects. Click that download button and have this template whenever you need it.
3. Performance Action Plan
This performance action plan can be used to both prepare your teams for the tasks they need to do and evaluate their performance, as well as give them guidelines and criteria for assessment on the actual catering service they need to provide during the event. Don’t waste any more time and download this template now for maximum convenience.
4. Event Action Plan
This sample event action plan can be used as a layout for how you want an event to go. It can serve many purposes like tracking progress from as far as months well before the event, to providing a schedule for the activities of an event and how what must be done within the timeframe.
5. Emergency Allergy Action Plan
As a catering service, you do can’t individually ask people what they’re allergic to and accommodate for every single person, that’s just unrealistic. This is why some catering services label their dishes with the food’s name to give people an idea of what’s in the pot. However, there will be instances where the customer was not aware or did not care to read and accidentally ate something they should not. Hence, when this happens, an allergy emergency action plan that contains emergency contact numbers, staff procedures, and the location of the first aid kits will come in handy in this particular situation.
When people think of elegant catering services, they think of great food, fantastic decor, and staff that are happy to serve you, and with the help of your knowledge in making a catering action plan, you can reach this criterion of high-quality service that your customers expect of you.
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