After analyzing the financial statements, the first obvious problem was the higher than the industry average labour cost. Looked into each team and where the core issues stemmed from. We overhauled the entire company by laying off some employees, and rebuilding the team.

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Kitchen team

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Problem:

1. They didn't have executive chef who's in charge of managing labour/food cost.

2. Menus were not formalized. As a result, higher level chefs had to come in to make simple orders such as sandwiches when these jobs could be done by less skilled chefs if the menus were formalized. Which resulted in high labour cost.

3. The kitchen team had too many higher level chefs and not enough entry level chefs. As a result, they were using higher levels chefs to do daily preps, which resulted in high labour cost.

4. Excessive amount of overtime which led to high labour cost

5. Unorganized food ordering which led to high food cost and unnecessary food waste

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Solution:

1. Hired an executive chef who had Michelin star restaurants work experiences.

2. Went through the entire menu books, created digitized excel menu files. When a booking team confirms the order, the kitchen team inputs the guest number and this digitalized menu tells exactly how many grams of each ingredient they need, as well as food cost. This allowed us to keep track of food cost per order, no food waste, and eliminated inconsistency. 

3. We hired several prep level chefs. This allowed us to reduce labour cost significantly.

4. We implemented the system where every overtime needs to be approved by the executive chef. This eliminated significant amount of overtime and allowed us to do a better forecasting when scheduling. 

5. We did inventory check on every item. Created digitized excel sheet to keep track of ordering. This eliminated food waste and reduced food cost.

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Operations team

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Problem:

1. We didn't have enough drivers which led to occasional delay in delivery and overtime.

2. Lack of customer service training provided to drivers.

3. There was no tracking system implemented. Therefore, the booking team would spend a lot of time answering phone calls/emails from clients saying they haven't received the deliveries.

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Solution:

1. Hired some on-call drivers who had serving experiences and could also work as part of the service team when there's an event going on.  We didn't have enough budget to give them enough hours to be full time drivers but combined with part-time driving and part-time serving, it added up to be full-time hours. This eliminated overtime for full-time drivers and significantly reduced the delay in delivery.

2. Created a training manual for the operations team and provided training to the entire team. This reduced complain calls/emails from clients significantly.

3. Introduced Detrack (vehicle tracking/Proof of Delivery app). Detrack live tracks the vehicle's location and let us monitor all of our vehicles on the map real-time, captures signature and photo proof from within the app and submit real-time PODs, sends real-time email updates on your delivery to both us and our customers. This was the biggest change we made to the operations team. We were the first catering company to implement POD service, and it eliminated missing deliveries, late deliveries and complains from the clients.

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Booking team

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Problem:

1. There was no KPI set for the booking team. Therefore, the team manager were not doing the management tasks.

2. They had 4 booking team members and nobody had specific clients they deal with regularly. Therefore, no relationships between clients and booking team members were being built. 

3. The booking team was only handling inbound inquiries, and no outbound sales were being done.

4. No specific procedures were being followed after a delivery was completed or an event was finished.

5. There was no effort in receiving reviews or feedback from clients (missed opportunity).

6. CRM tool Hubspot was not set up properly. Therefore, the booking team was typing each email every single time rather than creating templates for several situations. (inefficiency)

7. Even though they offered free wedding tasting, no extra effort was put in to customizing each tasting. Therefore, the closing rate was extremely low.

8. The same mistakes kept happening across all teams. 

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Solution:

1.  Created daily, weekly, and monthly KPIs for the booking team. We gave the responsibility of tracking the KPIs to the booking manager.

2. We divided clients and gave specific responsibilities to each booking team member. (i.e. in-charge of inbound corporate client, in-charge of weddings and custom events, in-charge of outbound sales, etc) This allowed each member to build relationships with clients and reduced mistakes.

3. Hired an outbound sales representative whose focus was to get new sales leads.

4. 5. Created an email template on Hubspot to be sent after the service was delivered to get feedback from clients. (i.e. If the initial feedback is not so satisfactory, deal with the situation right away. If we receive a good feedback, ask for a review on Google.) This allowed us to revolve situations right away, and reduced the amount of negative reviews on Google.

6. Created over 30 email templates categorized to possible situations on Hubspot for the booking team, which significantly increased the efficiency.

7. Partnered up with a wedding decor vendor. Managed to make a deal to be able to customize the sample table setting for each client without any extra cost. This increased the event closing rate.

8. We created a Google spread sheet shared with all teams to keep track of mistakes and to avoid the same mistake happening again.

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Service team

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Problem:

1. When re-branding from casual pacific north-west catering company to a high-end catering brand, the old service team wasn't in-line with the new vision.

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Solution:

1. Hired an Operations/Service team manager from a 5 star hotel Ritz Paris. He was in charge of the Operations team as well as the new Service team. We assessed each service team member, did a massive hiring spree, created a new service standard higher than the industry average in Vancouver. This led us to work with higher-end clients such as Lamborghini Vancouver, Ferrari Maserati of VancouverVancouver,etc. 

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